Arabs and Arabic in the Lake Chad region Ed. by Jonathan Owens (review)

BOOK NOTICES 215 cusses the background to work on Negerhollands, the role of the Moravians in the documentation of the creóle, and the life and works of the compiler. S pays much attention to the critical history of the manuscript dictionary, to revisions made to it, and to linguistic and orthographic variations documented among the entries. He also sheds light on the lexical material in the dictionary, providing etymologies for the small number of forms which are not of Dutch origin and pointing out, for example, that even in 1767, Oldendorp was able to gather more Negerhollands words of English origin (twelve) than had been taken from Danish, the official language of the islands (one word). The 3,404 entries of this work, ordered alphabetically according to the German keyword and provided with Negerhollands equivalents written in a Dutchbased orthography, contain much more information than their mere number might suggest, since many lemmata contain several subentnes. The redaction of the dictionary itself (43-154) is a diplomatic edition, complete with the numbers ofthe original manuscript pages; this is generously furnished with footnotes which largely discuss different textual readings. Several pages of the original manuscript are reproduced (155-58). An even earlier vocabulary is provided as supplement to the main work. Kingo, a Danish Lutheran minister and educator, transcribed the seven-page 'West Indian glossary', deposited in Copenhagen's Rigsarkiv, probably before 1765 (from a manuscript whose whereabouts are now unknown), and provided Negerhollands equivalents for 338 Danish entries, alphabetized according to initial letter. These are provided with German translations by van der Voort, who introduces and discusses the manuscript in an introduction (159-67), reproducing two pages from it (178-79). The volume ends with English and French synopses of the contents. This work is a landmark in creóle philology. In addition to being the most extensive published lexical source available for Negerhollands, it is a handsome, superbly executed, and very useful addition to the growing body of published material on the language. It is unfortunate that, being written in German, its contents will be inaccessible to most Virgin Islanders . [Anthony P. Grant, University ofSt. Andrews.] Arabs and Arabic in the Lake Chad region . Ed. by Jonathan Owens. (Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika, 13.) Köln: Rüdiger Koppe. 1993. Pp. 310. This special edition of the leading historical journal of African linguistics contains an introduction by Owens (7-12) and six papers on the history of the settlement and culture of Arabic-speaking groups around Lake Chad and neighboring areas of Sudan, Uganda, and Nigeria, and on the varieties of Arabic used there. Historical and cultural topics are treated in early papers; the bulk of the volume (and the discussion here) is given over to three important descriptive papers which deal with separate varieties of Arabic. O's own paper, 'Nigerian Arabic in comparative perspective' (89-175), draws extensively upon data from neighboring dialects (including those of Ndjamena and other parts of Chad, Western Sudan, Khartoum , and the Nile Valley) and upon Western Sudanic Arabic material from Sigismund Koelle's Polyghtta Africana (London: Church Missionary House, 1854) to contextualize the origins of Western Nigerian Arabic, which he is at pains to point out is not a pidgin or creóle (89). Clues from phonology, morphosyntax, and lexicon are all invoked to locate the dialect within Western Sudanic Arabic, as the linguistic analogue to the widely influential cattlebreeding Baggara culture area (cf. Sango bagara 'bovine ' from Chad Arabic), which is discussed in Ulrich Braukámper's paper in this collection ('Notes on the origin of Baggara Arab culture with special reference to the Shuwa', 13-46). 'Turku: A descriptive and comparative study' , by Mauro Tosco and Jonathan Owens (177-267) treats the pidginized Chad Arabic introduced from SW Sudan by soldiers under the Nubian leader Rabeh in 1879 (who were originally viewed by locals as Turks or tourkous, a word which became Sango tur- úgu 'soldier'), and recorded by Gustave Muraz in a French-Arabic-Sara soldiers' manual of 1930. A grammatical sketch is provided, and comparative analysis shows that Turku, rather unsurprisingly, has its closest parallels with Kinubi and Juba Arabic, although it shows later influence from...