William J. Gedney's Concise Saek-English English-Saek Lexicon.

• Author: Matisoff, James A.
• Position: Book review

William J. Gedney's Concise Saek-English English-Saek Lexicon. Edited with an introduction by THOMAS JOHN HUDAK. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication, no. 37. Honolulu: UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I PRESS, 2010. Pp. ix + 252. $35.

William J. Gedney (1915-1999) was the twentiethcentury's leading American authority on Tai languages and dialects. After his retirement in 1980, several of his students collaborated with him in preparing for publication the voluminous fieldnotes he had collected all over Thailand in the 1950's and '60's. Hudak has played a key role in this effort, helping to produce detailed treatises on the Lungming dialect (1991), on Tai Lue (1996), and on Saek itself; William J. Gedney's The Sack Language: Glossaries, Texts, and Translations (Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asia. Ann Arbor: Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies, University of Michigan [1993]). The present volume is a reworking of that 1993 study, which is now out of print.

The Saek dialect (the people's autonym is threeks) is now spoken in a couple of villages in Nakorn Pathom province of Thailand, right on the border with Laos, and in a few villages on the Laotian side as well. It was first noticed by French travelers and missionaries in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, and early opinion placed it erroneously in the Mon-Khmer family, although the French comparativist Andre-Georges Haudricourt, in a series of articles beginning in 1958, soon demonstrated that Saek is a Tai dialect--more specifically, and surprisingly given its geographic location, that it is a member of the Northern Tai dialect group.

Gedney's meticulously recorded data on Saek, generously made available to his fellow scholars via personal communications for decades, have nourished subsequent research, including Paul K. Bene-dict's Austro-Tai Language and Culture (1975; henceforth ATLC) and Fang Kuei Li's A Handbook of Comparative Tai (1977; henceforth HCT). Benedict used certain key Saek forms to buttress his case for a genetic relationship between Tai and Austronesian, e.g., pra 'eye' (ATLC 283), pra:i 'die' (269), ?blian 'moon' (423). Most recently, Lud Yongxian has published "An Introduction to the Saek Dialect" (in Chinese: Slujiii-hua de jieshao, Minzd Yliwin 2009.5: 60-81), based largely on the data in Gedney 1993.

Tai specialists have been fascinated by Sack for several reasons, first of all because of its geographical displacement southward from the Northern Tai...