Theoretical bases of Indo-European linguistics by Winfred P. Lehmann (review)

BOOK NOTICES 673 Inevitably there are some errors, maybe surprisingly few. Thus, the word baloba 'letter' is misalphabetized after mo.boli 'louse' instead of two pages earlier. In the Proto-Bantu root listing, *-búcá 'back, rear' is repeated after *-búda 'rain' in addition to its proper order. Some etymologies are overlooked or mistaken, e.g. ko.badilisya 'to exchange' and balobá 'letter' are overlooked as Swahili loans. Elsewhere, B omits Swahili zawadi in his comment 'Swa??' as the problematic source ofi.gyawáli 'gift', ko.geloka 'to change, turn around' is misetymologized as Proto-Bantu *pèndok- rather than *-gàdok- 'tum/ alter', -lazi 'long' as PB *-tadè rather than *-dài. Dubious are the etymologies of ku.suga 'to curse' as PB *-tók-, and ku.rcnda 'say' as PB *-dttdrather than *-tét- (if these are ultimately different). Omitted etymologies include *-tánda 'bedstead' for ka.ránda 'mat', *-tóm- 'send' for ku.rúmeka 'earn wages' (from the East Bantu idiom for 'serve'), *nyinà 'mother' for^a 'mother of (listed for nina 'mother') and *(vi)cé 'father' for sá 'father of (Usted for isé 'his/her father' ). For problematic cases I preferred B's strategy of suggesting an etymology or two, e.g. *dédù for ka.nteluntelu 'chin' as well as lu.zwelu 'beard' (inadvertently omitted from the Lega-English listings), or inclusion of both *-bùmb and *-pù as probable sources of ki.bú 'stomach'. i.dangi 'color' should add the source Swahili rangi ( o when the primary pitch accent, at the time of the innovation, shifted to another syllable (139). Why would change ofpitch lead to backing and rounding? L's (132) uncritical citing of Hirt's use of Russian e 674 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 3 (1998) > ? as support for this as a sound change seems inappropriate since the Russian change took place in a phonetically motivated context (following consonants which were 'hard' at the time); Russian IiI later velarized under similar conditions. A comment is due on L's typological proposal that as verb inflections, reflexives and reciprocals are ordered further from the root than modal expressions (199). Bantu contradicts this notion, e.g. Swahili wazungumz -an-e (they-converse-REcrpROCAL-suBJUNCttve ) 'they should talk to each other' . In any case, this book is informative and thoughtprovoking on virtually every page. A superior book is unlikely to appear on this topic and yet be as comprehensible to the general linguistic readership. [Benji Wald, Los Angeles, CA.] Swahili phonology reconsidered in a diachronic perspective. By Fidèle Mpiranya . Köln: Rüdiger Koppe Verlag, 1995. Pp. 87. In this scrappy little book, subtitled "The impact of stress on morphophonemics and syllable structure', Mpiranya presents a great deal of detailed information about standard Swahili morphophonemics, well organized according to reconstructed sound changes, with due attention paid to lexical reanalyses in certain sets of examples. M's discussion of the literature on Swahili synchronic and historical phonology is well informed, and his criticisms of some of the literature are informative and well-taken. For basic data and various issues in the literature, this book will serve the interested reader well. On the other hand, some of M's more original proposals are problematic, and his discussions do not always do justice to the issues involved. Among these, I was struck by M's proposal that Swahili's penultimate word stress derives from Persian final closed syllable word stress, which he attributes to Shirazi settlers shifting from Persian to Swahili (or its ancestor) at the end ofthe first millennium (13-14). Linguistic argument is minimal, only based on preservation of the original Persian stress in Swahili loan words, without considering that some kind of penultimate syllabic prominence is widespread among East Bantu languages, even among those which remain highly tonal and for which Swahili phonological influence is implausible. Although M'sdescription ofthephonetics underlying Swahili morphophonemics is usually accurate to aninteresting levelofdetail, hisdiscussionofthe Swahili nasal syllables (his term) ismisleading atbest(38). M's claim that mpya mbwa 'dog' donotphoneticallyindicate thatthe source ofthe syllabic nasal is N ratherthanm«, that only the syllabicity ofthe nasal distinguishes the sequence mu-b > mb from N-b > mb in...