Phonologies of Asia and Africa (Including the Caucasus). Two vols.

• Author: FOX, ISRAEL JOSHUA
• Position: Review

Phonologies of Asia and Africa (Including the Caucasus). Two vols. Edited by ALAN S. KAYE; with advice of PETER T. DANIELS. Winona Lake, Ind.: EISENBRAUNS, 1997. Pp. 1041 + maps. $119.50.

The Phonologies of Asia and Africa is a compilation of studies of languages chosen from a region extending from central Africa to the Caucasus. Volume one includes articles on Semitic (the more extensively covered family in the collection) and other Afro-Asiatic languages. Volume two includes articles on Asian Indo-European, Turkic, and Caucasian languages, and various unrelated languages.

The approaches taken to the phonologies are not uniform. This is necessary given the wide variation in attestation and current knowledge of the languages under review. The selection includes poorly. attested dead languages in a vowel-less script, such as Phoenician; better-attested dead languages in difficult scripts, such as Sumerian; well-attested and extensively studied dead languages with detailed phonetic scripts, such as Tiberian Hebrew; little-studied modern languages, such as Modern South Arabian; and well-studied modern languages, such as Hindi-Urdu. Each language, then, requires a different approach, and authors bring their expertise to each article. The juxtaposition of a variety of approaches is to the work's benefit, as it facilitates a comparison of linguistic methodologies. The wide range of these studies makes a detailed review of each article impossible, and only a small selection is discussed below.

"La phonologie des langues sudarabiques modernes," by A. Lonnet and M.-C. Simeone-Serelle (the only non-English offering), reports on important new fieldwork in this little-researched Semitic family. The Modem South Arabian languages play an important role in comparative Semitic philology, as they preserve most clearly certain Proto-Semitic features lost elsewhere: the lateral fricatives are the best known example; others include the verbal system and the consonants in the third-person pronouns. The MSA languages also play a pivotal role in the classificational debate over the extent of "South Semitic."

New contributions of this article include a more detailed dialectology, in which the limits of Mehri, Harsusi, Bathari, Hobyot, Jibbali, and Soqotri are defined, and the determination (p. 348) that s, a lateral fricative, is an emphatic and not merely a voiced unemphatic consonant, as T. M. Johnstone earlier claimed ("The Modern South Arabian Languages,"...