Topics in Chadic Linguistics: Papers from the 1st Biennial International Colloquium on the Chadic Language Family (Leipzig, July 5-8, 2001) (review)

As noted in a single-page preface by the editor, this small volume marks the revitalization of Chadic linguistics in Europe by marking the inception of a new biennial colloquium series to replace two continental series that had been discontinued. The preface follows a contents page, listing the eight papers in the volume. The eight colloquium papers, most twenty pages in length, cover a wide range of topics: Ari Agwana’s ‘La pluralité verbale en buduma’ (1–20), Roger M. Blench’s ‘Why reconstructing Comparative Ron is so problematic’ (21–42), Véronique de Colombel’s relatively short ‘Grammaticalisation et ordre des unités dans dix langues du groupe tchadique-central’ (43–52), Amedeo de Dominicis’s highly technical ‘Tone or pitch accent in Masa?’ (53–72), Dymitr Ibriszimow and Victor Porkhomovsky’s expansively detailed and diagrammed ‘Towards a typology of kinship terms and systems in Afro-Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic)’ (73–94), Mohammed M. Munkaila’s ‘Morphological causative and indirect object interface in Hausa’ (95–114), Henry Tourneux’s ‘Le système consonantique des langues dites “kotoko” ’ (115–36), and finally the editor’s ‘Predicate focus in Chadic languages’ (137–59).

As can be gleaned from the titles of the papers, there is some variety with respect to the topics and languages treated, with a slight tilt in favor of syntactic issues. Blench’s paper straddles phonology and the lexicon, given its interest in subclassifying the Ron group on a historical basis while recognizing the influence of neighboring Benue-Congo languages on its various members. Although de Dominicis’s paper on the question of whether tone or pitch accent underlies Masa’s tonal system is strictly synchronic and based on recorded and instrumentally measured spoken data, it has interesting implications for the development of tone in Chadic, since there seems to be no reason to suppose the Chadic’s Afro-Asiatic ancestor was tonal.

Despite the small number of papers, linguistic diversity among Chadic languages is very much in evidence from the examples and the general high quality of discussion in the papers. As many of the authors are quick to point out in their conclusions, virtually every aspect of Chadic is in no more than a preliminary state of research, compared to what remains to be done. The present collection gives reason to look forward to the continuation and further development of Chadic linguistics.