Beginning Hittite By Warren H. Held, Jr., William R. Schmalstieg, and Janet E. Gertz (review)

402 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 67. NUMBER 2 (1991) onstrate that the common view regarding Jacob Grimm and the dialects of German, namely that Grimm neglected them, needs revision. Beginning with biographical material (Ch. 1: 'Prerequisites', 0 [sic]-14), the author pursues the intriguing question of the oral language employed (and understood) by the Grimms. Neither Wilhelm nor Jacob knew any High or Low German dialect, though their own more or less 'standard' High German was colored by regionalisms —which is of course true for nearly all speakers to some degree. (The German terms 'Dialekt' and 'Mundart' as employed by Jacob are discussed in the very brief second chapter, pp. 15-17.) Instead, for their collection of fairy tales and later for their philological investigation they relied on consultants near and far. This is somewhat surprising, considering the breadth and the depth of material collected in Jacob's 4-volume Deutsche Grammatik (1819-40) and his 2-volume Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (1848). The romantic view of the two brothers wandering from farmhouse to farmhouse listening to and writing down tales told by elderly peasant women is corrected to one in which the brothers receive the farmer women in their study, or (even less picturesque) one in which the mailman delivers the stories sent to them. The 'dialect' fruits of their labors are the twenty-one fairy tales published in their renowned collection in Low German (or 'Plattdeutsch ') or a High German (for example Austrian) dialect. One tale, 'De wilde Mann', was replaced with a High German version ( 'Iron Hans') starting with the sixth edition. A third volume of annotations contained five further Low German tales, and from the estate another fourteen have found their way to print in recent years. All of these tales are listed and accounted for bibliographically in Appendix 1 (75-79). As to the immediate consequences of Grimm's understanding of the relationship between dialect and written language (Ch. 3, 1940 ) for linguistic insight, H distills three major points: (1) the relative independence of both forms from each other, (2) the relative uniformity of written language, at least since the Middle High German period, and (3) the relative autonomous development of both, a result of (1) and (2). H discusses the relative merits and faults of Grimm's findings, often defending Grimm from all too radical criticism, yet avoiding any 'canonization' tendencies. He also cites parallels to such later developments as sociolinguistic descriptive models (38f.). In Ch. 4 Grimm's use of dialect material is characterized. It is necessary to take into account the source material available to Grimm at the time; H refers to Johann Andreas Schmeller 's work on Bavarian and Franz Josef Stalder 's work on Swiss German, among others. Grimm, whose main focus remained the written (standard) language, could only infer that the development of the various dialects was fragmentary and irregular. The author does admit that an exhaustive survey of Grimm's use of dialect material in thousands of pages of published study is yet to be undertaken (41, 49). Grimm's decisive influence on contemporary and later dialectology is the subject of Ch. 5 (54-65), where Grimm is portrayed as an interested , passionate, reflective correspondent and colleague. H's conclusion (Ch. 6, 66-68) is concise and reliable. The reader is again referred to the collection of twenty-five excerpts from other authors' comments, spanning 140 years. on Grimm's positions (83-87). The bibliography (88-95) lists works up to 1985. Thirty-six illustrations (portraits, facsimiles, title-pages, etc.) enhance the attractiveness of this interesting essay. [John M. Jeep, The University of Chicago .] Beginning Hittite. By Warren H. Held,Jr., WilliamR. Schmalstieg, and Janet E. Gertz. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1988. Pp. ix, 218. A new Hittite text is welcome, since the standard grammar, Johannes Friedrich's Hethitisches Elementarbuch (HE; Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1960), is out of date and was never a student text. Beginning Hittite (BH) contains a 95-page grammatical sketch, four brief reading selections, and a glossary and sign list for the material in the volume (all clearly reproduced from typescript). While the information supplied is in general reliable, there are some errors. Typos include 'umlaut' for...