 Book Reviews / Indo-Iranian Journal  () – Windfuhr, Gernot (Ed.), e Iranian Languages [Routledge Language Fam- ily Series] (London/New York: Routledge, ), lxxvi +  pp., ., ISBN     .

Another jewel has been added to the well-known Routledge language fam- ily series. e present volume contains sixteen chapters packed with infor- mation on all the major Iranian languages of the past and the present, writ- ten by seventeen specialized linguists. It will without any doubt become a standard reference work for the Iranian languages as a whole. e only general criticism that I will raise is that the type is very small, but one can have an understanding for the publisher’s wish to restrict this edition to a single volume. As the introduction states, the book “aims to present the typologi- cal dynamics of the Iranian languages through time and space.” A simi- lar volume on the Iranian languages appeared in , the Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum edited by Rüdiger Schmitt, which focused on the phonology and morphology of the Iranian languages. e present sur- vey sets itself the task of addressing all linguistic levels, including “phrase, clause, and sentence level syntax, and pragmatic aspects”. It also provides very short sample texts with interlinear translations and comments for each language. e Iranian Languages can therefore be seen as complementary to CLI. e contents are the following. Gernot Windfuhr has written the intro- duction (pp. –) and ‘Dialectology and Topics’ (–) of the Iranian languages. Prods Oktor Skjærvø has contributed two long articles, on ‘Old Iranian’ (–) and on ‘Middle West Iranian’ (–). e other Middle Iranian languages which receive their own chapter are ‘Sog- dian’ by Yutaka Yoshida (–), ‘Khwarezmian’ by Desmond Durkin- Meisterernst (–), and ‘Khotanese and Tumshuqese’ by the late Ronald E. Emmerick (–). ere is no chapter on Bactrian. e longest chapter on Modern Iranian is ‘Persian and Tajik’ by Gernot Wind- fuhr and John R. Perry (–). e other chapters concern ‘Zazaki’ by Ludwig Paul (–), ‘Kurdish’ by Ernest N. McCarus (–), ‘Balochi’ by Carina Jahani and Agnes Korn (–), ‘Parachi’ by Charles M. Kieffer (–), ‘Pashto’ by Barbara Robson and the late Habibul- lah Tegey (–), ‘e Pamir languages’ by Joy I. Edelman and Leila R. Dodykhudoeva (–), ‘Shugni’ by the same authors (–), and finally ‘Wakhi’ by Elena Bashir (–). e main language miss- ing from this collection is Ossetic. Unlike in Schmitt , the various

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden,  DOI: 10.1163/001972412X620312 Book Reviews / Indo-Iranian Journal  () –  dialects and minor languages of western, central and southeastern Iran are not separately discussed. A short index on subject concludes the volume. In this review I will only dwell on the first two chapters. In Dialectology and Topics, Windfuhr provides a very useful overview of morphological and syntactic isoglosses across the Iranian speech area, such as those for gender and animacy, verbal tense-aspect systems, word-order typology, the ergative construction, and object marking. Phonological differences between the Modern Iranian languages are used to distinguish West Iranian from East Iranian languages, with further subdivisions into North-West and South-West. Windfuhr (p. ) claims that “the basic dialect division of the Iranian languages today goes back to the earliest stages of Iranian.” It is of course true that some of the modern isoglosses represent developments of , years ago, but it is far from certain that a division between eastern and western Iranian was a meaningful distinction in the Old Iranian period. Table . displays Avestan as a North-West Iranian language, but in fact the position of Avestan cannot be determined (Kellens : ). In table ., third row, third column, read “θr” instead of “hr” as the Avestan reflex of IIr. *tr. e chapter on Old Iranian by Prods Oktor Skjærvø is the longest in the volume. It gives a complete, joint grammatical description of Avestan and Old Persian, as was done e.g. by Bartholomae – (but without syntax). e phonology and morphology are treated in less detail here than e.g. in Hoffmann & Forssman , but a number of recent insights (from between  and ) have been taken aboard. A full-fledged Avestan phonology was published by Skjærvø b. e most important aspect of his contribution to the present volume is its syntax. Here is the number of pages devoted to each subsection: introduction , phonology , morphology , syntax , lexis , stylistics . e only other grammar which deals with syntax in similar detail is Reichelt  (with  out of  pages devoted to syntax), that is, a book which appeared exactly one hundred years earlier! Many of the syntactic descriptions by Skjærvø have been known to the field for around a decade from the different Avestan and Old Persian course materials which the author has kindly put at the general disposal on his website, www.fas.harvard.edu/~iranian/. To have them all collected in a single edition is a great advantage. ere is little point in summarizing the contents of this excellent work. Here is a small list of corrections and of remarks on matters in which I differ of opinion with the author: