The story of writing By Andrew Robinson (review)

458 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) Lexical change and variation in the southeastern United States, 19301990 . By Ellen Johnson. Tuscaloosa, AL: University ofAlabama Press, 1996. Pp. xi, 318. Paper $19.95. This book examines changes in the dialect lexicon of 38 communities originally included in the Linguistic atlas of the middle and south Atlantic states (LAMSAS). To the original set of LAMSAS interviews from the late 1930s, Johnson added an additional set of interviews which she conducted in the same communities in 1990; her interviews, moreover , were mostly conducted with informants very (ifnot exactly) similar to those originally interviewed for LAMSAS. Thus, the original LAMSAS informant in Savannah, GA, was a white urban female born in 1856; J's 1990 Savannah informant was a white urban female born in 1900. The differences that did emerge from the two sets ofdata would seem inevitable with the passage of more than a half century. J's informants as a group are better-educated than the LAMSAS informants and are also more urbanized. These differences aside, J's matchup ofsimilar informants from different eras allows a much better measure of change than the apparent-time studies which simply compare informants of different ages. About one-third of the book describes and analyzes the data and their collection. The remainder consists of appendices including detailed biographical sketches of the informants, variants associated with regional or social groups, variants exhibiting diachronic change, tallies ofanswers to each question and commentaries on some of the answers by the informants, and finally an index of responses listed by question number. The index enables the reader to locate a response in the other appendices and to discover whether the term varied according to time, region, race, age, education, or nirahty/urbanity. Besides reporting changes in the individual lexical items, a major purpose for this study was to determine whether all ofthe nonlinguistic variables listed above have changed in their importance as a factor in language variation. J finds that, in 1990 unlike in 1930, region has become the least important variable. A dramatic example ofthis decline emerges in a comparison between the geographic distribution of 37 items from Hans Kurath's 1949 Word geography of the eastern UnitedStates (Ann Arbor, MI: University ofMichigan Press) with the 1990 data. J's interviews corroborate the distribution of only 20 of Kurath's items, and her statistical comparisons of the two sets of data show the significance of region to be even less than the comparison with Kurath would suggest. However, most of these cases reflected variants —important regional variables in the 1930s—which had disappeared due to technological or economic changes. Tow sack, for example, would have disappeared, presumably, because the burlap bag referent is no longer used for packing. The case of words like these, then, does not so much mean that region has itself diminished as a factor in language variation but only that these particular terms no longer are useful as regional indices. It is unfortunate that J's book has elsewhere been cited (in, for example , its ownjacket blurb) as evidence that regionper se is declining in importance, when in fact her book supports a much weaker claim. That does not diminish the achievement of this book, however, which presents a rich array ofdatain both its text and appendices . And J's efforts to match the LAMSAS interviews with similar 1990 informants, in the same communities, even the same neighborhoods, deserve unqualified applause. [Timothy C. Frazer, Western Illinois University.] The story ofwriting. By Andrew Robinson . London & New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995. Pp. 224. $29.95. The story ofwriting is an engaging, accessible, and comprehensive introduction to the world's writing systems. True to its subject matter, which is ofcourse highly visual, it includes a wealth of photographs, timelines, and other illustrations—350 in all, many in full color. Part ofthe appeal ofthis book lies in its format. It is divided into three main sections: 'How writing works' (18-67), 'Extinct writing' (68-155), and 'Living writing' (156-217). These sections are divided into chapters which are themselves organized into a series of 'mini-articles' ortopics, typically 1-2 pages long. The first section explores a number...