Phonologies of Asia and Africa Ed. by Alan S. Kaye (review)

138LANGUAGE, VOLUME 75, NUMBER 1 (1999) If this is correct, then our success with Cosmides's task is based on a formal property of the rules that are presented (either they or their contrapositives express prohibitions) rather than on their subject matter. Proponents of ecological rationality would then be advised to seek a somewhat different kind of explanation for why we fail at Wason's task but succeed at Cosmides's, one that involves formal semantic analysis of both the experimental sentences and of the procedures we use to verify them. P was correct the first time: we do think in Fs, xs, and ys. REFERENCES Cosmides, Leda. 1989. The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task. Cognition 31 187-276. Pinker, Steven. 1994. The language instinct. New York: Harper Collins. Wason, Peter C. 1966. Reasoning. New horizons in psychology, ed. by Brian M. Foss 135-51. Baltimore, MD: Penguin. Department of Linguistics University of Arizona P.O. Box 210028 Tucson, AZ 85721 [langendt@anzona.edu] Phonologies ofAsia and Africa. Ed. by Alan S. Kaye. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1997. 2 vols. Pp. xxi, 1041. Reviewed by Gonzalo Rubio, The Johns Hopkins University These two volumes contain 50 chapters describing the phonological systems of 50 different languages, both living and dead, spoken in Africa and Asia. The first volume is dedicated to Afroasiatic languages: Akkadian and Amorite (3-38) by Giorgio Buccellati; Eblaite (39-48) and Ugaritic (49-54) by Cyrus Gordon; Phoenician and Punic (55-64) and Old Aramaic (115-25) by Stanislav Segert; Ancient Hebrew (65-83) by Gary A. Rendsburg; Tiberian Hebrew (85-102) and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (103-13) by Geoffrey Khan; Classical Syriac (127-40) by Peter T. Daniels; Modern and Classical Mandaic (141-59) by Joseph L. Malone; Old South Arabian (161-68) and Geîez (169-86) by Gene Gragg; Arabic (187-204) by Alan S. Kaye; Moroccan Arabic (205-17) by Jeffrey Heath; Cypriot Arabic (219-44) and Maltese (245-85) by Alexander Borg; Israeli Hebrew (287-311) by Shmuel Bolozky; Modern Aramaic (313-35) by Robert D. Hoberman; Modern South Arabian (337-72) by Antoine Lonnet and Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle; Chaha—Gurage—(373-98) and Amharic (399-430) by Wolf Leslau; Egyptian and Coptic (43 1-60) by Antonio Loprieno; Berber (461-76) by Maarten G. Kossmann and Harry J. Stroomer; Awngi—Cushitic—(477-91) by Robert Hetzron; Oromo (493-519) by Maria-Rosa Lloret; Somali (521-35) by Annarita Puglielli; and Hausa (537-52) by Paul Newman. In this first volume, Kaye should be specially praised for his excellent introduction and for his arrangement of the subjects, especially for devoting separate chapters to Ancient Hebrew and Tiberian Hebrew. More than half of the second volume deals with Indo-European languages: Hittite (555-67) by H. Craig Melchert; Old Persian and Avestan (569-600) and Ossetic (707-31) by David Testen; Pahlavi (601-36) by Dieter Weber; Hindi-Urdu (637-52) by Alan S. Kaye; Gujarati —Indo-Aryan—(653-73) by P. J. Mistry; Persian (675-89) by Gernot L. Windfuhr; Kurdish (691-706) by Ernest N. McCarus; Pashto (733-60) and Balochi (761-76) by Josef Elfenbein; and Armenian (777-93) by John A. C. Greppin. Also studied are Dravidian, Brahui (797-81 1) by J. Elfenbein; NiIo Saharan (815-38) by M. Lionel Bender; Niger-Congo, Swahili (841-60) by Ellen Contini-Morava and Sango (861-80) by James A. Walker and William J. Samarin; some so-called Altaic languages (883-925), Turkish, Tatar, and Uyghur by Bernard Comrie; Caucasian, Georgian (929-39) by Howard I. Aronson, Chechen (941-71) by Johanna REVIEWS139 Nichols, and Lak (973-97) by Gregory D. S. Anderson; and two unaffiliated languages, Sumerian (1001-19) by John Hayes and Burushaski (1021-41) by G. D. S. Anderson. The quality and interest ofthe diverse studies are exceptional and make this book an indispensable tool for phonologists and linguists in general, but there are some minor general problems. While most bibliographies are quite exhaustive, others are extremely limited. Also, the book could use at least a subject index (assimilation, epenthesis, etc.). On the other hand...