Reviews Of Different Books

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276 REVIEWS A[ndras] Rona-Tas, Tibeto-Mongolica: the Tibetan loanwords of Monguor and the development of the archaic Tibetan dialects (= Indo-Iranian monographs, 7). 232 pp. Budapest, Akademiai Kiado; The Hague, Mouton, 1966. The extraordinary importance of this monograph for the study of Tibetan historical phonology, as well as for the history of the Mongol languages, has already been brought to the attention of scholars concerned with these subjects in a number of reviews; in addition to my own notice in Language, 44 (1968), 147-68, the following reviews have come to my attention (and there may well have been others that have escaped me): M. I. Vorobjeva-Desjatovskaja, Narody Azii i Afriki, 1966, 5, 189-92; R. K. Sprigg, BSOAS, 30 (1967), 216-17, G. Kara, Acta Orient. Hung., 20 (1967), 377b-81b. Furthermore, I have had the favor of a long personal communication from Professor Rona-Tas, dated Budapest 30th September, 1968, in which he has been good enough to comment at some length on a number of points that I raised in my review published in Language. It may, therefore, be appropriate to utilize this additional short notice of this important work in order to comment briefly upon some of the points raised in the reviews that have appeared, and also some of the items discussed by Professor Rona-Tas in his letter. Mme Vorobjeva-Desjatovskaja's review aims more at introducing the Russian reader to the contents of the monograph than at a critical appraisal of its contents; hence she does not go deeply into any points of detail. Nevertheless, in the course of summarizing the contents of the monograph, she does focus attention on one important matter that I must confess had escaped my attention until I saw it stressed in her review. This is the passage (pp. 187ff.) in which Rona-Tas deals with pitch and 'tone' in the modern Tibetan dialects. When he writes," [Y. R.) Chao (Love songs, p. 27) and Miller (Writing, p. 2) distinguished the pitch as a phonemic quality from tone, the first of which is the level of intonation, the second the sinking-rising or the change of the relative level of intonation", I am afraid he does not give a completely accurate view of what I attempted to do in my treatment of the suprasegmentals of modern spoken Tibetan, or, for that matter, an accurate account of what Y. R. Chao attempted to do in his pioneering study of the Lhasa language. Both of us were working in the same way, along what would now be generally considered hopelessly old-fashioned Bloomfield-Bloch-Trager lines of 'phonemics'; tone, pitch, movement up, movement down, anything that the voice did that 'was not 'obviously' a 'vowel or a 'consonant' was a 'suprasegmental'; and we grouped these 'suprasegmentals' into distinctive 'tones', or 'tonemes', according to the same body of methodological assumptions by means of which we grouped two or more 'phones' into 'phonemes'. Whether what we were doing was 'right' or 'wrong', and whether it should continue to be done that way today, would involve questions of methodology and problems in linguistic theory rather far removed from the interests of this journal, and - in these post-Chomsky days - probably outside the competence of the reviewer. But for the sake of the student who may one day wish to re-open the investigation of such matters, the point should be made -- and without the review of Mme VorobjevaDesjatovskaja the problem would most likely have continued to escape my attention - that, most regretfully, I find Rona-Tas' description of my attempts to 'phonemicize' the Tibetan suprasegmentals a little far from the mark. But I am sure that we would both agree that, in this point in the history of Tibetan studies, what we need above everything 1 "Studies in Spoken Tibetan, I: Phonemics", JAOS, 75 (1955), 46-51. 3 Y. R. Chao (Jaw Yuanrenn) and Yu Dawchyuan, Love songs of the sixth Dalai lama Tshangs-dbyangs-rgya-mtsho (= Academia Sinica, National Research Institute of History and Philology Monographs, Series A, No. 5) (Peiping, 1930).