Gurage Studies: Collected Articles.

• Author: Hudson, Grover

This book, a reprinting of fifty-five of Leslau's articles on the Semitic Gurage languages of Ethiopia, is, perhaps, after his 1979 Etymological Dictionary of Gurage (reviewed in this journal: 102.2 [1982]), his most valuable work to date. The articles, which appeared between 1950 and 1985 are reproduced in their original form. There is an introduction, five grammatical sketches (a detailed phonological overview of all the languages and general grammatical sketches of four of them), sixteen articles on Gurage languages in general, eighteen on aspects of particular languages, and sixteen dealing with lexical and other topics of Ethiopian linguistics in which Gurage languages figure prominently. There is a quite thorough index. Many of the fifty-five articles appeared in little-available journals and collections, and, in the absence of such a complement to the Etymological Dictionary, this volume provides an interim Gurage comparative grammar. Some of the articles could have used some updating annotation, and the introduction might helpfully have provided some contextualizing of the articles, and related them to one another.

The introduction, however, provides very colorful and enjoyable autobiographical background, including a charming account of what linguistic fieldwork was like in Ethiopia in 1946. Probably Professor Leslau did not intend one clear impression left by this account, namely, his long and great affection for the country and people of Ethiopia.

The so-called Gurage languages include some twelve to fifteen recognized varieties, within which six or seven languages and/or dialect clusters may be distinguished, in three distinct groups - roughly, northern (of which Soddo is the best documented) western (Chaha he best documented), and eastern (which includes the well-documented language Harari, not traditionally considered a Gurage language). All but Harari are spoken in a less than thousand-square-smile area of south-central Ethiopia about a hundred miles southwest of Addis Ababa. Eastern Gurage languages are more divergent from western and northern Gurage languages than, for example, Amharic is from Tigrinya, so those who know Ethiopian Semitic languages from these two, or Ge ez, will misunderstand the degree of diversification and richness of this Semitic-speaking region. Most of the Gurage peoples share ensete culture with their neighboring Cushitic and Omotic groups (Kambata, Janjero, etc.); domestic life focused around the...