The Japanese language in contemporary Japan: Some sociolinguistic observations By Roy Andrew Miller (review)

BOOK NOTICES 475 Institut in Kabul and the—until recently— very active educational exchange between the Federal Republic and Afghanistan have not resulted in any contrastive Pashto-German study.) The book is a systematic introduction to the written language, subdivided into 44 lessons, with grammatical comments, a reading selection, a few review questions, and a German-Pashto translation exercise. A key to the translations (254-63), a Pashto-German glossary (264-300), and some grammatical tables (301-3) follow. Lorenz, a 'Dr. sc' according to the title page, gives the following sources (29): Russian-Pashto dictionaries, N. A. Dvoryankov 's (1960) and D. A. Shafeev's (1963, 1964) outlines, D. L. R. Lorimer's syntax (1915), and S. Rishtin's (1948) and my own grammar of Pashto (1955). Unfortunately, his made-up textual selections provide no introduction to actual speech acts. They do contain references to recent events, e.g. the recent Afghan revolution (118). Modern Afghan terminology is used, such as the academic rankspöhänd' professor' and pöhanwäl, glossed 'Dozent'. It would be interesting to know how and where L learned his Pashto. The Roman transliteration used here differs somewhat from the one currently favored by Kabul's Pashto Academy. It is also different from the one I used in my Reader of Pashto (University of Michigan Press, 1962); e.g., he writes for ts in calor 'four', but dz in dzäj 'place.' His use of and suggests that his favored Pashto is actually a ' Pa^to' with a palatalized fricative—not the Peshawar velar spirant [paxto:], or the Kandahar retroflexed shibilant, or the Quetta shibilant [pajto:]. L's sketchy phonetic descriptions are insufficient to indicate the pronunciation. L's Pashto is actually a mixed dialect with southern (Kandahar) as well as Eastern (Jalalabad) features. HisyVwr 'you are' (33) is Kandahar, but is contradicted by wâjaj (not wäjäst) 'you speak' (37). His zsbi 'languages' (47) is Kandahar, but the oblique form zabo instead of zabu is not. The Kandahar 3rd pers. mase, preterit rasedaj 'he came' is labeled 'mundartlich' by L (72); he prefers the endingless rased—quoting, as I did in 1955, an Afghan orthography conference of 1948 as authority for this preference. The grammatical comments seem, on the whole, adequate and correct. The greatest pedagogical crux in Pashto is the ergative construction of transitive verbs in all tenses of the past, which was recently described in great detail by Habibullah Tegey (Linguistic method, Essays in honor of Herbert Penzl, ed. by I. Rauch & G. F. Carr, 369-418 [Mouton, 1979]). L's treatment, using 'Agens' and 'Patiens', is satisfactory (72), but may cause didactic difficulties: sari xadza lidsla 'Der Mann (Agens) sah die Frau (Patiens)', is better translated ' Vom Mann wurde die Frau gesehen.' Technically, the book is a delight: its Arabic print, next to the Roman transliteration , is flawless and beautiful. In spite of its shortcomings, it may turn out to be the only available textbook in a Western language usable for actual language instruction in Pashto. [Herbert Penzl, Berkeley.] The Japanese language in contemporary Japan: Some sociolinguistic observations . By Roy Andrew Miller. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research; Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 1977. Pp. 105. $3.25. Sociolinguistics has made its greatest impact in studies of socially-conditioned diversity within languages, and in research on multilingual societies; the present volume is, then, especially welcome in drawing attention to the often-neglected topic of sociallyconditioned attitudes toward language, even within linguistic communities of relatively great homogeneity. Miller points out that a flood of popular publications on the Japanese language appear in Japan each year, and that these provide rich material for an understanding ofwhat, from a foreigner's viewpoint, may seem paradoxical and difficult in Japanese sociolinguistic attitudes. M's basic thesis in this beautifully written monograph is that, for the people of Japan, 'Japanese is not simply a language but an ineffable sociolinguistic experience. Although this experience is incapable of explanation to the outsider, it remains meaningful beyond description to the members of the group. Membership in this group, however, is available only by the accident of birth. To all others, the experience of the language must...