Encyclopedia of Indo-European culture Ed. by James P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams (review)

154LANGUAGE, VOLUME 75, NUMBER 1 (1999) The fourth section, 'Linguistic phonetics', begins with Peter Ladefoged's 'Linguistic phonetic descriptions' (589-618). Ladefoged's approach will be familiar to those who have followed his long-standing interest in finding a way to devise a phonetically realistic feature system that would be useful in phonological analysis. He sets up a hierarchy of features but, as he himself acknowledges, this set of features is not totally satisfactory: Features are not all independent, and they cannot distinguish some of the less common sounds found in languages of the world. Although there is some similarity between Ladefoged's features and those ofgenerative phonologists , readers should not rely on this chapter to understand current phonological descriptions. 'Phonetic universals' (619-39) by Ian Maddieson is not a list of universals but a discussion of some phonetic trends found in the majority of languages and why they may occur. 'The prosody of speech: Melody and rhythm' (640-73) by Sieb ???teß??µ discusses the difficult task of equating acoustic measurements of pitch and duration with their prosodie uses in languages . 'The relation between phonetics and phonology' (674-94) by John J. Ohala looks at how the once unified study of speech sounds split into separate disciplines and then points out ways in which phonetic descriptions can explain various phonological generalizations and language changes. In the last section of the book, 'Speech technology', 'Speech signal processing' (697-720) by Johan Liljencrants is a highly technical treatment of signal processing and is likely to be comprehensible only to those with some background in the field. Likewise, 'Some approaches to automatic speech recognition' (721-43) by W. A. Ainsworth is not for the casual reader. By contrast, Francis Nolan's 'Speaker recognition and forensic phonetics' (744-67) is a nontechnical discussion for those who would like to know the current state of speaker identification. Nolan points out that there has been considerable success with acoustic verification of a known speaker, but the problem of identifying an unknown speaker from an acoustic sample is more difficult. There is greater accuracy from simply listening to speakers than from elaborate acoustic analyses. The last chapter in the volume, 'Speech synthesis' (768-88) by Rolf Carlson and Biörn Granström, avoids most of the highly technical details by presenting the basic principles used in speech synthesis, but it does provide references to more detailed descriptions. Linguistic concepts used in synthesis have included phonetic features, phonological rules and autosegmental processing. Carlson and Granström also describe how synthesis may begin with targets more or less corresponding to phonemes or major allophones or concatenated units such as syllables or half-syllables. The editors are to be congratulated on putting together a very useful book. They have selected topics that represent the wide-ranging interests of phoneticians, invited recognized experts to write on these topics, and coordinated the contributions so that the volume is a coherent whole. The book belongs on the shelf of any serious phonetician, and linguists in general should be aware that it is available to provide a source of recent information about most areas of phonetic research. REFERENCES Kaiser, Louise (ed.) 1957. Manual of phonetics. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co. Malmberg, Bertil (ed.) 1968. Manual of phonetics. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co. University of Kansas Department of Linguistics Lawrence, KS 66045 [fing@ukans.edu] Encyclopedia of Indo-European culture. Ed. by James P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams. London & Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997. Pp. xlvi, 829. Reviewed by Winfred P. Lehmann, The University of Texas, Austin Everyone concerned with Indo-European studies will welcome the publication of this encyclopedia . Excellently designed and carefully produced, it provides access to the culture of the REVIEWS155 society of Proto-Indo-European speakers through their vocabulary and the relevant archeological findings. The main work consists of 658 pages of conceptual entries arranged alphabetically in two columns with a large format. The first entry deals in approximately one column with the Abashevo culture; like other such articles dealing with archeologically determined cultures, it is accompanied by a map as well as by an illustration of archeological finds. It is followed by an entry entitled abdomen (2-3), in...