A Comparative Dictionary of Raute and Rawat: Tibeto-Burman Languages of the Central Himalayas.

• Author: Anderson, Gregory D.S.

A Comparative Dictionary of Raute and Rawat: Tibeto-Burman Languages of the Central Himalayas. By JANA FORTIER. Harvard Oriental Series, vol. 88. Cambridge, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019. Pp. xx+ 276. $50.

The volume under review is the culmination of at least two decades of work recording the lexicon of these important and, until now, poorly documented languages of the Tibeto-Burman (Trans-Himalayan) family spoken in Nepal and India. The dictionary covers a macro-language or language-dialect continuum consisting of at least three named entities with ISO codes--Raute, Rawat, and Raji--the last included to a lesser degree and excluded from the title. Each variant form is identified in the examples. All share the same endonym Tou 'people, person'.

The transcription system used in the dictionary is somewhat odd. It uses a small number of diacritics not widely available, but otherwise seems to want to have mainly (though not entirely) standard keyboard strokes, and there are some uses of the IPA, too. Thus, the result is a complicated hybrid that has codified some rather odd choices (for example, a for schwa). As the primary user group of such a dictionary will be linguists interested in Tibeto-Burman languages, it is not clear that it will meet the needs of such users as well as it might have. Also, since likely only a very small number, or possibly no, community members are literate in Roman or IPA orthographies, it is not clear what user group benefits from such a decision.

Some of the entries are filled with rich ethnographic information that makes the dictionary quite enjoyable to read and the content quite informative. For example, the information for the entry dzura/dzuri (pp. 81-82) includes not only a photo to enrich the entry content but some valuable background contextualization of what the cultural significance of the hair tail is to both male and female members of the Raute community, made vivid through personal accounts. Many similar entries have lengthy discussions of the relevance of the lexeme in the broader communicative matrix it is used within.

The discussion of the entries of some of the grammatical elements included in the dictionary can at times strike one as odd. For example, -le or -li (pp. 136, 137) or ya/ya//ye (p. 196) are variably described as meaning 'have' or being modal verbs or imperfective or perfective verbs, but the examples given do not suggest such interpretations in some of the instances cited. So...