Late Cornish

Iwan Wmffre
University of Galway, Ireland

Cornish, spoken in south-western Britain until the 18th century, was alongside Breton and Welsh - an uninterrupted continuation of the ancient Brittonic language of Roman Britain. Cornish was never as numerically important as the other two languages, so that its neglect by Celtic linguists is understandable, however, its position immediately between Brittany and Wales, makes it particularly interesting from the point of view of the dialectal develoment of ancient Brittonic.

Since medieval times the domination of Englsih, the language of state, steadily eroded the hold of the Cornish language upon the higher echelons of Society, and led in the early 18th century to its disappearance as the language of a traditional homogeneous society. In the 20th century much interest has been shown in the language, an interest which has led to a revival of the language as a spoken medium amonst enthusiasts, though what precisely constitutes the relationship between the Cornish of learners in the 20th century and earlier forms of Cornish remains an unresolved question.

The author, who is a native Breton- and Welsh-speaker, gives a description of spoken Cornish of the 17th and early 18th centuries, a period of the language condemned by many - too peremtorily - as being degenerate, but a period which has left us the great majority of prose material in the language.

The study contains chapters on phonology, morphology and syntax, and texts with interlinear translation.

ISBN 9783895861222. Languages of the World/Materials 135. 60pp. 1998.

The Fyem Language of Northern Nigeria

Daniel Nettle
Merton College, Oxford

Fyem is spoken by a small community in the Central Highlands of Nigeria. This is a region of extreme linguistic and historical complexity, few of whose numerous languages have been described. Like many small languages in Africa and elsewhere, Fyem is retreating before the spread of larger tongues such as Hausa and English. The aim of this study is to present a thorough description of the language whilst it is still in general use. The book gives clear treatments of Fyem phonology, morphology and syntax, as well as an English-Fyem dictionary, a Fyem text with analysis and translation, and a discussion of the use of the language today. There are also chapters on the history of the people and their language. Fyem belongs to the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo family. However, it also shows considerable affinities in both grammar and lexicon with the Chadic languages which are found in the area. These affinities are the result of historical interactions between the different communities. The author uses such linguistic clues in conjunction with ethnohistorical evidence to unravel the complex history of Fyem migration, trade and inter-marriage.

ISBN 9783895865190. Languages of the World/Materials 136. 112 pp. 1998.

Yingkarta

Alan Dench
University of Western Australia

Yingkarta is an almost extinct language once spoken near the present town of Carnarvon on the north west coast of Western Australia. The language has not previously been described, and this description is based on recordings made in the 1960's and early 1980's with the few remaining speakers, most of whom have since died. Unfortunately, no text materials have been collected for the language. All indications are that Yingkarta is relatively conservative with respect to languages to its immediate north, and for this reason its description is of some importance to historical/comparative studies of Australian languages.

Yingkarta is typical of Australian Pama-Nyungan languages with a suffixing, agglutinative structure and relatively free word order. There are six points of articulation with both a laminal and an apical contrast. The language makes no formal distinction between nouns, adjectives and adverbs of manner, which are grouped together as the one part of speech, 'nominal'. Pronouns have singular, dual and plural forms though, unusually for languages of the area, Yingkarta does not mark number on nominals. There is an incomplete set of optional bound pronominal elements, or agreement markers, which appear enclitic to the last word of the first clause constituent. Yingkarta has a system of split-ergative case marking: most pronouns have separate ergative, nominative and accusative forms while other nominals generally take ergative case-suffixes in A function and are unmarked in S and O function. However, the ergative marking of nominals and accusative marking of pronouns appears not to be obligatory, though this may be an artefact of data collected with semi-fluent speakers. Verbs generally fall into one of two major conjugations and in main clauses are inflected for tense, aspect and mood. In subordinate clauses verbs select from among a set of inflections which indicate the relationship between main and subordinate clause. A system of switch-reference operates for relative clauses.

ISBN 9783895861529. Languages of the World/Materials 137. 60pp. 1998.

Svan

Kevin Tuite
Université de Montréal

Svan is the smallest and least well-known of the Kartvelian (South Caucasian) languages. The traditional Svan homeland is in the northwest highlands of the Republic of Georgia, and the speech community comprises 35,000 to 40,000 people. In most recent respects, Svan retains the principal features of a Kartvelian language: subject and object agreement; verbal marking of aspect, evidentiality and 'version' [similar to active/medial opposition of Indo-European]; and a complex split-ergative morphosyntax. On the other hand, Svan morphophonemics has become far less transparent than that of Georgian or Laz-Mingrelian.

There is a great deal of allomorphy in noun declension and in some verbal paradigms (e.g. in the imperfect), and the pattern of Proto-Kartvelian verbal ablaut has been restructured in a distinctive way. Altough the sketch is primarily concerned with the synchronic grammar of the four Svan dialects, attention is given to certain issues in Kartvelian historical morphology, such as quantitative and qualitative vowel alternations and the evolution of the case system.

ISBN 9783895861543. Languages of the World/Materials 139. 58pp. 2 maps. 1997.

Evenki

Nadezhda Bulatova and Lenore Grenoble
Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg; Dartmouth College

Evenki is the largest of the Manchu-Tungusic languages spoken in Siberia. The Evenki ethnic population currently numbers roughly 30,000 people; approximately one third of the population speaks Evenki.

This monograph provides an overview of Evenki phonology, morphology and syntax. Evenki is characterized by strong agglutination, vowel harmony, verb-final (SOV) word order, and the use of postpositions. Nouns inflect for case, number and possession; Standard Evenki has 12 cases. The verbal system morphologically marks tense, mood, person and number, aspect and Aktionsarten as well as voice. Furthermore, Evenki possesses a complex system of participles, supines and gerunds.

In addition to the grammatical sketch and a sample text, discussion of the current sociolinguistic situation of Evenki is provided as well, with special attention to the Evenki dialect continuum and the status of Evenki as an 'endangered' language.

ISBN 9783895862229. Languages of the World/Materials 141. 60pp. 1999.

Livonian

Christopher Moseley

The Livonian, or Liv, language (Livonian randa keÛl ‘coast language’) is a member of the Baltic-Finnic subgroup within Finno-Ugric. It was until recently spoken in twelve costal villages of Kurzeme province in Latvia. At the beginning of the twentieth century it had over two thousand speakers, but the dispersal of the population during two world wars and subsequently during the Soviet period has meant that the language has not been passed on to younger generations so that at present only about ten elderly first-language speakers remain alive.

However, since the independence of Latvia in 1991, teaching of the language has been resumed and other cultural activities to foster the language have provoded an opportunity for the belated revival of the language. Livonian is a written language, but the orthography has varied somewhat during the period of just over a century since it was first committed to writing.

ISBN 9783895861581. Languages of the World/Materials 144. 120pp. 2002.

Russian

Edna Andrews
Duke University

The present volume is a unique representation of Russian grammar that includes a fundamental description and analysis of the cornerstones of Russian grammatical categories, while providing presentations of lexical meaning, word formation and the interaction of grammatical and lexical meaning in the nominal, adjectival and verbal systems of the Russian language. The language of the metalinguistic texts will be in English coupled by extensive examles from CRD that are sufficiently grounded in meaningful contexts informed by pertinent cultural information.

Although this work is devoted primarily to contemporary standard Russian (CSR), we will also include remarks and commentary that include information about the historical development of the Russian literary language, as well as relevant data in the area of language innovation in a variety of registers, including colloquial, specialized/professional, and substandard language.

The following prelimary table of contents will demonstrate the logical development and reasoning upon which Russian has been conceived:

1. The Russian Case System. a. Historical underpinnings of the case system of CSR. b. Case system of CSR i.declensions, ii. agreement iii. declensional shifts, iv. gender shifts, v. desinences, vi. significance of syncretisms. 2 The Russian Verb System. a. Categories of tense, mood and aspect, b. Conjugation and the one-stem, c. Participle/verbal adverb foramtion and aspect relations, d. Verbal government and variation. 3. Deictic word forms in CSR. 4. Distribution of the categories of person, number and gender: significance and hierarchy. 5. Nondeclining word forms, a. prepositions, b. enclitics/particles, c. substantives, d. question of native Slavic roots and their relationship to foreign borrowings, i. ancient borrowings, ii. recent borrowings. 6. Word formation, a. substantival, b. adjectival, c. verbal, d. deverbal. 7. Semantics of nonroot morphemes, a. purely lexical morphemes, i. suffixes, ii. prefixes, b. morphemes as grammatical and lexical. 8. Syntactic relations and the meaningfulness of word order.

ISBN 9783895861598. Languages of the World/Materials 145. 100pp. 2001.

Georgian

Marcello Cherchi
University of Chicago

Georgian, spoken by over three million people in the southern Caucasus, is the only written member of the Kartvelian language family, and has a literary history of a millenium and a half. The language provides a crucial resource for studying the cultures, languages, and history of the region. Among the linguistic points of interest are the phonological proclivity for consonant clusters, and the typological characteristics of mixed or split case marking and verb marking systems.

The grammatical sketch will serve as a concise presentation of modern Georgian phonology, morphology and syntax with particular attention given to the complex verbal morphology and the morphosyntax of case government. A select bibliography will include materials available in Western languages.

ISBN 9783895861192. Languages of the World/Materials 147. 60pp. 1999.

Serbo-Croatian

Snjezana Kordic
University of Münster

The language which in linguistic literature is most commonly called Serbo-Croatian belongs to the Southern branch of the Slavonic group of the Indo-European language family. It is spoken by approx. 16 million people in the four of the six republics of the former Yugoslavia (the Štokavian dialect was the basis for language standardization): Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Hercegovina. Since Yugoslavia has disintegrated, each of the three countries which emerged from the four republics now calls this language according to its national name: Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian. It is also spoken by the expatriates, particularly in West Europa, and certain cities in North and South America and Australia.

Serbo-Croatian has all the most important typological characteristics of the Slavonic languages, that is a rich inflectional morphology, an extensive agreement system, so-called free word order, a rich set of morphophonemic alternations, the pervasive aspectual opposition, a double negation, a reflexive possessive and so on.

Some of the interesting specifics of Serbo-Croatian are: 1) four accents with pitch and length involved (only Slovene among Slavonic languages has a somewhat similar system of accents); 2) it is the only Slavonic language that has preserved a three-member system of deixis according to degrees of distance and with the same consonant alternation v/t/n by demonstrative pronouns, adverbs and even by so-called presentatives; 3) in place of an infinitive in certain constructions where its understood subject can be retrieved from the syntactic context, Serbo-Croatian (especially in the eastern region) often uses a subordinate clause consisting of the subordinator da and a present-tense verb form - this phenomenon is typical to the area of Balkan languages (Bulgarian and Macedonian have the same construction).

The present volume begins with a section on phonology (vowels, consonants, accents). This is followed by a description of morphology (nominal: nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals; verbal morphology). The syntax is presented in the third section, in which noun phrase, clause structure, coordination, subordination (especially relatives), negation, word order and discourse related phenomena are described. The volume also contains a sample text with interlinear transcription and translation and an ample bibliography.

ISBN 9783895861611. Languages of the World/Materials 148. 64 pp. 1997.