A Primer of Romance Philology (review)

Reviews 145 It would be difficult to give too much praise to this Handbook which indeed constitutes an important resource for both novice and specialist. A must for the self-respecting medievalist's bookshelf. Maxwell J. Walkley Department of French University of Sydney Atkinson, J. Keith, A Primer ofRomance Philology, Department of Romance Languages, The University of Queensland, Boombana Publications, 1996; paper; pp. vi, 126; R.R.P. AUS$33.00. Satisfactory study of any language at University level should, of course, include a component in which the history of the language is examined, in however desultory a manner that may turn out to be. The Romance languages are well placed, with their common ancestor, Vulgar Latin, to trace their history with some certainty from as far back as the early centuries of the first millennium. Unfortunately, it seems to be the fashion today for students at Australian universities who have majored in any of the Romance languages to take their degree without very much notion at all of the history of that language's development. There are many manuals available already for the student of Romance linguistics, including W . D. Elcock's classic The Romance Languages, (London, 1960); P. Bee's Manuel Pratique de Philologie Romane, (2 vols., Paris, 1970-71); and D. L. Canfield and J. C. Davis's An Introduction to Romance Linguistics, (London, 1975). Yet most of these are very detailed studies, discussing even marginal languages like Romansch, very definitely for the specialist linguist and certainly too sophisticated for the average undergraduate one is likely to encounter today in language departments of Australian universities. This applies especially when one considers that these students rarely have that knowledge of Latin which was generally expected twenty and thirty years ago. Thus there is an opening for J. Keith Atkinson's gentle introduction to the intricacies and pleasures of the subject, his A Primer of Romance Philology, which presents itself as 'a beginner's guide to the Romance languages of France and Spain'. One might indeed be surprised by the absence of that major Romance language, Italian, in this survey, but 146 Reviews Atkinson's book is based on classes given at the University of Queensland where the representative Romance languages taught are French and Spanish. Anyway, in the course of the Primer some examples of the development of the Italian language are encountered, even if no 'major features' of developments specific to Italian are outlined in the relevant Chapter 7 ('Major Features of Each Language'). User-friendly is what Atkinson's Primer strives to be. In the Preface the author assures us that 'even without a knowledge of Latin', students who had both acquaintance with and interest in contemporary French or Spanish had derived benefit from the offered course, 'The Politics of Language Change: Early France and Spain', on which the Primer is based. There are eight chapters in all, each giving extra reading suggestions, referring the student to relevant sections of Elcock, Bee, Canfield and Davis or even J. Anderson's Historical Romance Morphology (Ann Arbor, 1979), for more detailed information on the topics treated in the chapter. Atkinson confines his own remarks to the essential points and explains these clearly and concisely, neatly explicating any grammatical terms he needs to use. Chapter 1 discusses the origins of the Romance languages and so includes a three-page summary of Vulgar Latin with maps, reproduced from Elcock, to illustrate both Hispano- and Gallo-Romance. The basic principles of historical phonetics are presented in Chapter 2, while Chapters 3 to 6 examine, with considerable recourse to comparative tables, the morphology of Old French, Old Provencal, Old Catalan and Old Spanish. With the basic syntactic, phonetic and morphological peculiarities of each language under consideration having been presented summarily in Chapter 7, students are provided in Chapter 8 with selected texts, accompanied by a most useful philological commentary. The extracts are properly quite short, the language rather than any narrative being the important consideration, and both verse and prose items are offered. From time to time, a literal translation of part of the text into English is given. The Primer concludes with a bibliography of works consulted, including a thoughtful list...