Reviews Of Different Books

Page 45

REVIEWS 291 On p. 427 Zide devotes half a page to this reviewer's paper on "Consonant variation in Munda", which cannot be passed by without some comment. The passage begins with the words: "Kuiper's paper on consonant variation in Munda has a typological burden and follows up earlier work of his own and of other Dutch scholars, e.g. Gonda on Austronesian. He questions the applicability of the comparative method ... so that clean-cut reconstructions cannot be made, as they presumably can be made for IndoEuropean. Kuiper provides a large corpus of variant forms in Munda, and in discussing them rejects such standard explanations for the variation as dialect mixture. In my opinion the variants he cites probably come from a variety of sources: conditioned changes (e.g. consonant cluster simplification), dialect mixture, and expressive derivation..." With regard to this passage I should like to make the following comments: (1) the main object of the paper, which was presented to a Conference on Indo-Pacific linguistics, was simply to point out the existence of a problem that deserves to be studied because it constitutes a serious difficulty in comparative studies. The explanation of expressive deformation had been adopted (as was clearly stated) from Pinnow. Still, the main purport of the paper was not to propose an explanation but to present material, a point that Zide apparently missed. The limited value of material culled from dictionaries and second-rate grammars was obvious. (2) Whether or not one chooses to call the paper typological, anyway, it cannot be said to follow up earlier work of my own since I clearly dissociated myself from my earlier publications as far as the interpretation of the material was concerned. Nor am I aware of any connection between this paper and studies of other Dutch scholars". The paper does definitely not reflect a national habit of advocating unorthodox views. (3) I did definitely not question the applicability of the comparative method in general. On the contrary, it was pointed out that for a large portion of the vocabulary this method does hold good but that only a certain sector of it had to be put apart, a fact that had been fully recognized by Pinnow, p. 21. (4) Zide's words to the effect that clear-cut reconstructions "presumably can be made for Indo-European" are only intelligible to me if they express a doubt on his part as to the applicability of the classical method of historical reconstruction even to Indo-European. It is true that, ever since the nineteenth century, some scholars have been aware of the fact that etymological word-studies in Indo-European often present more intricate problems of phonemic correspondences than might be guessed from the exposition of these correspondences in the current handbooks. (See, e.g., the discussion, with references, in Mnemes charin, Gedenkschrift Paul Kretschmer, I (1956), p. 222f.). The fact that Indo-European comparative linguistics has nevertheless become the model for comparative studies in general is probably to be attributed to the circumstance that the reconstructed proto-Indo-European was the language of a rigidly organized "Herrenschicht" and as such, for sociological reasons, different from the language of jungle tribes. G. Fortune's lecture on Ideophones in Shona (London, 1962) is revealing for the kind of transformation, words can undergo in certain societies, and more particularly for the circumstances and the way in which this may happen. For these phenomena in the Austroasiatic area see, besides Pinnow, Kharia-Sprache, p. 20 ff., also J. A. Gorgonjev, Grammatika khmerskogo jazyka (Moskva, 1966), p. 69ff. and David Stampe, IJAL, 32 (1966), p. 397. The term "expressive" is only a rough indication of this phenomenon. (5) On p. 414 Zide reports on Pinnow's listing "the regular and semi-regular correspondences", thereby implicitly accepting the inapplicability of the traditional comparative method to part of the lexical material -- a fact which Pinnow had correctly noted. By accepting the existence of "semi-regular correspondences", however, one has returned to the nineteenth-century theory of sporadic sound-laws, which amounts to denying the possibility of a scientific treatment of the linguistic material. (6) In the paper under discussion it had been pointed out that an attempt to explain the "variation" by means of the "standard explanation" of dialectmixture had led to the necessity of assuming an incredibly high number of strongly