Language and culture in Native North America: Studies in honor of Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow Ed. by Michael Dürr, Egon Renner, and Wolfgang Oleschinski (review)

REVIEWS167 Language and culture in Native North America: Studies in honor of Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow. Ed. by Michael Dürr, Egon Renner, and Wolfgang Oleschinski. (Lincoln studies in Native American linguistics, 2.) München & Newcastle: Lincom Europa, 1995. Pp. x, 483. Reviewed by S0ren Wichmann, University of Copenhagen This festschrift for Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow was originally intended for his 65th birthday but was delayed just long enough to appear on his 70th birthday. It contains thirteen papers on Athapaskan, Tlingit, Haida, Hokan, Siouxan, Iroquoian, and Uto-Aztecan. In addition, there are three anthropologically oriented papers (excluded from the present review.) The book concludes with a bibliography of Pinnow's works and a curriculum vitae. For the reader who wants to acquire an appreciation of the essence of Pinnow's contributions to Na-Dene studies 'The methodological background to the Na-Dene controversy' (102-22) by Michael Dürr and Gordon Whittaker will be a good place to start. The authors, although clearly predisposed to giving a positive assessment of Pinnow's scholarship, manage to present a reasonably balanced discussion of the positions of scholars who have been unwilling to accept Pinnow's view, continued from Sapir (1915), that Haida is related to Tlingit-Athapaskan. They counter the argument set forth by Michael Krauss, Victor Golla, Jeff Leer, and Sarah Thomason that Haida may be some kind of a hybrid language by pointing out that 'if a hypothesis of hybridization is claimed to provide the solution with respect to Na-Dene, the kind of hybridization involved in this particular instance has to be specified' (110). They note that Pinnow (1985) was able to summon 25 verbal grammatical cognates shared between Haida and Tlingit-EyakAthapaskan ; that he pointed out the existence of suffixes that induce contrastive tone in Haida and Tlingit; that he showed how nouns, though to a lesser extent than the verbs, do have morphological similarities; and that all languages compared align possessive pronouns with verbal object pronominals , a typological feature not otherwise attested in the Northwest. Pinnow has also made progress in the more recalcitrant area of lexical comparison by comparing word families. This methodology is inspired by Pinnow's view that Haida, like Tlingit and Athapaskan, predominantly has monosyllabic morphemes. By comparing single Haida stems which are synchronically unanalyzable with the monomorphemic lexemes of Athapaskan and Tlingit, it is difficult to discover cognates. But by using Pinnow's methodology, which is a kind of simultaneous application of the techniques of internal and external reconstruction, progress is possible. A paper by Michael Dürr and Egon Renner (4-18) briefly reviews the various opinions that have been voiced concerning the genetic relationship among the group of languages that Sapir (1915) called Na-Dene. Ever since Sapir suggested that Haida, Tlingit, and Athapaskan are genetically related there have been skeptics. Pliny Goddard and Franz Boas were among the early opponents. Major breakthroughs came in the 1960s when Michael Krauss showed that Eyak is related to Athapaskan and when Pinnow was able to substantiate the view that Tlingit is related to Eyak-Athapaskan. The latter view was slow to gain acceptance, but even Krauss, who had been a staunch opponent, was converted by the early 1980s. Dürr and Renner are upset because consensus has still not been reached concerning the inclusion of Haida. But this state of affairs only seems natural, considering that only Dell Hymes in the mid 1950s and Pinnow in the mid 1980s have invested any major effort in trying to verify the hypothesis. Pinnow himself has a brief addendum (20-25) in which he places himself between the position of extreme splitters and that of extreme lumpers and makes various comments on some recent works in long-range comparison involving Na-Dene. Egon Renner's massive 'The structure ofthe Na-Dene controversy: A meta-theoretical explanation ' (26-101) takes up the same issue as the previous paper by Dürr and Renner but goes into more detail. On the basis of ideas about the structure of scientific communities and sociological conditions for research adopted from Ludwik Fleck and Thomas Kuhn, Renner tries to explain why the field of diachronic Na-Dene research has developed...