Crimean Gothic: Analysis and etymology of the corpus By MacDonald Stearns Jr. (review)

424LANGUAGE, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 2 (1980) Esper, Erwin A. 1973. Analogy and association in linguistics and psychology. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Fodor, Jerry A. 1975. The language of thought. New York: Crowell. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1975. Truth and method. New York: Seabury Press. Gellner, Ernst. 1968. Words and things. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Goodman, Nelson. 1968. Languages of art: An approach to a theory of symbols. Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill. Harris, Adrian David. 1974. The analogous conception of being: A study in dialectical idealism. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms. Harris, James W. 1973. On the order of certain phonological rules in Spanish. A Festschrift for Morris Halle, ed. by Stephen R. Anderson & Paul Kiparsky, 59-76. New York: Holt. Harris, Martin B. 1977. The inter-relationship between phonological and grammatical change. Recent developments in historical phonology, ed. by Jacek Fisiak, 159-72. The Hague: Mouton. Hempel, Carl Gustav. 1962. Deductive-nomological vs. statistical explanation. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 3.98-169. Householder, Fred W. 1971. Linguistic speculations. Cambridge: University Press. Jeffers, Robert J. 1974. On the notion 'explanation' in historical linguistics. Historical linguistics, ed. by John M. Anderson & Charles Jones, 2.231-55. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Kiparsky, Paul. 1968. Linguistic universals and linguistic change. Universals in linguistic theory, ed. by Emmon Bach & Robert T. Harms, 170-202. New York: Holt. Klein, Wolfgang. 1975. Eine Theorie der Wortstellungsveränderung: Einige kritische Bemerkungen zu Vennemanns Theorie der Sprachentwicklung. Linguistische Berichte 37.46-57. Kurylowicz, Jerzy. 1964. The inflectional categories of Indo-European. Heidelberg: Winter. Leed, Richard. 1970. Distinctive features and analogy. Lingua 26.1-24. McCord, Edward, ms. Philosophical groundwork for the comparison of cultures. University of Pittsburgh dissertation. Maher, J. Peter. 1975. The TG paradigm: Against the MITniks. To appear. Silverstein, Michael. 1974. Dialectal developments in Chinookan tense-aspect systems : An areal-historical analysis. (IJAL Memoir 29, pp. 45-99.) Baltimore. Stern, Gustav. 1931. Meaning and change of meaning (Göteborgs Högskolas Ârskrift, 38.) Göteborg. [Reprinted, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1 964.] Wang, William S-Y. 1969. Competing changes as a cause of residue. Lg. 45.9-25. Weinreich, Uriel; William Labov; and Marvin I. Herzog. 1968. Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. Directions for historical linguistics, ed. by Winfred P. Lehmann & Yakov Malkiel, 95-195. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: BlackwelL [Received 27 April 1979.] Crimean Gothic: Analysis and etymologyofthecorpus. By MacDonald Stearns jr. (Studia lingüistica et philologica, 6.) Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1978. Pp. xii, 172. Reviewed by Richard D. Janda, UCLA In the section concerning Crimean Gothic (CG) in the 1920 edition of his Gotisches Elementarbuch, Wilhelm Streitberg wrote little more than a summary statement that the vocabulary of CG showed 'unmistakable [EGmc] traits', REVIEWS425 along with many non-Gothic ones 'possibly due to foreign influence'; his over-all conclusion was the provisional one that 'it is impossible, at present, to make a more exact judgment of the linguistic character of [CG]' (40). Until recently, subsequent work had done little to alter this state of affairs; but with the publication of Stearns' book (an ' extensively expanded revision' ofhis 1973 Berkeley dissertation), Streitberg's verdict must now be updated in two major ways. On the one (positive) hand, we can now be certain of much more about CG than merely that it is an EGmc. dialect; but on the other (negative) hand, to the extent that there are many aspects of CG about which we still can have no 'genaueres Urteil', Stearns has more or less proved that their ultimate unknowability is not only 'vorläufig', but probably also endgültig, barring the discovery of a further text. His book is a meticulously put-together and well-integrated compendium of almost literally every known fact, and practically every statement ever made, about CG—from the first mention of its speakers (ca. 850 a.D.) to an alternative analysis of its one textcorpus that appeared just before S's manuscript went into proof. Later scholars may reformulate some of S's conclusions, and perhaps quibble with some of his arguments for them ; but, for some time to come, any further work on CG will have...