The order of words in the ancient languages compared with that of the modern languages By Henri Weil (review)

482 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 2 (1982) extensively used in other stem classes in the western part of Flanders). It emerges that, compared to the material from 1885, the -en plural is spreading, but not very rapidly. A. M. Kristol, in '400 years ofplurilingualism in Bivio' (95-120), presents a thorough picture of the concurrence of several Rhaeto-Romance dialects, Italian, and German among the inhabitants of the little village of Bivio (Beivo) on the Swiss-Italian border. Historical and social aspects dominate; no examples of linguistic interference are given. The papers by Hefner & Ureland , Taeldeman, and Kristol are documented by maps. K. J. Mattheier, 'Language change in the Rhineland' (121-138), analyses the intrusion of standard German into the speech of fifty men from the village of ?f (southwest ofCologne). The replacement of spirants by stops is much more frequent in formal speech than in the everyday variety. L. Auburger, 'Linguistic variation in the evolution of the Macedonian standard language' (1-38), would have fit better with the theme of the 2nd symposium; it highlights the problem ofcreating norms (e.g. the accentuation ofplacenames and loanwords) in a standard language whose dialects show great variation. P. Mühlhäusler, 'Why pidgins are not mixed languages' (139-60), is the only paper not concerned with Europe. The plural formation in Tok Pisin, spoken in Papua New Guinea, is taken as an example of how to describe 'mixed languages' in a dynamic way. The only theoretical paper in this volume, C-J. N. Bailey's 'Yroèthian linguistics and the marvelous mirage of minilectal methodology' (39-50), is also the only one in English. The iconoclastic Bailey, who cites only himself in his bibliography, holds that traditional linguistic theories 'neither explain nor predict'. If some of his observations were combined with a clearer conceptualization ofnaturalness (a word which Mühlhäusler also uses without definition ), valuable conclusions might result. In short, this is an interesting volume, although the underlying theme is somewhat hard to detect. The typesetting is nearly faultless (except for the truncated numbers of the footnotes on p. 35, which are easily reconstructed). I look forward to the publication of 'Cultural and linguistic minorities in Europe', the proceedings of the 4th symposium (1980). [JeanClaude Müller, Yale University.] The order of words in the ancient languages compared with that of the modern languages. By Henri Weil. Translated by Charles W. Super; new edition with introduction by Aldo Scaglione. (Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science, I: Amsterdam classics in linguistics, 14.) Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1978. Pp. xxxix, 114. $21.00. Weil's De Vordre des mots dans les langues anciennes comparées aux langues modernes first appeared in Paris in 1844; the third edition (1879) was translated into English by Charles W. Super and published in 1887. This reprint includes an introductory essay by Aldo Scaglione , three obituaries written by W's students, and a bibliography of W's works. A classicist rather than a historical linguist, W was concerned with explaining why the word order ofFrench, German, and English is subject to only slight variation, while that of Latin and Greek is much freer. Some of his contemporaries would have interpreted this situation by saying that the modern languages stay close to the natural order of thought, while in Latin and Greek, 'inversions' were more common—suggesting that the natural order ofthought worked differently in antiquity, or at least that occasions for departing from it were more frequent. W's thesis, by contrast, was simply that French, German, and English rely on word order to mark syntactic relations in a way that Latin and Greek do not. The book is divided into three chapters. In the first, W argues that insofar as a natural succession of thoughts exists, it proceeds from topic to comment and has nothing to do with grammatical relations. Chap. 2 considers the relation between syntax and word order, establishes the distinction between free- and fixedword -order languages, and proposes an order typology of head-modifier vs. modifier-head (much like that recently suggested by Vennemann ). Chap. 3 treats word order from the point of view of stylistics. It is striking how much...