Lenguas en Contacto: El testimonio escrito.

• Author: Yakubovich, Ilya S.

Lenguas en Contacto: El testimonio escrito. Edited by PEDRO BADENAS DE LA PENA, SOFIA TORALLAS TOVAR, EUGENIO R. LUJAN, AND MARIA ANGELES GALLEGO. Madrid: CONSEJO SUPERIOR DE IN-VESTIGACIONES CIENTIFICAS, 2004. Pp. xx + 320. [euro]26 (paper).

The study of language contact represents a vigorous branch of modern linguistics which draws upon sociolinguistics and historical linguistics for its research methodology, but has independent aims and goals. It has received an enormous boost in the second half of the twentieth century as a result of the raised awareness of pidgins, Creoles, and partially restructured vernaculars, as well as the intensive study of modern moribund languages. The last decade has witnessed a number of publications reflecting the growing interest in contact linguistics on the part of philologists studying ancient languages. Bilingualism in Ancient Society, ed. J. N. Adams et al. (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002) focuses on contact phenomena in the Classical Mediterranean world, while Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures, ed. S. Sanders (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2005) tackles language coexistence in the ancient Near East. The volume under review, edited by a team of Spanish colleagues, represents a further example of this commendable trend.

The contribution of Ignacio Marquez Rowe addresses the linguistic status of Peripheral Akkadian. The author strongly objects to the widespread tendency to refer to the varieties of Akkadian used as a second language outside Mesopotamia as pidgins or bilingual mixed languages. He stresses that their deviant grammatical features arose as a result of imperfect second language acquisition in a school setting and states: "the Byblos and other Amarna material can and probably should be considered as examples of a faulty knowledge of Akkadian grammar" (p. 28). Unfortunately, the author does not contrast the types of errors that arise during the imperfect learning of spoken vs. written languages and thus fails to show the existence of a sharp boundary between the two types of contact-induced varieties. For a more sophisticated attempt at equating the imperfect acquisition of Akkadian by Canaanite scribes with alloglottography, see E. von Dassow, "Canaanite in Cuneiform," JAOS 124 (2004): 641-74.

The papers by Sofia Torallas Tovar and Chris H. Reintges discuss the contact-induced features of Coptic. The first author focuses on the dynamics of lexical interference between Greek and Egyptian, while...