Mulu'wetam: the First People Edited by Jane H. Hill and Rosinda Nolasquez (review)

REVIEWS461 in Hopi, nor does it occur regularly in this position in SUA, though */ -»· r can occur in some SUA languages in word-initial position, and there have been some analogical t\r alternations word-medially in Tarahumara.) There is just no way to justify correlations of PSUA */ with PNUA */ (let alone *7). Moreover, the shift */ -* / in Cupan and Tubatulabal is motivated structurally by the absence of inherited */ (following the PNUA shift */ -»¦ *n), creating a 'hole in the pattern' (absence of liquids) which in turn encouraged shifts like */ -»¦ / (and Hopi *w -*¦ I). Since PUA had at least one liquid */, it had no compelling motivation to shift other consonants to */. L's reconstruction ofanother passive complex, *-ki-wa-, is based on evidence from three SUA groups. L has recently (p.c., May 1976) retracted the Pimic correlations in the light of recent descriptive material; they were phonologically problematic anyway. Reconstruction for PSUA based on the remaining forms (Tarahumara and Corachol) is still reasonable; and in view of a possible Luiseño cognate, this might also go back to PUA. I have criticized many specific historical claims in L's book. Still, the very fact that such an ambitious work on UA historical morphosyntax can be written is heartening; only a few years ago virtually no such work was even being contemplated . L is the first UA-ist to acquire the control of the descriptive data necessary to produce historical theories of such scope. Like most pioneers, he leaves himself open to criticism from carping reviewers and from later workers who have the benefit of his research. The most general criticism I would make is that there is too much emphasis on attaining immediate theoretical devidends, such as demonstrating that frozen derivational formations reflect earlier complex syntactic structures with higher predicates, existential verbs etc. To arrive at such results, L attempts ambitious morphosyntactic reconstructions, many of which are too shaky to be useful evidence on theoretical points. The reconstruction of such a remote protolanguage as PUA will take decades of patient work by a number of scholars; and even then, it is doubtful that complex morphosyntax can be confidently reconstructed . Langacker's book ends with a long and very useful UA bibliography, using a special code (e.g., UA-L-NCG) instead of bulkier citation forms (like 'Langacker 1975'). Works represented in this bibliography can hereafter be cited in this code; but new works should not be until L (or someone else) issues published supplements to the bibliography with 'authorized' codes for new titles. [Received 3 September 1976.] Mulu'wetam: the First People. Edited by Jane H. Hill and Rosinda Nolasquez. Banning, CA: Malki Museum Press, 1973. Pp. iii, 198. $6.50. Reviewed by J. F. Davis, Cologne University This volume contains 69 prose texts and 38 songs in the Cupeño language, a member of the Cupan subgroup of the Californian Uto-Aztecan languages. The texts range in length from three or four lines to more than 220 and are matched on facing pages with sentence-by-sentence translations into English, kept as literal as possible so that interested readers can more easily work out for themselves the meaning of each Cupeño sentence. 462LANGUAGE, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 2 (1977) As Hill explains in the introduction (p. ii), some ofthe texts were collected by her in 1962, 1964, and 1966, mostly as narrated by Nolasquez; the others are the considerable collection of stories gathered by Paul-Louis Faye in 1919-21, but completely forgotten about until 1967, when they were discovered by the archivist at the Lowie Museum ofAnthropology at Berkeley. Hill classifies both sets of texts into five sections according to the topics dealt with. The first, 'We relate history', is a mixture of semi-historical myths (two versions of the Creation story; two versions of the story of Kisily Pewish, magical founder of the Cupeño tribe) and authentic historical events—especially several narrating the brutal expulsion of the Cupeño from their ancestral villages at Cupa and Wilakalpa and their forced removal to the small mixed reservation at Pala in 1902. The second section, 'Big days', comprises 13 longish texts giving accounts of old religious ceremonies, both Christian...