The Turkic protolanguage: A computational reconstruction By Gyula Décsy (review)

BOOK NOTICES 473 title reveals, the present publication addresses sociolinguistic aspects of languages in contact or, more precisely, languages in contact with Spanish. The volume opens with a foreword from the editor, PiETER Muysken (7-8) followed by five sociolinguistic articles dealing with Spanish in contact with other languages (9-100). The articles are written in Spanish and vary anywhere from 12 to 28 pages in length. The remainder of the publication (101-35) consists of an analysis of a poem, a review article, and half a dozen book reviews; it therefore lies outside the scope of this volume's otherwise unifying theme of Spanish sociolinguistics. The first article, 'Entre dos lenguas: Contacto de inglés y español en Gibraltar', by Melissa G. Moyer (9-26) is the only one among the five that discusses Spanish in contact with aNON-minority language—in this case, English spoken in Gibraltar. Owing, no doubt, to the nonminority status of English in the British crown colony, M's article deals less with Spanish influence on English, or English influence on Spanish, than with the admixture of the two languages (codeswitching) known locally as yanito. According to Moyer, recorded samples oíyanito display a lexical composition that is 60% English and 40% Spanish. In 'La situación lingüística del fa d'Ambô' (27-44), Marike Post describes the current status of fa d'Ambô, or Annobonese, a Portuguese-based creóle indigenous to the island ofAnnobón. Annobón is a part of Equatorial Guinea, whose official language is Spanish. Post considers the extent of Spanish grammatical and lexical influence both on the Annobonese spoken on Annobón proper and on that spoken by natives ofAnnobón residing in the capital of Equatorial Guinea, Malabo. Ewald Hekkino and Dik Barker, in 'El otomi y el español de Santiago Mexquititlán: Dos lenguas en contacto' (45-73), discuss Spanish influence on the grammar and lexicon of Otomi, one of the approximately 60 indigenous languages still spoken in Mexico . In addition, the authors briefly discuss the influences that Otomi has on the grammar of the Spanish used by native speakers of Otomi: these include a lack of gender and number agreement in noun phrases, false reflexivization of nonreflexive verbs, and an absence of consecutio temporum in subordinate clauses. In 'Hablar cuatrapeado. En torno al español de los indígenas mexicanos' (75-86), José Antonio Flores Farfán describes a variety of Spanish that is spoken as a mother tongue by indigenous Nahua. According to the author, previous studies have focused on the Spanish spoken only as a second language by native speakers of Náhuatl. The present study, in contrast, analyzes residual influences exerted by Náhuatl on the language of native spanishspeaking Nahua. Flores Farfán delineates Náhuatl's major phonemic, phonotactic, syntactic, and semantic 'effects' on the speech of Hispanophone Nahua. In the fifth, and final, article, 'Contacto lingüístico y coherencia gramatical: Castellano y quechua en los waynos del Perú', editor Pieter Muysken discusses the problems that the lyrics of Andean folk songs—known as waynos—pose for the concepts of codeswitching and linguistic borrowing. M's survey ofbilingual (Quechua and Spanish) wayno texts suggests that the preservation of grammatical coherence may not necessarily be a requisite concomitant of codeswitching. Despite some typographical errors, the format and the type used for this volume are attractive and easy to read. Longer textual samples are provided as appendices to the individual articles. Altogether this is a nice collection of concise, yet incisive, studies in Spanish sociolinguistics. [Gary H. Toops, Wichita State University.] The Turkic protolanguage: A computational reconstruction. By Gyula Décsy. (Bibliotheca Nostratica 11.) Bloomington, LN: Eurolingua, 1998. Pp. 216. This book follows Décsy's earlier published reconstructions of Proto-Uralic (Bloomington, TN: Eurolingua, 1990) and Proto-Indo-European (Bloomington, IN: Eurolingua, 1991) and succeeds in compiling a great deal of information in a relatively small space. In addition to providing a solid, general introduction to relatively uncontroversial matters such as the historically attested system of common Turkic phonology and vocabulary, D includes a number of his own views regarding murkier aspects of proto-Turkic. Unfortunately, these hypotheses...