Indian names for plants and animals among Californian and other western North American tribes By C. Hart Merriam (review)

BOOK NOTICES 245 interest in Ho-min Sohn's 'Contractions as a mechanism ofpolysémie breeding: A device for speaker involvement in Korean' and In-Seok Yang's 'Pragmatics ofgoing-coming compound verbs in Korean'. Section IV, on sociolinguistics, contains papers on subject honorification, styles ofaddress, and language policies in North and South Korea. Ki-Hong Kim's 'Cultural and linguistic variables in the language of emotion of Americans and Koreans' is noteworthy for the light it sheds; however, statements such as 'in English, 12 words are used to express sadness, while in Korean 28 words are used' must be taken with a grain of salt. This book, attractively printed and bound, is a useful synthesis of the current state of the art of Korean linguistics. It is a welcome addition to the rapidly increasingly literature on Korean. [Cornelius C. Kubler, Foreign Service Institute , Washington, DC] nouns and verbs include -kitja 'about to, intend to', -parni 'not', and -putjuni 'should but didn't'; switch-reference markers apply to verbs, following suffixes such as these. Another notable feature of Pintupi is a class of 14 'speaker attitude markers', enclitic to the first declinable word in a sentence; they include -lka 'contrary to expectations', -kunyu 'reporting what someone else has said', -nypa 'affirming truth/accuracy of statement', -paka 'maybe', and -/(pi 'finally (after some unnecessary delay)'. The Hansens include two texts and a basic 500-item vocabulary. There is also a valuable introductory chapter with a map of the original Pintupi territory and a useful discussion of dialect differences, including a tabulation of grammatical similarities and differences between Pintupi and four other dialects of the important Western Desert language. [R. M. W. Dixon, Australian National University.] The core of Pintupi grammar. By K. C. and L. E. Hansen. Alice Springs, N.T.: Institute for Aboriginal Development , 1978. Pp. 254. $A 10.00. About 1 ,000 people speak the Pintupi dialect of the Western Desert language; many abandoned their traditional nomadic life in the Gibson and Great Sandy Deserts and came to live in government settlements only within the past few decades. The Hansens model their presentation on Joyce Hudson's Core ofWalmatjari grammar (reviewed in Lg. 56.911-12); the main points of phonology and morphology are clearly stated, with many exemplificatory tables . Pintupi shows split case-marking on a typical Australian pattern: nouns and free pronouns inflect on an absolutive-ergative paradigm, while bound pronouns show a nominative -accusative distinction. In the free pronouns , used quite rarely, one form covers both singular and dual, with a distinct form for plural; but bound forms are usually added to the free pronouns, and these do distinguish singular, dual, and plural. Pintupi shows a richer set of nominal and verbal affixes than most Australian languages, and it can be hard to decide whether certain suffixes should be regarded as derivational or inflectional; e.g., -tjanu 'from, because of may be followed by ergative, dative, or other case affixes. Suffixes that can be added to both Indian names for plants and animals among Californian and other western North American tribes. By C. Hart Merriam. Assembled and annotated by Robert F. Heizer. (Ballena Press publications in archaeology , ethnology, and history, 14.) Socorro, NM, 1979. Pp. 296. For almost 30 years prior to his death in 1979, Robert Heizer served, in his words, as the 'voluntary caretaker' of the rich C. Hart Merriam Collections of basic ethnographic and linguistic information on aboriginal Californians. Much of the famous biologist's unpublished materials were edited by H and published as reports of the Archaeological Research Facility at Berkeley . This volume on Indian names for plants and animals was the last—and, in some ways, the most important—of H's scholarly and selfless efforts. M is far better known for his biological contributions than for his efforts at ethnographic recording. He was the first director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and was among the founders ofthe American Ornithological Union. Every college zoology student is familiar with M's life zone system for describing ecological diversity. It is his qualifications as a naturalist that promise to make the present volume an important document for comparative ethnobiological research...