The lexical affiliations of Vegliote By John Fisher (review)

496 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 2 (1977) Jakobson-Fant-Halle (48-52). The book concludes with a supplementary bibliography (205-10) listing discussions of 'generative' phonology and of prosodie phenomena (which receive no mention in the main body of the work), and with a fold-out table (211) of Italian phonemes. The material is presented in great detail and very carefully; misprints are few. Yet for whom is the book intended? The beginner, or even the intermediate-level learner, will profit more from the texts than from the (for him) overly complicated presentation of all the variants of each phoneme. The advanced student will revel in the latter, but will find the texts too narrowly representative of a single standard. The linguist will find the material useful for developing analytical techniques, but the problems set in the sections devoted to questions will probably be too elementary. Who, finally, except a few advanced polyglots, will need a book in which these three languages are discussed in wholly separate sections, with no crossreferences at all? It would have been better (though perhaps less profitable) to publish the three sections as separate booklets. Despite these cavils, however, Mioni has provided one of the best introductory treatments of English, German, and Dutch phonologies available to speakers of Italian. [Robert A. Hall Jr., Cornell University.] The lexical affiliations of Vegliote. By John Fisher. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976. Pp. 165. The affiliation of Dalmatian (of which Vegliote was the last surviving variety) with the other Romance languages has been the object of extensive discussion, mostly on the basis of comparison of structural features (phonology, inflection). A good, extensive, sophisticated analysis of the position of Vegliote in its lexical aspects would have been welcome. Unfortunately, this is not it. The first two chapters are short. The 'Introduction' (13-25), outlining the problem to be dealt with, consists largely of quotations from previous scholars. In 'Procedure' (27-31), F announces his intention of trying 'to determine the approximate number of reflexes of Latin etyma that had survived through the centuries and how these compared with the same etyma of [sic!] the national Romance languages' (27). Chapter 3, 'Vocabulary ', occupies the largest number of pages (32-110); it consists almost wholly of an alphabetical list of the 483 Vegliote words which Meyer-Lübke traces to Latin etyma. For each of these, F lists the etymon and such Romance cognates as Meyer-Lübke ascribes to it. In F's fourth chapter, 'Conclusion ' (111-19), he decides that 'There is greater affiliation with the West than with the East, but not enough to show cleavage', and that 'There is rather progression in full accord with geography, and indication of basic Latin-Romance unity' (112). The rest of the chapter is an inconclusive discussion of the methodology of determining relationships among languages. The book ends with six pages of notes (120-25), an incomplete bibliography (126-32), and indices of all the Romance words appearing in Chapter 3 (133-63) and of authors (163-5). The material of this treatise might have made a tolerably acceptable short article, but it has been inflated to book-size. The three chapters devoted to discussion are padded out with not wholly relevant material, needless verbiage, and extensive quotations. Much space is wasted in Chapter 3 by listing each Romance cognate of each Vegliote word on a separate line, with all the rest of the line blank; one quarter of the space would have sufficed, if each Vegliote word, its Latin etymon, and its Romance cognates had been listed in a paragraph. The only concrete data contributed through F's own efforts are contained in the table (p. Ill) of words shared by Vegliote with pan-Romance (of which there are 208), with Italian (427), with French (380), with Spanish (365), with Portuguese (344), and with Rumanian (298). (How about words common to Vegliote and two or three other Romance languages? F does not even mention such a possibility.) F criticizes Roger (not Robert!) Hadlich and other scholars for their views, but comes to pretty much the standard conclusions as to the position of Vegliote. His bibliography does not contain all...