The Dravidian Languages.

AuthorSteever, Sanford B.
PositionBook Review

The Dravidian Languages. By BHADRIRAJU KRISHNAMURTI. Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2003. Pp. xxvii + 545. $95.

The Dravidian Languages is the latest installment in the Cambridge Language Surveys. While synchronic descriptions and typological observations of the individual languages appear throughout, its backbone and first concern is historical and comparative. The book consists of eleven chapters: Introduction (1-47), Descriptive phonology (48-77), Writing systems (78-89), Historical and comparative phonology (90-178), Word formation (179-204), Nominals (205-76), The verb (207-387), Adjectives, adverbs and clitics (388-419), Syntax (420-69), Lexicon (470-88), and Conclusion (489-503). As a matter of full disclosure, this reviewer must state that he reviewed preliminary drafts of several chapters for the author (p. xix).

The book is a reference volume and may serve as a source book for comparative and typological studies of the Dravidian languages. Much of it is informed by the item-and-arrangement (I-A) method; accordingly, it contains extensive data, but the argumentation to link these data to linguistic generalizations varies in depth and detail from topic to topic. The volume contains the most extensive discussions of comparative lexicon and syntax found in any handbook of comparative Dravidian linguistics; however, its strong suit is clearly comparative phonology, reflecting both the author's own forte and numerous contributions. The descriptive phonology lists the autonomous phonemes for twenty-five languages but, consistent with its I-A approach, omits detailed information on phonological processes in each, presenting instead generalizations about phoneme inventories in the various subgroups: morphophonemics is treated in just four short paragraphs (pp. 60-61). While the text (p. 54) notes that Old Kannada, and by extension Modern Kannada, has both aspirated and unaspirated voiceless and voiced stop phonemes, the chart on p. 67 omits the two aspirated series. This gives the impression, contrary to standard analyses, that the members of the aspirated series are clusters of stop + h rather than the unit phonemes that Kannada phonotactics (and the writing system) presuppose.

One of the most exciting contributions of this book is section 4.5.2. which brings new statistical analysis to bear on the question whether Proto-Dravidian (PDr) had initial voiced stops. Against claims recently advanced by some...

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