Book reviews / Рецензии

Kirill Babaev Russian State University for the Humanities In Hot Pursuit of Language in Prehistory. Essays in the four fields of anthropology. In honor of Harold Crane Fleming. By John D. Bengtson (ed.) Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2008. XXIV + 476 pp.

The volume under discussion was published in hon- Genetics and genogeography have recently become our of Harold Crane Fleming, a distinguished veteran an important part of prehistoric studies, and pioneer- anthropologist with deep specialisation in linguistics ing experiments of L. Cavalli-Sforza (1991) and his and language prehistory. His particular passion in this followers to link genetic data with cultures, ethnicities domain have been African languages, on which he and languages are gaining substantial popularity. One published a great number of significant papers fol- of them is carried out in Shomarka Omar Keita’s arti- lowing his long term trips to Ethiopia, working cle “Geography, selected Afro-Asiatic families, and Y- mostly, though not exclusively, with Chadic, Omotic chromosome lineage variation: an exploration in lin- and Cushitic languages. Through his studies, Harold guistics and phylogeography”. The author deals with Fleming has always emphasised that only a complex Y-chromosome genetic data of various ethnic groups interdisciplinary approach can lead us to uncover the of Afro-Asiatic (or Afrasian) language speakers. As it prehistory of humankind — a task he has always been turns out, many of the ones that are located in Africa working upon in person. belong to the same haplogroups — which, therefore, The book is a solid attempt to vindicate this very may confirm their common origins. The author claims approach. It contains a collection of articles written by to find the same traces in Semitic data to back the the- specialists in various fields of anthropological studies ory of the African origins of Afrasians; however, this — including genetics, archaeology, linguistics, cul- does not seem evident. There are further doubts re- tural studies and human biology. The lifetime idea of garding links with Berber genetic data, which, ac- Harold Fleming, therefore, is well reflected here: to cording to earlier discoveries, lies closer to Eurasian bring together people who can answer questions on stocks than to African ones. deep human past multiplying knowledge of several The article by Christy Turner named “A dental an- interconnected disciplines and creating a synergy to thropological hypothesis relating to the ethnogenesis, boost the progress. A great endeavour, indeed. origin, and antiquity of the Afro-Asiatic language The collected papers are divided into five major family: peopling of the Eurasian-S.Asian triangle IV” blocks in an attempt to follow the disciplinary princi- considers traits of dental morphology of Homo ple: African Peoples; African Languages (synchronic sapiens fossils to resolve the same problem: the origi- studies); African Languages (classification and pre- nal homeland of Afrasian language speakers. Con- history); Languages of Eurasia, Oceania, and the trary to the previous author, the author supports the Americas; and Human and Language Origins. How- idea of Near Eastern origins of Afrasians, namely the ever, some inconsistencies may be noticed: papers on Natuf archaeological culture of the region. In the light genetics are placed into the first and final sections, of the latest reports (Militarev 2009), this relation while issues of mythology are discussed in parts I and seems promising. Sadly, the author’s phrase ‘the hy- IV. This is probably done on purpose, to strengthen pothesis of non-African origins of Afro-Asiatic finds the impression that all humanities are interrelated and support in the fact that the Semitic branch ... is the cannot be easily classified. most important in terms of number of speakers’ (p. 18) We will go through the materials one by one in the does not withstand serious criticism. order they are presented, focusing more on linguistic Daniel McCall describes the phenomenon of the studies as the present Journal implies. calendar 7-day week in the culture of ancient civilisa-

Journal of Language Relationship • Вопросы языкового родства • 2 (2009) • Pp. 139–174 Book reviews / Рецензии tions in his “African weeks”. He turns to a well- Unfortunately, no examples are presented to support known parallel between the 7-day week in the ancient the reconstructions, which are mostly taken from ear- Mediterranean, originating from Babylon, and the lier works of the author. The author concludes that same tradition among the Akan people of Ghana. An there was a common phonetic innovation in East and amazing migration of the cultural custom is suggested South Cushitic, and another one common for Beja and by the author to have emerged due to the gold cara- South Cushitic. The latter, according to the author, van trade across Sahara which lasted for thousands of may suggest a Beja-South Cushitic node in the internal years between the Mediterranean and the ‘Gold classification of the family. Coast’, the homeland of the Akan. The author analy- The issues of phonetic and morphological devel- ses possible correspondences in the names of the opment in Chadic languages are discussed in Herr- weekdays between European cultures and this remote mann Jungraithmayr’s “Erosion in Chadic”. He de- African one. scribes a very intriguing, but still poorly studied, issue “Gender distinction and affirmative copula clauses of the difference in development speed between vari- in Zargulla” by Azeb Amha is the first article of Part II ous languages of the same stock. Indeed, some lan- of the book. It provides an insight into the problem of guages of the group / family always seem more pro- gender marking in one of the Omotic languages: sur- gressive, while others are rather conservative. The prisingly, the old opposition of masculine and femi- process of language change and proto-language sys- nine is reinterpreted as neutral / emotional shading of tem destruction is called erosion by the author, who the copula. Typologically, this kind of development is then analyses it for Chadic. Based on this criterion, he a rare case, worth being studied on a wider range of proposes to divide the languages of the family into data, and a nice example of how the Afrasian gender three basic groups: ‘Old Chadic’, preserving much of system has eroded in Omotic. Proto-Chadic in its phonetics and morphology; ‘Mid- Another synchronic study is contained in “Riddling dle Chadic’, showing significant shifts; and ‘New in Gidole” by Paul Black, who finds and classifies Chadic’, the most progressive and innovative lan- rules of building popular riddles in two East Cushitic guages which have reduced or dropped much of their languages of Ethiopia: Gidole and Konso. prehistoric shape. It is interesting to see that some The longest paper of the volume, “A lexicostatisti- languages may be archaic in preserving vowels and cal comparison of Omotic languages”, is written by progressive in consonantism, or vice versa. The issue Václav Blažek; it opens the third part of the book. This clearly deserves deeper research, with a discussion of is a serious and detailed analysis of the subject, con- the reasons for different rates of language change taining both a retrospective review of the existing re- which, in our opinion, should include external lan- constructions of Proto-Omotic and the author’s own guage contacts as one of the main drivers of the lan- estimates. Blažek adduces two of the most recently guage change. established and reliable systems of phonetic corre- Philippe Bürgisser (“On Kunama ukunkula “elbow” spondences between the Omotic languages (one by L. and its proposed cognates”) not only addresses the Bender and the other by M. Lamberti & R. Sottile), as etymology of this body part lexeme in one of the Nilo- well as the language tree diagrams of Omotic built by Saharan languages, but also gives some lexical corre- H. Fleming and L. Bender. Based on the Swadesh 100- spondences to strengthen the possible relations be- word lists for fourty Omotic dialects, the author sug- tween Nilo-Saharan and two isolate languages of the gests his own version of the language diffusion chart, region, Shabo and Kadu. Further on, pros and contras which amends Bender’s tree in some details without of the two existing Proto-Nilo-Saharan reconstructions changing the whole picture. A good corpus of recon- (by L. Bender and C. Ehret, respectively) are analysed. structed Proto-Omotic roots for the Swadesh list is en- The author’s view is that Bender’s sound correspon- closed. The author concludes that the breakup of the dences are poorly worked out, and that both versions Proto-Omotic language community took place ca. are not strict enough due to far-fetched semantics, 7,000 years ago. which is entirely true. However, one of the author's Christopher Ehret's contribution to the volume is further statements — ‘I don’t share Ehret’s faith in the entitled “The primary branches of Cushitic: seriating existence of exceptionless sound laws’ — is something the diagnosis sound change rules”. The basis of the that we can hardly accept. Exceptionless sound laws study is the comparison of the reconstructed phone- are not a matter of faith, but rather a basic principle of mic systems of Proto-Cushitic and its core branches: comparative linguistics; observed deviations from a common innovations are considered to reflect the postulated rule are usually due to other rules, some- structure of the proto-language’s dialectal diffusion. times still waiting to be discovered.

140 J. D. BENGTSON (ed.). In Hot Pursuit of Language in Prehistory

“The problem of pan-African roots” by Roger given according to their time depth. The author is re- Blench is a collection of lexical comparisons between luctant to admit Altaic as a family of languages, but the four language macrofamilies of the continent mentions that some arguments in favour of the made by the author in the recent years. Blench has de- Nostratic (Eurasiatic) and Ural-Altaic theories are ‘dif- fended the Niger-Saharan hypothesis of genetic rela- ficult to take distance from’. The question, as Jan- tions between the two sub-Saharan African language hunen rightly puts it, is the method. The Etymological families, and the extension of this analysis towards dictionary of the Altaic languages (EDAL 2003) con- pan-African lexical correspondences seems logical. tains almost 3,000 items, while for Proto-Uralic no However, we should be cautious about the material more than 200 roots can be recognised. The reason is presented: the number of languages of Africa is so the assumption that a word can only be considered huge (over 1,500 in Niger-Congo alone) that finding a Proto-Uralic if it is found in both Fenno-Ugric and ‘suitable’ shape of word with a close semantic mean- Samoyedic languages, though the latter are quite ing, as Blench does, may not seem reliable. To avoid scarce in number. However, the binary approach to mere coincidences, one needs to compare proto- Indo-European (or Indo-Hittite) as falling into two language forms (carefully reconstructed in advance) major nodes of Anatolian and Narrow Indo-European rather than data from one or two languages of a fam- will substantially decrease the number of Proto-Indo- ily. Otherwise, the studies of deep (and global) ety- Hittite roots. Will that make all the remaining roots of mologies may be easily discredited from a methodo- Pokorny not Proto-Indo-European? logical standpoint. John Bengtson, the Editor of the volume, presents a Part IV of the book opnes with an excellent paper well-structured analysis of the recent advances in the by Allan Bomhard, “Some thoughts on the Proto- long-range studies of the two hypothetical macrofa- Indo-European cardinal numbers”, that will be inter- milies of Eurasia: Nostratic (Eurasiatic) and Dene- esting for everyone familiar with the Indo-European Caucasian (“The languages of Northern Eurasia: in- reconstructions. It appears that, although the issue has ference to the best explanation”). It is the typological already been studied for two centuries, there is still and phonetic differences between these families that room to grow. Bomhard recalls and supports some are the subject of the paper, and a summary chart is earlier hypotheses on the origins of the numerals, e. g., given following the analysis. The author concludes that he backs the original meaning ‘four’ for the root a binary scheme of the deep prehistoric language diver- *Hok’to­, whose dual form *Hok’tō is commonly known sification in Eurasia is the best explanation to date. to have meant ‘eight’. He also considers the original The work by Michael Witzel, called “Slaying the Indo-European word for ‘two’ to have been *do­, with dragon across Eurasia”, concentrates on the mytho- Anatolian evidence, and explains the traditional logical story widespread in both the Old and the New *duwo- / *dwō as a Caucasian loanword. Thus he is able Worlds: the evil dragon being killed by the hero. The to interpret Indo-European *de-kt ‘ten’ as < value of mythology for reconstructing human prehis- ‘two-hands’. At the same time, there is no explanation tory has always been high for Indo-Europeanists in the paper for what particular reasons the Proto- (Puhvel 1993; Mallory 1991), and the dragon story, in Indo-Europeans (including Proto-Anatolians, if we re- particular, was also under close scrutiny (Watkins call Luwian tuwa- ‘two’) needed another word for 2001). Witzel goes further to compare similar images ‘two’, if they already had one. Also, why is the ‘Cau- and myths about dragon slaying from China, India, casian’ *dwo- so similar in phonetic shape with the Egypt, Mesopotamia, Japan etc., and makes compari- original **do-? It would be much more logical to sup- sons with Maya (Kekchi) mythology as well, pro- port another theory here (Gamkrelidze & Ivanov longing and deepening the comparison on both the 1984), namely, that the initial sound of Indo-European cultural and the linguistic level. *dwo- was actually a kind of a labiodental phoneme re- One of the early scholars dealing in long-range lan- flected as *d- (Irish dó), *dw- (Latin bis ‘twice’) and *w- guage comparison, Alfredo Trombetti, is paid homage (Tocharian A wu) depending on the particular Indo- in the article by Jonathan Morris (“Trombetti: the fore- European dialect. In this case, borrowing of this form father of Indo-Pacific”). The author reestimates Trom- into Caucasian sources, such as Proto-Circassian betti’s works dedicated to the issues of genetic rela- *t’q’wa mentioned by Bomhard, would be no surprise. tionship between Andamanese, New Guinean and Juha Janhunen’s “Some Old World experience of Australian languages, called the Indo-Pacific hypothe- linguistic dating” deals with long-range comparison sis. Both Trombetti and his fellow countryman Ric- hypotheses of the language families of Northern Eura- cardo Gatti compiled a large number of proposed sia. The classification of Eurasian proto-languages is cognates, many of which are quoted in the paper.

141 Book reviews / Рецензии

More lexical items are presented from Trombetti’s in- that time, the society was well organised with the use teresting 1923 work on possible correspondences be- of language. This ‘archaeology of language’, as the tween Dravidian and Australian. author puts it, is, without a doubt, an important area Jane Hill, in her “Otomanguean loan words in for further investigation. Proto-Uto-Aztecan maize vocabulary” touches upon The origins of human language are further re- the issue of maize domestication in North America garded in the works of George van Driem (“The origin and Mesoamerica and proposes that the terms for its of language”) and Paul Whitehouse (“Some specula- cultivation in Proto-Uto-Aztecan were actually bor- tions on the evolution of language, and on the lan- rowed from neighbouring Otomanguean. One of the guage of evolution”). The former presents his forth- more convincing arguments is built around the initial coming monograph ‘The Language Organism’ de- consonant alternations in Uto-Aztecan lexical items, an scribing the theory of language origins and evolution isolated phenomenon in this family, yet quite produc- through history. A similar problem is raised by P. tive in and typical of Otomanguean. Some observations Whitehouse: what did early languages look like? The are made on the possible homeland for Uto-Aztecan. author makes a few decent comparisons with child lan- The article by Larry Lepionka (“Historical inter- guage, probably the best model for studying the early pretations of geographical distributions of Amerind developments of human language as a whole. There is subfamilies”) gives a detailed description of prehis- also an attempt to build a chronology of language de- toric migrations of language families which arose after velopment, definitely a great endeavour itself. the breakup of the Proto-Amerind language commu- Two authors, Alain Matthey de l’Etang and Pierre nity. The basic classification of Amerind, upon which Bancel, share authorship of the two last articles of the the author is relying, is presented in (Ruhlen 1987) volume. They concentrate on proposed global ety- following the late Joseph Greenberg. Various geo- mologies of the two kinship terms, mama and papa, graphical, social and historical typologies are drawn and their derivatives. There are two well known views upon to reconstruct the prehistory of the people’s dis- on their origins, and most mainstream linguists con- solution over the vast territory of the American conti- sider them banal nursery terms, the easiest a baby can nent, which makes the paper a good example of inter- pronounce when acquiring speech. However, the hy- disciplinary synergy advocated in this volume. pothesis of their ancient origin in the human proto- Stephen Zegura, in his “Current topics in human language is also widely discussed (Bengtson & Ruhlen evolutionary genetics”, emphasises the most actual 1994). The second article, “The millennial persistence trends in modern genetics, including the origins and of Indo-European and Eurasiatic pronouns and the geographic migrations of early Homo Sapiens, the origin of nominals”, attempts to derive the personal chimpanzee connection, and the origins of human pronominal roots widespread in Northern Eurasia, language. namely *mV- ‘I’ and *tV- ‘thou’, from these very pre- The last topic is also the subject of the contribution historic kinship terms. This raises doubts, and not by Philip Lieberman (“A wild 50,000-year ride”), who only because of the lack of comparative linguistic evi- deals with the development of speech anatomy of dence presented, but also from a typological point of Homo sapiens. He names a collection of features view. Such an origin of the pronominal paradigm which allowed the human being to pronounce basic (from lexemes meaning ‘father’ and ‘mother’) is never vowel sounds, and notices that the earliest recorded found in the world’s languages, though we may find signs of the ability to pronounce vowels like [a], [i] derivatives of sibling terms used as polite pronouns in and [u] go back to nearly 50,000 years back, but not some Asian tongues, cf. Vietnamese anh ‘thou’ < ‘elder earlier. So, this seems a natural chronological bound- brother’, etc. (Babaev 2009). Still, the claim of the an- ary for long-range comparative linguistics as it finds cient Nostratic (Eurasiatic) origins of the two men- itself at the very end (or, rather, the beginning) of the tioned personal pronouns is beyond any doubt (Ba- road to the prehistory of language. baev 2008). Another view on this issue is contained in Ofer Bar- Overall, the collection of articles we have reviewed Yosef’s article “Can Paleolithic stone artifacts serve as seems to have achieved its goal: to demonstrate a syn- evidence for prehistoric language?” This is a view ergetic effect of interdisciplinary approach for the re- from the archaeological standpoint, and it analyses the search of the human past. This display of interdisci- level of mutual comprehension within human society plinary knowledge is all the more impressive if its in the Paleolithic era. The author suggests that the presentation is unified by being dedicated to a single methods of stonework and similar techniques used to person who has devoted his life to the study of human draw similar patterns on stone may confirm that, by prehistory — Harold Fleming.

142 J. D. BENGTSON (ed.). In Hot Pursuit of Language in Prehistory

References

Bengtson & Ruhlen 1994 — BENGTSON, John & RUHLEN, Merritt. Global Etymologies // RUHLEN, Merritt (ed.), On the Origin of Languages. Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pp. 277–336. Cavalli-Sforza 1991 — CAVALLI-SFORZA, Luigi. Genes, peoples and languages // Scientific American 1991; 265: 5: pp. 104–10. Mallory 1991 — MALLORY, J.P. In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth. New York: Thames & Hudson. Puhvel 1993 — PUHVEL, Jaan. Comparative Mythology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ruhlen 1987 — RUHLEN, Merritt. A Guide to the World’s Languages. Vol. 1: Classification. Stanford: Stanford Univer- sity Press. EDAL — STAROSTIN, Sergei, DYBO, Anna & MUDRAK, Oleg. An Etymological Dictionary of Altaic Languages. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Watkins 2001 — WATKINS, Calvert. How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press. Babaev 2008 — БАБАЕВ К.В. Происхождение индоевропейских показателей лица. Исторический анализ и данные внешнего сравнения. Москва—Калуга: «Эйдос». [BABAEV, Kirill. Origins of Indo-European person marking. A Historical Analysis and External Comparison Data. Moscow—Kaluga: Eidos] Babaev 2009 — БАБАЕВ К.В. О происхождении личных местоимений в языках мира // Вопросы языкознания, № 4. В печати. [BABAEV, Kirill. On the Origins of Personal Pronouns in the World’s Languages // Voprosy Ya- zykoznaniya. Vol. 4, in press.] Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1984 — ГАМКРЕЛИДЗЕ Т.В., ИВАНОВ В.В. Индоевропейский язык и индоевропейцы. Москва, 1984. [GAMKRELIDZE, Tamaz & IVANOV, Vyacheslav. The Indo-European Language and the Indo-Europeans. Moscow.] Militarev 2009 — МИЛИТАРЁВ А.Ю. Картина жизни неолитического человека и общества в Передней Азии по праафразийской лексике. Доклад на 4-ых Старостинских чтениях. Москва, РГГУ, март 2009. [MILITA- REV, Alexander. 2009. The picture of life of the Neolithic man and society in the Near East apud Afrasian lexi- con. Reported at the 4th Starostin Conference. Moscow: RSUH, March 2009]

143