Systemcharakter und Relativität der Sprache By August Dauses (review)

206 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 1 (1998) it proposes a model based on the notion of different types of boundaries. In two more technical papers, Dale Gerdemann and Erhard Hinrichs attempt to solve remaining problems with head-driven generation algorithms in unification based grammars by using atomic values in logical form, while Tsuneko Nakazawa presents an LR parsing algorithm for feature based grammars. In Part III, the general overview of computational phonology by John Coleman is followed by two more technical papers: one by Jennifer Cole on eliminating cyclicity in phonology, and one by Julia Hirschberg and Richard Sproat on predicting pitch accent from text analysis. In addition to being an already important reference , this book can be used as supplementary readings in a computational linguistics course, and I would highly recommend it. [Dominique Estival, University ofMelbourne.] The Blackwell encyclopedia of writing systems. By Florian Coulmas. Oxford & Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996. Pp. xxxviii, 603. $74.95. The spate of large reference books in linguistics issued in recent years by several continental and British -based publishers now includes some titles in the field of grammatology, including the valuable work under review. One other is the two-volume Handbuch edited by Hartmut Günther et al. under the title Schrift und Schriftlichkeit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994-96); still another is The world's writing systems (WWS), edited by Peter T. Daniels and me (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). It seems appropriate for me to declare my possible bias here since it could be thought that Coulmas' book is in some sense a competitor to WWS. In fact I see the two books as complementary, and I hope that all research libraries and interested scholars will acquire both. It is noteworthy that the Library of Congress has classified these two works under separate headings : WWS under 'P' (Language) and Coulmas under 'Z' (Bibliography). In contrast to the other works mentioned above, which are organized topically, Cs book is arranged alphabetically, lending itself well both to quick reference and to enjoyable browsing. Many of its other distinctive qualities result from the fact that—unlike more typical reference volumes, but like David Crystal 's highly successful Cambridge encyclopedia of language (1987)—Cs work is not an edited volume but was written by his hand alone. The clear advantages of this lie in tightness of organization, coherence of statement, and consistency of voice. The main disadvantage, of course, results from the fact that no single author can be equally expert in all the topics covered by such a wide-ranging book. For example, a user who looks under Japanese writing—with the supplementary entries for kana, katakana, hiragana, kanji, and kanbun—will find highly authoritative statements since this is an area ofCs expertise. By contrast, a user who looks under Devanagari—the script used for Sanskrit, Hindi, and some other languages of India—wiU find many details that are bound to be unclear or misleading to nonspecialists; e.g., the archaic phonetic terms 'guttural ' and 'cerebral' are employed here instead of the 'velar' and 'retroflex' which are used elsewhere in the book. Vowel letters are said to occur in two forms, 'initial and medial'—which is accurate for Sanskrit, but not for Hindi, in which the 'initial' form also occurs medially after other vowels; and so on. Cross-references are somewhat weakly developed; the reader of the Devanagari article has no way of knowing that furtherrelevantinformation is available under the headings Sanskrit, Hindi, and Syllabic alphabet . Readers who experience uncertainties will be grateful for the book's abundant bibliographical references . However, there is no index. One doesn't normally expect an index, of course, in a dictionarytype work; however, in this volume it could have compensated for the relative shortage of cross-references . Thus, although the Devanagari article mentions that the script is used for Marathi and Nepali, the reference user has no direct access to those language names. [William Bright, University ofColorado .] Systemcharakter und Relativität der Sprache. By August Dauses. Stuttgart : Steiner, 1996. Pp. 102. As in his previous publications, Dauses discusses the theory of relativity in language and questions idealistic, ontological, and mechanistic models of language and language change. The communicative function...