Reviews Of Different Books

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REVIEWS 277 else is not additional theoretical or analytic work on the pitifully small amount of available data, but new field-work with native speakers, and the accumulation and publication of new linguistic data, covering every facet of the language, the tones (or 'pitches', or whatever) included. The review by R. K. Sprigg is little more than a description of the contents of the monograph, and raises no interesting points. His insistence that "W(ritten) T(ibetan) Ih- is and presumably always has been" a digraph for a voiceless [1] (p. 217b) is no doubt correct enough, and Rona-Tas' postulation of a shift O(ld) Tibetan) Ih-> hl(p. 128) should probably be omitted from a history of Tibetan phonology, but the point is minor, and more a question of the symbols and notation we use for our formulations than it is a problem in the history of the language. Interestingly enough, several of the points in Rona-Tas' monograph that I thought it worthwhile to comment upon in some detail in my 1968 review were also signaled out for special attention in the review by G. Kara that appeared the year earlier; it is perhaps needless to add that the two notices were, of course, prepared independently of each other. Thus, Kara comments especially upon Rona-Tas' etymologies #26 and #29, both of which also attracted my attention (cf. my p. 163). What Kara has to say about #26 is important, and should be taken into consideration in any future study of the problems presented by this etymology; it still seems to me that the possible effect of a Chinese intermediary form on the history of the lexical items involved should be given further consideration. In the case of #29, I am afraid that honesty now compels me to say that neither my comments in my 1968 review, nor Kara's remarks, actually shed much light on this still vexing etymology. Another item of fortuitous coincidence between our two reviews is to be found in the treatment of the developments of original Tibetan initial n- (Rona-Tas, p. 123-4; Kara, p. 381a; Miller, p. 165). In this connection, I now wonder if, once again, an intermediate stage of linguistic history involving loans through and from Chinese might not with profit be invoked in order to throw some light on those Tibetan dialects in which original initial n-appears to have shifted to initial zero (though, as I pointed out in my review, the Central Tibetan form for 'camel' is not one of these). Here I particularly have in mind the zero-initial forms of modern Mandarin. "This initial, in the majority-type pronunciation, does have a slight consonantal-type obstruction in the form of a frictionless velar or uvular voiced continuant... A (large) minority of speakers use a glottal stop or a pure vocalic beginning for all words with a zero initial. A very small minority of speakers begin such words with a consonantal ng-..." This is, of course, the feature of modern Chinese pronunciation that accounts for the *continental Sinological transcription of the syllables that are, for Wade-Giles, an, as ngan (Tch'ang-ngan, etc.). Middle Chinese had both initial glottal stop and initial n-, as well as initial zero (what Karlgren calls 'smooth vocalic ingress'), but in the history of the forms involved, there has been much analogic shifting back and forth among these categories. Perhaps we have here to deal with an areal feature, borrowed from one language family into another language family, unrelated but contiguous; or perhaps it was simply the forms that were borrowed, and re-borrowed. Finally, it is interesting to note that Rona-Tas' remarks on the semivowel u attracted Kara's attention (pp. 380b-381a) as they did my own, and with good reason, since they are important, and deal with a critical feature in the historic phonology of Tibetan as well as of Mongol (I return to this point shortly below). : Yuen Ren Chao, A grammar of spoken Chinese (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965), pp. 26-7. 4 Berhard Karlgren, Grammata Serica (Stockholm, 1940), p. 49.