Die Sprache von Nisheygram im afghanischen Hindukusch.

• Author: SALOMON, RICHARD
• Position: Review

Die Sprache von Nisheygram im afghanischen Hindukusch. By ALMUTH DEGENER. Neuindische Studien, vol. 14. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 1998. Pp. ix + 588. DM 114.

The Nuristani (formerly known as Kafiri) languages of the isolated valleys of northeastern Afghanistan have long fascinated linguists on account of their archaic character and apparent status as an independent branch of the Indo-Iranian protofamily. But the documentation of the Nuristani languages and dialects has been and continues to be spotty and insufficient, due for the most part to the ongoing difficulty, both geographical and political, of gaining access to Nuristan. Since the pioneering field research and publications of Georg Morgenstierne beginning in the 1920s, few linguists have succeeded in carrying out fieldwork in Nuristan, and even fewer have published their results in any comprehensive form. One of the few successors to Morgenstierne's ground-breaking efforts is Georg Buddruss, and the present volume is based entirely on field notes made by him in Nisheygram and Kabul in 1969 and 1970 (pp. vii-ix, 19), which have been expertly presented and analyzed by his student Almuth Degener.

The speech of the village of Nishey, or Nisey-ala as it is referred to by its own speakers, is a dialect of the language which has hitherto been referred to in scholarly literature as Waigali, but which is, more strictly speaking, a group of dialects spoken in the Waigal Valley in southeastern Nuristan (pp. 2-3). The text materials presented here by Degener are described by Buddruss in his foreward as "die ... bisher umfangreichste Sammlung von Texten in einer Nuristani-Sprache" (p. ix), and there can be no doubt that this volume will constitute a major advance in the field of Nuristani linguistics. The book consists of three main parts: a detailed grammatical analysis; a compilation of forty-three texts transcribed by Buddruss from oral recitations, together with German translations; and a complete and painstakingly documented glossary.

The grammatical analysis is straightforward and pragmatic; in the author's own words, "[d]ie Darstellung der Grammatik dient allein dem Zweck, eine wenig bekannte Sprache zuganglicher zu machen. Sie arbeitet mit sprachwissentschaftlichen Methoden, ohne sich auf eine bestimmte Schule festlegen oder eine grammatische Theorie unterstutzen zu wollen" (p. 20). The happy result is that we have a practical yet linguistically sophisticated presentation, in which...