Studies in Caucasian Linguistics: Selected Papers of the Eighth Caucasian Colloquium (review)

The 24 articles in this collection are a selection of papers presented at the Eighth Colloquium of the Societas Caucasologica Europaea, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, 6–8 June 1996. They are intended to represent an overview of current research in all three indigenous Caucasian language families and are dedicated to the memory of the outstanding Russian Caucasologist Georgij A. Klimov (1928–97). The volume opens with a brief biography (1–4) and a chronological listing of Klimov’s scholarly publications (5–22).

The contributed articles, three in Russian with English summaries, sample recent scholarship by many of the world’s leading specialists in the field. Georgij A. Klimov’s ‘On the external history of the Svan language’ (23–31) enlists toponymic and historical evidence to trace the former range of Svan speakers in Western Georgia. Three articles deal with diachronic aspects of Georgian grammar. Jost Gippert’s ‘The formation of comparatives in the history of Georgian’ (32–44) describes the evolution of synthetic and analytic comparative forms. In ‘Towards the problem of the transition from the aspectual to the tense-aspectual system of the Georgian verb’ (45–49), Konstantine Lerner and Reuven Enoch describe the evolution of a system still in typological transition. Marcello Cherchi’s ‘An instance of Georgian verbal analogy in light of Mańczak’s tendencies and Word-and-Paradigm generative formalism’ (60–72) uses a slot-based approach to discuss changes in affixal verb morphology. Two articles are synchronic in orientation: Winfried Boeder’s ‘Attribution in Georgian’ (50–59) explores the grammatical encoding of deverbal attributes in NPs; Vaxtang Imnaishvili’s ‘On the question of the structure of composites in Georgian’ (73–78) explores the structure of certain types of compound words.

Sergei A. Starostin’s ‘The problem of genetic relationship and classification of Caucasian languages: Basic vocabulary’ (79–94) juxtaposes Proto-Kartvelian, Proto-Nakh-Dagestanian, and Proto-Abkhaz-Adygh reconstructions of the 35 lexical items on the Yakhontov list (a glottochronological tool developed by Soviet linguist Sergei E. Yakhontov and analogous to the longer and betterknown Swadesh list). While Proto-Kartvelian seems clearly unrelated, 24 matches are asserted between the two northern families to support the author’s hypothesis of a single North-Caucasian language family. The comparisons are based largely on the author’s own reconstructions, and ‘North Caucasian’ remains insufficiently tested by international peer review to be regarded as conclusive. Starostin’s hypothesis receives support from another contribution, Viacheslav A. Chirikba’s ‘The West Caucasian material in The North Caucasian etymological dictionary’ (152–70), which provides a useful errata list to the dictionary (Sergei L. Nikolayev and Sergei A. Starostin, Moscow: Asterisk, 1995).

Most of the remaining entries deal specifically with either Nakh-Dagestanian or Abkhaz-Adygh. In ‘Diachrony of personal pronouns in East Caucasian’ (95–111), Wolfgang Schulze compares reconstructed forms for the various subbranches of Nakh-Dagestanian. Nakh-Dagestanian pronominal verb morphology is the topic of G. V. Topuria’s ‘The origin and development of personal conjugation in East Caucasian languages’ (112–15). Mikhail Alekseev discusses the evolution of case suffixes in ‘Reconstruction of the Proto-East Caucasian locative morphemes’ (116–24). In ‘Some observations on class categorization in Tsez’ (125–39), Bernard Comrie and Maria Polinsky discuss grammatical gender classes in one of the Dagestanian languages, concluding that Class II is semantically anomalous because it represents a conflation of two historically unrelated classes. In ‘The structure of pairs of aspectual verb forms in the Nakh languages’ (140–51), A. D. Timaev describes the origin of morphological iteratives. Wim Lucassen’s ‘Labialized reflexes of Proto-West Caucasian complexes in comparison with East Caucasian’ (171–80) discusses additional possible evidence for Proto-North Caucasian.

The remaining ten...