Compendium of the World's Languages, Volume 1: Abaza to Kurdish; Volume 2: Ladakhi to Zuni (review)

The grandiose connotations of this title are only partly justified by its contents since fewer than 400 of the world’s several thousand languages actually receive treatment here. Those that are included, however, do seem to have been carefully chosen to represent a broad spectrum of genetic, typological, and geographical variety. Each language is described in some detail and in a pleasing visual format rather than in a shorthand style loaded with abbreviations. The compiler, George L. Campbell, is described on the first page as a ‘a polyglot linguist and translator formerly of the BBC World Service’. C seems intent foremost on creating a single reference to slake the initial curiosity of readers by introducing them to a diverse mixture of well-known and ‘exotic’ languages. To this end, the entries pay nearly as much attention to writing systems and other philological aspects as to basic linguistic structure per se. It is important to stress at the outset that this book is geared toward the general reader more than the serious linguist. This remark is not at all intended as criticism but only as a basis for evaluation. However, this review will also argue that the sources consulted as a basis for writing many of the entries appear to have been chosen extremely haphazardly, with no broad understanding of the most up-to-date literature available. This problem, all the more unfortunate in a second edition, significantly reduces the compendium’s usefulness even to the curious general reader.

Except for a brief introduction (vii–xiv), a key to abbreviations (xv–xvi), and an alphabetical listing of the languages included (xvi–xxvi), most pages are filled with the language entries themselves (1–1818). Pagination is continuous throughout both volumes, the second of which closes with a language-by-language bibliography of references (1819–54). This list reveals the origin of the information presented in the entries and directs the interested reader to sources of greater detail on each given topic. This bibliographic data would have been easier to access had it been placed directly after each entry. In keeping with the book’s purpose as a general introductory reference designed to encourage new interest in language study (or to extend an existing interest into some novel, uncharted trajectory), there is an avoidance of theory-specific terminology. The grammatical and philological terms employed are only those that should be familiar to anyone with a rudimentary linguistic education. Many entries contain substantial illustrative material in the form of charts showing phoneme inventories, content-word paradigms, and explanations of alphabets and syllabaries, where necessary. Most close with the first eight lines of the Gospel of John rendered in the given language. Without interlinear morpheme glossing, this is simply a visual illustration of the script rather than a text useful for analyzing the language’s morphosyntactic patterns in any meaningful way.

Some of the best and most detailed entries cover ancient language forms such as Old and Middle English (503–10), Classical Greek (632–44), and Latin (958–72), or extinct languages such as Sumerian (1548–55), Etruscan (539–42), Ancient Egyptian (490–7), Elamite (498–500), or Gothic (625–31). There are also entries on Epigraphic South Arabian (516–22) and the Orkhon-Yenisei Turkic runic inscriptions of the eighth century (1288–93). The latter is new to the second edition; unfortunately, it lacks a reproduction of the runic letters themselves, an unusual omission since writing samples are included in most other entries. Examples and explanations of scripts draw heavily from the author’s own Handbook of scripts and alphabets (London & New York: Routledge, 1997). Like the illustrative texts, however, these explanations usually furnish nothing beyond a basic acquaintance with the general type and ‘look’ of each writing system.

Entries also contain sociolinguistic data. In particular, C is to be commended for his use of modern ethnonyms for native peoples and languages of the former Soviet Union...