The Linguistic Identity of Europe (review)

For one person to write about 62 languages of Europe is a giant undertaking even if the author has a collaborator (Décsy is listed as holding the copyright for contents, Krueger for the English text). Part 1 consists of the ‘Introduction’ (11–22) and two chapters–Ch. 1, ‘The linguistic past of Europe’ (23–51), and Ch. 2, ‘The linguistic present of Europe’ (53–262). Part 2 concludes Ch. 2 (271–400) and continues with Ch. 3, ‘The linguistic future of Europe’ (401–54), and Ch. 4, ‘Demostatistics of Europe’ (455–507). The quality of this work is quite mixed. While in broad outline it may be considered informative, in details it suffers from many inaccuracies.

The discussion in the introductory chapter of the origins of human speech (16–22) makes no references to some of the modern theories based on indirect but solid evidence; the reference to ‘about 3,000 languages on the earth’ (19) is a considerable under-estimate.

D divides the languages of Europe into ten ‘functional’ zones. (A speech zone is somewhat confusingly defined as ‘a group of languages, not genetically related or not closely related, which in consequence of connections as neighbors or identical social factors in their origin, development and function display similar structural features’ [53].) One of these zones, the SAE zone (the abbreviation stands for Benjamin Lee Whorf’s ‘Standard Average European’) includes the five ‘major languages’—German, French, English, Italian, and Russian. Seven zones are geographically defined: The Viking Zone which includes Danish, Faeroese, Lapp, Finnish, Anglo-Saxon (‘insofar as it lives on in modern English’ [77]), and eight other languages; the Littoral Zone (including Maltese, Dutch, and Basque); the Peipus (a lake) Zone; the Rokytno (a village in northern Ukraine) Zone; the Danube Zone; the Balkan Zone; and the Kama (river in eastern Russia) Zone. The remaining two groupings are ‘Language isolates’ (236–42) and ‘Diaspora languages’ (242–59). The ‘Language isolates’ grouping consists of Romansh, Sorbian, ‘Luxemburgish’, and Gagauz (a Turkic language spoken for the most part in southern Moldova); the designation of this grouping is confusing inasmuch as it conflicts with the established term ‘language isolate’ meaning a language which has no known relationship to any other language. The ‘Diaspora languages’ grouping consists of Yiddish, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Romany, Armenian, and Karaim (another Turkic language reportedly spoken today by several small groups in eastern Europe).

How reliable and informative are the several pages devoted to each of the 62 languages? Czech (of the Danube Zone) may be taken as a representative sample (153–8). Bohemia and Moravia formed the western portion of Czechoslovakia from 1918 through 1992 (not between 1920 and 1993 as stated); the names of the Slavic tribes that originally settled in Bohemia and Moravia are spelled in a confusing manner (despite the fact that diacritics are used elsewhere) as Luchane, Dudlebi, Zlichane, Chorvate, and Morovan instead of Lučané, Doudlebi, Zličané, Charváti, and Moravané. ‘The German Emperor Karl IV’ was both the Bohemian king and also Holy Roman Emperor Karel IV (Charles IV), and Prague was the capital of the Bohemian Kingdom rather than ‘a significant cultural and political centre of the German Empire and of Eastern Central Europe’ (154–5). Instead of a biased historical commentary, D should have mentioned that although Latin predominated as the literary language from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, Czech in fact began to be used during the thirteenth century and during the fourteenth was employed in a great variety of genres—legends, tracts, dramatic compositions, satires, and fables. The Unity of Brethren (Jednota bratrská, a Reformation church founded in 1457) is mentioned (and its Czech name misspelled), but not mentioned is the fact that toward the end of the sixteenth century leaders of this church made a translation...