Caucasian Perspectives
George Hewitt (ed.)
SOAS, University of London
The majority of articles in this volume were papers delivered in June 1990 in London at the Vth Colloquium of the Societas Caucasologica Europæa, an organisation which has grown since its modest inception in 1983 to boast the support of all those interested in the languages of the Caucasus both in Europe and North America. The core is supplemented by contributions sought by the editor. Topics covered ranges from the traditional philological skills of ethymology, textual analysis (specifically of the Caucasus material in the 17th century Turkish texts, and reconstruction, though accentuation, folklore, literary and historical criticism, to a selection of papers dealing with Caucasian aspects of the sociology of language. All four indigenous language-families of the Caucasus are represented (including Old Georgian), as is Ossetic.
Contents:
Jost Gippert (Bamberg), The Caucasian language material in Evliya Çelebi's "Travel Book": a revision;
Catherine Paris, Eloge de la langue, ou la racine tcherkesse *bze;
Mukhadin Kumakhov, Adyghean (Cherkess) epic onomastics (on material from the Nart epic) (in Russian);
Rieks Smeets, On valencies, actants and actant coding in Circassian;
John Colarusso, How many consonants does Ubykh have?;
Wim Lucassen, Reflexes of salient Proto-North-West-Caucasian labial-initial complexes;
Slava irikba, Phonological features of specialized baby lexicon (Caucasian data);
Loren Trigo, Abkhaz stress shift;
Neli Arsba, Some questions on the accentology of the Abkhaz language (in Russian);
George Hewitt, Languages in contact in N.W. Georgia: fact or fiction?;
Donald Rayfield, The language of abuse and the abuse of language -- polemics in Georgian;
Wolfgang Feurstein, Mingrelisch, Lazisch, Swanisch: alte Sprachen und Kulturen der Kolchis vor dem baldigen Untergang;
Ulrich Lüders, The Laz verbal complex: principles of organisation;
Johanna Nichols, The Caucasus as a linguistic area, 1: personal pronouns;
M. Alekseev & R. Radúabov, Pre-requisities to the formation of a Tsez writing-system (in Russian);
The semantic organisation of the pan-Daghestanian noun-thesaurus (in Russian), etc.
ISBN 9783929075014. 406pp. 1993
