Linguistic Studies

448 LE'ITERS IN CANADA ongoing discussion in the philosophy of logic, because although Geach may lack some of Phelan's care for documented support of his interpretations , he makes St. Thomas speak to contemporary concerns. But is it really Aquinas? This is an important question, but for a philosopher with Phelan's passion for expressing the truth it can never be the primary question. The most important task is not to decide what Aquinas really believed, but to express truth that compels belief, and in such a way that it will be understood and believed, demands communication. The tragedy of this book is that, with all of Phelan's scholarship and admirable concern for the truth he seldom manages to e£fect communication with anyone but neo-Thomists, because communication can succeed only when one takes all one's listeners seriously and adapts one's idiom to theirs. As early as the fourteenth century St. Vincent Ferrer managed to write a very good logic (De suppositionibus dialecticis) dealing with great subtlety with many of the characteristic problems of the logic of his time, all of which, he claimed, was done secundum sententiam veridicam sancti Thomae. Nor will Geach likely he the last to make Aquinas speak a new idiom. It is a great pity that Phelan did not do more of it. (JOHN TRENTMAN) LINGUISTIC STUDIES The core of A Linguistic and Literary Analysis of Old English Riddles (Montreal: Mario Casalini, 1966, viii, 94) by Agop Hacikyan, is the statistical investigation of certain syntactical points which are presented in the six tables that make up Appendix 1 (45--62) along with the commentary on these tables that constitutes part of Chapter 3. Hacikyan uses his statistical results to investigate the questions of the authorship and the date of the riddles. His conclusion (25) is that the riddles are the work of many authors spread over perhaps as many as three centuries. This is a legitimate and valuable study and as such would have made a monograph or substantial article. The remainder of the hook must be criticized strongly. BaSically its fault stems from an attempt to swell out to book length material that just will not support such an expansion. Thus, Chapter 1 defines the riddle and shows rather lengrhily that the form is both widespread and HUMANITIES 449 ancient. The relevance to Old English riddles of much of the classical material cited is not made clear. On the whole the second chapter repeats well-established facts about the manuscript. There are many apparent echoes of the standard edition of Krapp and Dobbie and one actual (incorrect) quotation. There are also misleading statements such as that implying on page 7 that acute accent marks appear over only short vowels and doubled vowels. The non-linguistic discussion of the riddles is concentrated in Appendix 2 and Chapter 4. The appendix lists all the accepted solutions with a very comprehensive bibliography and thus has some merit as a reference tool. The original comments of the author and his contributions towards the solutions of the riddles, however, are very few. The same can be said of Chapter 4. Having said that the literary level of the riddles varies considerably and that some are very poor (29), Hacikyan can make very few further comments about them as a whole, and he is thus restricted to listing isolated examples of well-turned phrases and successful passages. The chapter is filled out by a large number of lengthy critical quotations (20 quotations from 13 authors in a chapter only 16 pages long). It is, incidentally, a little surprising to find that when Hacikyan wishes to define the Old English kenning he turns to Frye's Anatomy of Criticism as his authority. A very copious bibliography makes up almost a quarter of the whole book. (CHRISTOPHER DEAN) Canadians have become accustomed in recent times to the words "linguistics " and "linguistic" with the publication of part one of the report On bilingualism and biculturalism. So we now hear such phrases as "linguistic problem" and "linguistic rights," where "language problem" and "language rights" would have done a year or two ago. There is a second use of the...