Système phonologique et phénomènes phonétiques dans le parler besney de Zennun Köyü By Catherine Paris, and: La Princesse Kahraman: contes d'Anatolie en dialecte chapsough (tcherkesse occidental) By Catherine Paris, and: A dictionary of Proto-Circassian roots By A. H. Kuipers (review)

REVIEWS449 Harms, Robert T. 1964. Finnish structural sketch. Bloomington: Indiana University. Itkonen, Erkki. 1961 . Gibt es im Ostseefinnischen Spuren eines Duals ? (Studia Fennica, 9:3.) Helsinki. Itkonen, Terho. 1976. Syntaktisten vaikutusyhteyksien luonteesta. (With English summary, 'Non-generative phenomena in Finnish morphology and syntax'.) Virittäjä 1976:52-81. Karlsson, Fred. 1974. Céntrala problem i finskans böjningsmorfologi, morfofonematik och fonologi. (Suomi, 117:2.) Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Karttunen, Frances E. 1970. Problems in Finnish phonology. Bloomington: Indiana University dissertation. McCawley, James. 1964. The morphophonemics of the Finnish noun. Mimeographed, MIT. Paunonen, Heikki. 1976. Allomorfien dynamiikkaa. (With English summary, 'AlIomorph dynamics'.) Virittäjä 1976:82-107. Rapóla, Martti. 1966. Suomen kielen äännehistorian luennot. Helsinki. Wmc, Kalevi. 1967. Suomen kielen morfofonemiikkaa. Turku: Phonetics Dept., University of Turku. [Received 24 August 1976.] Système phonologique et phénomènes phonétiques dans le parler besney de Zennun Köyü. By Catherine Paris. Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1974. Pp. 246. F 96.00. La Princesse Kahraman: contes d'Anatolie en dialecte chapsough (tcherkesse occidental). By Catherine Paris. (Langues et civilizations à tradition orale, 8.) Paris: Société d'Études Linguistiques et Anthropologiques de France, 1974. Pp. 303. F 75.00. A dictionary of Proto-Circassian roots. By A. H. Kuipers. Lisse (Netherlands) : Peter de Ridder Press, 1975. Pp. 93. $10.00. Reviewed by Stephen R. Anderson, UCLA The Northwest Caucasian languages are among the most notorious in the world : truly linguists' languages. Just to take their phonology, consonant systems of 80 or more members are certainly among the most elaborate to be found; on the other hand, their vowel systems—with two or three members, opposed only in height—are equally dramatic in their simplicity. Indeed, Kuipers has argued that some of these languages can be analysed as having no phonological vowels at all : see his monograph on Kabardian (Kuipers 1960), and subsequent discussion by various scholars cited in his most recent contribution to the debate (Kuipers 1976). While the Northwest Caucasian languages thus have an obvious exotic appeal that has not gone unnoticed by European scholars (of whom Trubetzkoy is perhaps the best known), they have not in fact been much studied in America. In part, this might be attributed to the difficulty of finding speakers; but there are at least two known communities of Circassians and related people in the United States (one in New Jersey and one in Southern California), and possibilities exist for those interested in such fieldwork. More significant, probably, has been the difficulty ofobtaining usable descriptive materials in the standard languages of Western scholarship. Most of the descriptive literature on these languages is of course in Russian, and unlikely to be translated in the near future; and all too few American linguists read Russian except under duress. In fact, however, the past twenty years or so have seen the growth of an impressive literature on the languages of the Northwest Caucasian group in French (and to a lesser extent in English). The works noted here more or less fill out the picture of the family, and Western scholars will no longer have an excuse for not getting to work. 450LANGUAGE, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 2 (1977) Ironically, the language which has been most extensively documented, Ubykh, is the most seriously moribund. This language, spoken by at most a dozen or so people in remote villages in Anatolia, has been dealt with at length in a series of works by Dumézil and Vogt, based largely on work with a single speaker. By properly collating various of these works, one can obtain a fairly comprehensive picture of the morphology of the language; and there is a substantial dictionary (Vogt 1963) to aid in the study of the copious collection of texts—many of them edited in comparative editions, with versions for other languages of the family. Despite its lack of currency as a living language, Ubykh is an important member of the family for comparative purposes; and though much of the available textual material seems to suffer from overediting , it forms a central and valuable resource. For the Abkhaz-Abaza group, with a substantial number of speakers not only in the Soviet Union but also scattered through the Middle...