Current Trends in Caucasian, East European and Inner Asian Linguistics: Papers in Honor of Howard I. Aronson (review)

Commemorating almost fifty years of his writing and teaching about the languages of the former Soviet Union, this festschrift dedicated to Howard I. Aronson brings together a number of the most important scholars in their respective fields to define the latest research in languages of Eastern Europe and the CIS. The bulk of the volume (twelve of seventeen articles) concentrates on the Caucasus, and Kartvelian languages in particular, topics to which Aronson has devoted much attention over the course of his career. The distribution of topics is quite broad, with articles treating phonological typology, reflexivization, inflectional morphology, historical comparison, sociolinguistics, and more. In principle, the editors could have organized the work along thematic, or perhaps familial, lines, rather than alphabetically by author, but this does not seem to have lessened its usability. Indeed, its usability is exceeded only by the overall quality of the presentations. To cite just one example, Johanna Nichols’s work on sound correspondences within East Caucasian is detailed and rigorous in its application of the comparative method, and lays a groundwork for research in an area notorious for controversies over methodologies used to establish genetic relationships (see I. M. Diakonoff and S. A. Starostin, ‘Hurro-Urartian as an Eastern Caucasian language’, Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft 12, 1986).

After a brief introduction by Kevin Tuite, a foreword by Victor A. Friedman, and a listing of Aronson’s scholarly publications, the following contributors and works are presented: Gregory D. S. Anderson, ‘Towards a phonological typology of Native Siberia’; Shukia Apridonidze, ‘On the syntax of possessive reflexive pronouns in Modern Georgian and certain Indo-European languages’; Marcello Cherchi, ‘How many verb classes are there in Mingrelian?’; John Colarusso, ‘More Pontic: Further etymologies between Indo-European and Northwest Caucasian’; Donald Dyer, ‘The Bulgarians of Moldova and their language’; Victor Friedman, ‘Lak folktales: Materials for a bilingual reader, part two’; Thomas V. Gamkrelidze, ‘Typology of writing, Greek alphabet, and the origin of alphabetic scripts of the Christian Orient’; Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley, ‘Dialect continua in Tungusic: Plural morphology’; Zev Handel, ‘Ingush inflectional morphology: A synchronic classification and historical analysis with comparison to Chechen’; Alice C. Harris, ‘The prehistory of Udi locative cases and locative preverbs’; K. david Harrison and Abigail R. Kaun, ‘Vowels and vowel harmony in Namangan Tatar’; Johanna Nichols, ‘The Nakh-Daghestanian consonant correspondences’; Maria Polinsky and Bernard Comrie, ‘Constraints on reflexivization in Tsez’; Wolfgang Schulze, ‘The diachrony of demonstrative pronouns in East Caucasian’; Kora Singer, ‘On double dative constructions in Georgian’; Kevin Tuite, ‘Kartvelian series markers’; and Edward J. Vajda, ‘Tone and phoneme in Ket’. These works are followed by an index covering references, languages cited, and other general subject matter.