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234 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 1 (1998) Old Irish verbs and vocabulary. By Antony Green. Somerville, MA: Cascadura Press, 1995. Pp. v, 145. $15.00. Virtually all students of Old Irish are introduced to the subject with John Strachan's Old-Irish paradigms and selections from the Old-Irish glosses (fourth edition revised by Osborn Bergin, Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1949) supplemented by E. G. Quin's Old-Irish workbook (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1975). These get the student started, but Strachan's glossary is only selective, and Quin does not supply one, thus leaving the beginner to face the unwieldy Dictionary of the Irish language (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1913-76). And neither of them addresses the most daunting aspect of Old Irish for the learner, the complicated phonological alternations that exist between forms of the verb which occupy absolute initial position in the clause and those which are preceded by a variety of null-position elements such as negators, preverbs, and interrogative particles. Thus, for example, absolute initial as beir '(s)he says' alternates with epir, eiper, and con ice '(s)he is able' alternates with cumaic, cumaing, cumuing . The rules underlying these alternations have now been addressed in Kim McCone's The Early Irish verb (Maynooth: An Sagart, 1987), but it is not a book for absolute beginners. They require more basic pedagogical support. Both of these matters have now been addressed by Green's slim volume, which he tells us in his preface he originally compiled as a learner for his own use. It is no surprise that demand for such a commodity immediately developed among his fellow learners, and it is a boon for all that it is now widely available. The first part of the volume gives the paradigms for many of the verbs found in the exercises in Quin's Workbook. Those not given include the weak verbs, whose predictable forms can be extrapolated from the sample paradigms given, and compound verbs whose forms can likewise be extrapolated from the paradigms of verbs with the same base. G lists each verb in normalized orthography , noting conjugation class and the exponents employed as tense and mood markers. Not every form in a given paradigm is attested, of course, but when they can be uncontroversially reconstructed, G distinguishes them with italic type. Throughout this section , he is also careful to provide explanatory notes on individual forms as they are required. The second part of the volume is composed of Old Irish-English and English-Old Irish glossaries which include every word in the Strachan and Quin volumes as well as some other common words. In the Old Irish-English section, conjugated verb forms are often separately alphabetized and referred to the relevant head word—a work saver for beginning students—and in both glossaries nomináis are listed with a notation of their gender and stem classes. All instructors of Old Irish will want to bring this valuable tool to the attention oftheir students. [Joseph F. Eska, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.] The biology of language. Ed. by Stanislaw Puppel. Amsterdam & Philadelphia : John Benjamins, 1995. Pp. x, 300. Cloth $84.00. This book collects the papers presented at a December 1988 international symposium held at Czerniejewo , Poland. The papers address questions of human language's biological origins; the authors present essentialist, evolutionist, and alternative arguments about the source of our ability to communicate linguistically. The volume includes indices of names and terms. Many ofthe authors posit that evolution has played an important role in our language abilities, but Mary Ritchie Key offers convincing insight from an essentialist stance. In "The biological imperatives in communicative interaction' (147-56), Key illustrates the relationship between physiology and language through a model based on the structure of cognate sets in comparative linguistic studies. One theme that runs through many of the evolutionist articles is the relationship of animal or homimd symbol use to human language. In 'Animal communication and human language: Searching for their evolutionary relationship' (99-126), Gábor Gyori suggests ways that human language might have evolved from animal communication and discusses language as a cognitive system. Also, Robert Payson Creed posits, in "The invention of...

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