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BRIEF NOTICES 499 cumulated as a by-product of three years of anthropological field work. It is the first published information available on Kwaio, a Malaita language of the Southeast Solomonic subgroup of Austronesian, and is intended to serve as a basis for a series ofstudies on Kwaio culture. Remarkable for its broad range of application, its goals are of three types. The first is to establish an orthography for the language. K hopes that administrators and the Kwaio people, who 'have been hampered by an inadequate orthography and lack of a Kwaio-English dictionary', may be able to use his book. Since the language has only twentyone phonemes, it was possible for K to use an orthography identical with the phonemic representation. The new spelling system is ideal if the Kwaio are willing to adopt it, and if a phonemic spelling is really more appropriate for the language than some combination of morphophonemic and phonemic spelling. The Kwaio-English section, which even contains an introduction in Kwaio, will probably work only for those Kwaio people who already know some English, or when used concurrently with a grammar in a classroom. This first goal of the dictionary is experimental, and it will be interesting to see whether the Kwaio really use it. If they do, it will be one of the few analytical as well as practical dictionaries useful to scholars and laymen alike. Second, the Kwaio dictionary should be welcomed by Austronesianists for adding to the body of comparative evidence, especially since the emerging Central Oceanic subgroup (of which the Malaita languages are a part) is, according to K, of great importance to prehistory. As a third goal, the Kwaio dictionary lays a foundation for linguistic and anthropological work and records, and preserves the Kwaio cultural heritage, which will inevitably be altered and finally lost. The dialect of Kwaio described here is now spoken by three or four thousand people. The body ofthe dictionary is preceded by an introduction briefly describing the book, the orthography, the relevant structure of the language, the island, dialect differences, and the language family. This is followed by a morphological sketch emphasizing the formclasses of Kwaio bases. Entries in the main part of the dictionary are not identified as to form-class, and no systematic treatment ofthe syntactic structure of Kwaio is given. The Kwaio-English part of the dictionary lists about four thousand 'bases', numbered consecutively to facilitate future reference— some with their reconstructed proto-Malaitan equivalents—and their derivatives with glosses; no sample phrases or sentences illustrating the usages of the entries are given. Loan words are so marked. To make the dictionary as complete as possible, Keesing used computer technology in an interesting way: he secured a program which printed out the bisyllabic forms that could be Kwaio word bases, but for which no forms were recorded, and tried to elicit them. By doing this he was able to add four hundred rare or archaic Kwaio words to the vocabulary. Reading the glosses in the Kwaio-English section, one gets a good idea of the culture of the island: we find glosses like 'skull repository ' or 'an aromatic variety of bulb shrub used in love magic'. Some are semantically complex, e.g. 'call upon one's dead immediate ancestors to perform ritual one does not know perfectly'. A concluding index without translation shows the base under which the Kwaio form closest in meaning to each English entry can be found. In short, this book is as many-sided as it can be without being superficial. It represents a notable contribution to our knowledge of the otherwise undescribed Kwaio language, and is an exemplary basis for further work. [Alice Schlichter, University of California, Berkeley.] A Proto-Algonquian dictionary. By George F. Aubin. (National Museum of Man, Mercury series, Canadian Ethnology Service, paper 29.) Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1975. Pp. x, 197. This work is not a comparative or etymological dictionary in the standard sense, but rather a collection of 2294 reconstructions of Proto-Algonquian forms which Aubin has drawn from twenty-four sources by eleven authors. He has also provided an EnglishProto -Algonquian index of 657 entries, including grammatical categories as...

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