The Indigenous Languages of the Caucasus (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- The indigenous languages of the Caucasus, vol. 1: The Kartvelian languages ed. by Alice C. Harris, The indigenous languages of the Caucasus, vol. 2: The North West Caucasian languages ed. by B. George Hewitt, The indigenous languages of the Caucasus, vol. 3: The North East Caucasian languages, part 1 ed. by Michael Job, The indigenous languages of the Caucasus, vol. 4: The North East Caucasian languages, part 2 ed. by Rieks Smeets
The languages of the Caucasus have long been an object of particular fascination for linguists. Disregarding representatives of more widespread families (Ossetic and a variety of other Iranian languages, and Armenian, from Indo-European; Azeri and various other Altaic languages; and the Neo-Aramaic Semitic language Aisor), there are three distinct families of languages entirely indigenous to this region, each of which presents a number of features of great interest.1 Serious linguistic work on the languages of the North West and North East dates to the several magnificent late-nineteenth-century individual-language descriptions prepared by Baron Peter K. Uslar and Anton von Schiefner. The South Caucasian languages, primarily Georgian, are attested since the fourth century ad, and there is an important local grammatical tradition. Given the inherent interest of the languages, their independence from those of the major families of Europe and Asia, and the amount of descriptive work that has been done on them, one would expect them to figure much more prominently (and less anecdotally) in contemporary theoretical discussion.
Apart from the somewhat forbidding complexity of the phonetics, phonology, and morphology of languages like Georgian, Ubykh, and Archi, an important reason for their marginal status is undoubtedly the fact that a great deal of the descriptive literature is written in Russian or in Georgian. Even though the vast amount of work done by Georges Dumézil (e.g. 1975) and his students on the North West languages was in French, and Schiefner’s descriptions of North East languages such as Avar and Udi appeared in German, one of the dirty little secrets of our field is that English-speaking linguists (in the US at least) are surprisingly averse to reading basic source material that is not written in their language. The series of books under review could be taken to address this concern by providing a comprehensive set of sketches of the languages of these three families and (where possible) their histories, in compact and accessible form.
Two of these volumes have already been reviewed in Language (Vol. 1 by Nichols (1995) and Vol. 4 by Haspelmath (1996)). The occasion for the present review is the appearance of Vol. 3, completing the set as originally envisioned in 1981. The formats of the volumes vary considerably, as does their success in meeting the general goal of providing a convenient and comprehensive survey of the linguistically relevant facts about the indigenous languages of the Caucasus.
As Nichols (1995) has already noted, Vol. 1 provides excellent coverage of the Kartvelian family, including an overall survey, insightful grammatical sketches of the major modern languages (Georgian, Mingrelian, Laz, and Svan), and accounts both of the Georgian manuscript tradition and of the one language (Old Georgian) that is attested from much earlier times (roughly the fourth to the eleventh centuries ad). Though the individual chapters are jarringly different in appearance (due to the use of camera-ready manuscript) and the physical aspects of the book frankly deplorable considering the price, this volume provides a masterful...
