Florian Coulmas Research Articles

<i>Guardians of language: Twenty voices through history</i>, by Florian Coulmas (2016)

Guardians of language: Twenty voices through history
 Florian Coulmas (2016)
 Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xxii + 345 ISBN 978-0-19-873652-3 (hardback)

Guardians of language: Twenty voices through history by Florian Coulmas

Reviewed by: Guardians of language: Twenty voices through history by Florian Coulmas Iair G. Or and Elana Shohamy Guardians of language: Twenty voices through history. By Florian Coulmas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 345. ISBN 9780198736523. $55 (Hb). Language planning and policy (LPP) was founded as an academic field in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Joshua Fishman and other prominent scholars. In its early years, LPP was perceived as a subfield of applied linguistics and the sociology of language, one most specifically interested in developing nations and the way they cope with language-related problems. Some particular cases of language planning, such as the planned revitalization of Hebrew in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, drew a great deal of attention. Scholars uncovered more and more historical cases in which new scripts were developed, dialects were standardized or granted official status, and language conflicts between elites or other social groups were resolved. In the present book, dedicated to the memory of Fishman, who died in 2015, Coulmas seems to revive and continue the Fishmanian tradition of historical case studies by exploring twenty individuals who variously shaped languages and language policies in multiple spheres of activity through history. The survey of these language policy makers is chronologically ordered and begins in the eighth century with Alcuin of York, who strove to purify Latin from vernacular influences, followed by Sibawayhi, the great Arabic grammarian who studied the speech of Arabian Bedouins, and Dante Alighieri, who studied and accorded prestige to the Italian vernaculars. Other early figures are King Sejong, who devised a new script for Korean, ElioAntonio de Nebrija, who authored the first grammar of Castilian Spanish, and Cardinal Richelieu, who founded the first language academy, for the French language. All of the other figures surveyed were active in the 1700s or later: Catherine II (Russian), Adamantios Koraïs (Greek), Noah Webster (American English), Jacob Grimm (German), Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (Hebrew), Ludwik Zamenhof (Esperanto), Ueda Kazutoshi (Japanese), Vladimir Ilich Lenin (Russian and the local languages of the USSR), Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (Turkish), Mahatma Gandhi (Hindi), Zhou Enlai (Chinese), Pope Paul VI (Latin and the vernaculars), Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana (Indonesian), and Léopold Sédar Senghor (French). Each presentation of a language policy leader begins with a biographical sketch of their activities and involvement, followed by a discussion of the language situation in the geographical and historical context in which they were active. Each chapter concludes with an imagined interview with the policy maker, titled ‘The last word’ and carefully crafted from quotations and texts written by the person. While the interviews might seem out of place at first, they are very effective in letting the readers glimpse the language activists’ ways of thinking in modern terms. The book ends with a coda that discusses and synthesizes the twenty cases by analyzing the similarities and dissimilarities among them. Like Fishman (2006), C traces various axes or continua of language policy objectives (modernization vs. conservation, universality vs. uniqueness, unity vs. pluralism, domination vs. liberation, and elitism vs. egalitarianism) on which each of the language policy makers can be positioned. Like Neustupný (2006), he also analyzes the history of language planning, distinguishing between different phases of LPP. For example, he shows that multilingualism and language pluralism only appeared as language policy goals at a very late stage. Although the theoretical framework of the book is no doubt embedded in the Western tradition, in the selection of the ‘twenty voices’ C manages to avoid the Eurocentric bias by including language activists from Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. However, certain types of cases may be under-represented. C seems to focus mainly on success stories on a national scale and to overlook the struggles of minority and indigenous languages as well as the losers of these heroic national projects. Thus, languages of groups and nations who never achieved statehood, such as Catalan, Basque, Berber, or any of the indigenous languages in the Americas, are not represented, nor are languages that suffered from national language-planning projects such as Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic, which became almost extinct in the Jewish world because of the rise and spread of [End Page 473] Modern...

Review of Coulmas (2016): Guardians of language: Twenty voices through history

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Florian Coulmas and Ralph Lützeler (eds.): Imploding Populations in Japan and Germany: A Comparison

F<scp>lorian</scp> C<scp>oulmas and</scp> R<scp>alph</scp> L<scp>ützeler</scp> (<scp>eds</scp>.): <i>Imploding Populations in Japan and Germany: A Comparison</i>

The Cambridge encyclopedia of the language sciences

Part I. Introductory Essays: 1. Language structure in its human context: new directions for the language sciences in the twenty-first century William Croft 2. The psychology of linguistic form Lee Osterhout, Richard A. Wright and Mark D. Allen 3. The structure of meaning James Pustejovsky 4. Social practices of speech and writing Florian Coulmas 5. Explaining language: neuroscience, genetics and evolution Lyle Jenkins 6. Acquisition of language Barbara Lust 7. Elaborating speech and writing: verbal art Patrick Colm Hogan Part II. Entries.

Florian Coulmas (ed.). 2007. Language Regimes in Transformation. Future Prospects for German and Japanese in Science, Economy, and Politics (Contributions to the Sociology of Language 93). Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. xi, 216 p

Article Florian Coulmas (ed.). 2007. Language Regimes in Transformation. Future Prospects for German and Japanese in Science, Economy, and Politics (Contributions to the Sociology of Language 93). Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. xi, 216 p was published on October 1, 2010 in the journal Zeitschrift für Rezensionen zur germanistischen Sprachwissenschaft (volume 2, issue 2).

Population Decline and Ageing in Japan: The Social Consequences , and: Ageing and the Labor Market in Japan: Problems and Policies (review)

Reviewed by: Population Decline and Ageing in Japan: The Social Consequences, and: Ageing and the Labor Market in Japan: Problems and Policies Chikako Usui (bio) Population Decline and Ageing in Japan: The Social Consequences. By Florian Coulmas. Routledge, London, 2007. viii, 167 pages. $150.00, cloth; $35.95, paper. Ageing and the Labor Market in Japan: Problems and Policies. Edited by Koichi Hamada and Hiromi Kato. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, 2007. xxv, 191 pages. $110.00. With increasing longevity and falling fertility, Japan faces an entirely new social and economic environment: a hyper-aging society. It is expected that close to 30 per cent of the Japanese population will be 65 years of age or older by 2025. Japan’s population aging has proceeded rapidly, causing acute and profound changes in intergenerational relations, national pension systems, medical care and long-term care programs, and gender relations in the family and the workplace. The two books reviewed here offer timely research on demographic challenges to Japanese society and its labor markets. They are different in disciplinary orientation, target audience, and scope. Florian Coulmas’s book examines “social ageing” (vaguely defined as “social transformation on a large scale” [p. 16] caused by population aging) based on social and demographic data and opinion data published by governmental and nongovernmental agencies. Coulmas is director of the German Institute for Japanese Studies in Tokyo, works in Japan, and also is chair of Japanese Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen. His book targets general social science readers and is excellent reading for students in courses on social gerontology and on Japan or East Asia. In Population Decline and Ageing in Japan, Coulmas offers a broad, descriptive analysis of the demographic challenges and the resultant social transformations that confront Japan today and in the coming decades. It is well structured and clearly written. In chapter 1 (“Facts and Discourses”), he presents data on demographic changes and sums up current public discourse about the consequences of social aging in eight questions (pp. 15–16): Will it be possible to maintain Japan’s high standard of living in a hyper-aged [End Page 464] society? How can social security be sustained without stifling the economy or causing too much hardship for the elderly? Why do Japanese women have fewer children than they would like to? How should a social policy be designed and what are its potential and actual effects? Why is it that affluence breeds childlessness? Are gender relations so askew that men and women postpone marriage and having children? Does the burden of caring for the old and infirm curb the younger generations’ ability and willingness to have children? How and to what end does immigration come into play as society adjusts to the realities of population decline? Coulmas does a good job of describing how the shared aspirations of the “all middle class society” have clearly become a thing of the past and how Japan today faces challenges to reinvent itself, including the reconsideration of male dominance, striking a balance between family and work needs, and addressing rising inequalities. In chapter 2 (“The Problems of Generations and the Structure of Society”), Coulmas stresses that Japan is not just getting older but its aging population is also causing fundamental changes in intergenerational relations. For example, the traditional multigenerational living arrangement has steadily declined and has been replaced by conjugal family units. Yet, Coulmas cautions readers that if “elderly living with their children in separate dwellings on the same site are counted as broadly defined co-residence, the rate of co-residence has hardly changed” (p. 24). The increased number of conjugal family units may indicate the modern adaptation of traditional living arrangements and accompanying qualitative changes in the family system. One question Coulmas might have asked would involve the changing parameters of the economic rationality of intergenerational living. One wonders if multigenerational living arrangements may become practical solutions in the future with the recent increases in unemployment, job uncertainty, and delayed marriage and divorce among young persons. In chapter 3 (“Social Networks”), Coulmas argues that government, business, and civil society will play major roles in the development of new social networks for the elderly. The growing...

Shrinking Population Economics: Lessons from Japan. By Akihito Matsutani. Tokyo: International House of Japan, 2006. xiv, 200 pp. ¥1429 (paper).Tackling Japan's Fiscal Challenges: Strategies to Cope with High Public Debt and Population Ageing. Edited by Keimi Kaizua and Anne Krueger. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. xvi, 222 pp. $85.00 (cloth).Population Decline and Ageing in Japan—The Social Consequences. By Florian Coulmas.

Shrinking Population Economics: Lessons from Japan. By Akihito Matsutani. Tokyo: International House of Japan, 2006. xiv, 200 pp. ¥1429 (paper).Tackling Japan's Fiscal Challenges: Strategies to Cope with High Public Debt and Population Ageing. Edited by Keimi Kaizua and Anne Krueger. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. xvi, 222 pp. $85.00 (cloth).Population Decline and Ageing in Japan—The Social Consequences. By Florian Coulmas.

FLORIAN COULMAS, Sociolinguistics: The study of speakers' choices

Florian Coulmas, Sociolinguistics: The study of speakers' choices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. 263. Pb $29.99.In his new textbook, Coulmas provides readers an easy introduction to sociolinguistics, using speaker choice as the central notion for discussion. In a comfortable conversational style, the author slowly introduces topics, using common examples to demonstrate how sociolinguists think about language use. He provides summaries of findings of key sociolinguistic studies that illustrate ideas without overloading readers with unnecessary and cumbersome details of those studies. The book is accessible for beginning sociolinguistics students and is equally engaging for those already familiar with sociolinguistic concepts, largely because the author uses such interesting and global research to illustrate ideas.

Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power and Identity (review)

Reviewed by: Literacy and literacies: Texts, power and identity by James Collins and Richard Blot Peter Unseth Literacy and literacies: Texts, power and identity. By James Collins and Richard Blot. (Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xx, 217. ISBN 0521596610. $21.95. Collins and Blot write as part of the new literacy studies (NLS), the movement that rejects literacy as a set of ‘autonomous’ skills and stresses the varying uses and practices of literacy situated in different cultures and eras. It must be kept in mind, however, that in NLS ‘literacy’ has been broadened to include much more than decoding strings of symbols comprising texts, a step that is both its strength and its weakness. C&B’s contribution to NLS is the study of how ‘texts, power, and identity’ can inform the search for ways to wrestle with both local and global aspects of literacy; they devote a chapter to each, followed by a chapter of synthesis. C&B bring a significant amount of French scholarship to the attention of English readers, which is a positive step if one agrees with Jacques Derrida. Those who do not follow postmodern and poststructuralist ways of thinking will find much that makes them uncomfortable, including the strong focus on power and balkanized identities. But all will find a rich variety of case studies and analyses to ponder. C&B spend much time arguing against the idea that literacy leads toward certain predictable results, such as economic development, higher cognitive functions, and ‘civilization’. But they seem to lump together those who hold these dubious assumptions with those who hold to the idea of a narrow definition of literacy as ‘language-writing’. They leave no room for those who believe that there is a need for a definition of literacy that focuses on decoding (the symbols of a text to understand the words that the author intended), but who do not believe that literacy predictably leads to certain results, individual or societal. C&B wrestle with what constitutes ‘literacy’. They seem to be driven to identify something in every culture as a form of ‘literacy’. Amerindian picture-writing, rejected as ‘writing’ by such scholars as Florian Coulmas (The Blackwell encyclopedia of writing systems, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), represents the practice of literacy to C&B, which is not surprising. But they go much further and speak of ‘a conception of writing that would include ritual insignia, ritual artifacts, and the prayers and songs attached thereto’ (160). But, if everything is literacy, then nothing is literacy. Certainly there is a great need for ethnographies of literacy and for a sensitivity by outsiders to the situated practices in which people employ reading and writing, but this still requires a narrow concept of literacy which refers to understanding the words of the author. This is not an elitist position, but rather a call for returning to a specific concept allowing us to speak of people learning the skills needed to read their language in a way that allows them to comprehend the intended message of the author, typically propositions. This should be differentiated from how people use print media. First-graders may interact with a variety of media, but they still have to learn to read (whether by phonics, whole language, or some other method). We need to distinguish between this traditional view of ‘literacy’ and the NLS view. Until this is clarified, NLS writers will continue to confuse, maybe alienate, those who teach people to read their languages. Peter Unseth Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics and SIL Copyright © 2005 Linguistic Society of America

Modern Japanese Culture: The Insider View (review)

Reviewed by: Modern Japanese Culture: The Insider View Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit (bio) Modern Japanese Culture: The Insider View. By Leith Morton. Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, 2003. v, 290 pages. $25.00, paper. In this bold project, Leith Morton sets out to give an overview of modern Japanese culture by focusing on those contemporary Japanese thinkers he believes have made the greatest significant impact. His approach differs from other recent introductions to Japanese culture such as books by Florian Coulmas, who gives an anthropological overview, and by Vlasta Winkelhöverová, who stresses material aspects of Japanese culture.1 To introduce "The Insider View," Morton presents "explanations of cultural phenomena by people who are writing inside the culture being described, [End Page 444] who have been raised inside that culture; in this specific case, writers whose language and social and cultural background are explicitly Japanese" (p. 2). At the same time, however, the "Insider View" points to Japanese thinkers and writers "who predominantly adopt a nativist approach, rather than those who adopt a universalist approach to discourse" (p. 2). According to the author, most accounts of Japanese culture in English have been written from an outsider perspective, which is easier to synthesize and comprehend because of its universalist theoretical orientation. Morton's concentration on insider theorists of culture claims not only to open up new perspectives but also to expose these native discourses to at least the possibility of intercultural dialogue. One presupposition of an endeavor like this is to admit that contemporary Japan is not a fixed entity but a constantly changing complex that cannot be "frozen" into one tableau. Morton does not aim at the "final word" on Japan, which he believes is "not humanly possible" (p. 5). Instead, he wants to suggest "some of the underlying patterns that various thinkers have identified as applicable to the evolution of culture in Japan" (p. 5) and compare them with outsider viewpoints, thus arriving at a "synthetic, syncretic—in short, overtly interpretative" cultural map (p. 5). In chapter one, Morton examines, by way of a close reading of two volumes by the psychologist Minami Hiroshi, Japanese ethnocentric discourses, attempting to probe their unexamined assumptions as well as to evaluate key modern thinkers in this area. He introduces Watsuji Tetsurō's Fūdo (Climate and culture, 1935) and Kuki Shūzō's Iki no kōzō (The structure of iki, 1930) and traces patterns of argument developed therein to contemporary thinkers such as Kawai Hayao, Umehara Takeshi, and Aoki Tamotsu. Chapter two is devoted to discussion of four works by Yanagita Kunio, whom the author holds to be the "major theoretician of culture of modern Japan" (p. 7). According to Morton, Yanagita has had a profound influence on Japanese ways of conceptualizing and thinking about society and culture, which he tries to show by citing various thinkers of later periods. Yoshimoto Takaaki is seen by Morton as one of Yanagita's most prominent successors in contemporary Japan, and his works, such as Gengo ni totte bi to wa nani ka (What is beauty in respect of language? 1965) as well as his studies on collective imaginaries (1968) and mass images (1984), are subjected to an exegesis, which is then mirrored in contemporary reactions by figures such as Tokieda Motoki, Isotani Takashi, and Karatani Kōjin. The next section highlights the literature of contemporary Japan, focusing on Mishima Yukio as "postwar heretic" (p. 157), ōe Kenzaburō as his political counterpart, Murakami Haruki, Yamada Eimi, and Uchida Shungicu, as well as a host of poets active from the immediate postwar period down to the "revolution in women's poetry" (p. 204) as it was brought about [End Page 445] by figures such as Shiraishi Kazuko and Itō Hiromi. Chapter five sketches television, cinema, and manga as the three most influential areas of mass culture, drawing, as in the other parts of the book, mostly on Japanese views such as Yoshimoto Takaaki's critique of television and Yomota Inuhiko's Nihon eigashi 100-nen (History of 100 years of Japanese cinema, 2000).2 In his brief epilogue, the author tries to determine how much insider discourse on culture in Japan differs from its equivalent in...

The Making of literate societies

Preface. Part I: On Being a Literate Society: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives on Literacy. 1. Conceptualizing Literacy as a Personal Skill and as a Social Practice (David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance) 2. The Roles of Literacy Practices in the Activities and Institutions of Developed and Developing Countriesm (Armin Triebel) 3. Societal Literacy: Writing Culture and Development (Georg Elwert.) 4. Literacy in Ancient Greece: Functional Literacy, Oral Education and the Development of a Literate Environment (Rosalind Thomas) 5. Literacy in Germany (Utz Maas) 6. Literacy in Japan: Kanji, Kana, Romaji and Bits (Florian Coulmas) Part II: On Becoming a Literate Society: Literacy in Developing Societies. African Case Studies. 7. Language, Literacy, the Production and Reproduction of Knowledge, and the Challenge of African Development (Kwesi K. Prah) 8. Literacy and Literature in National Languages in Benin and Burkina-Faso (Joseph Akoha) 9. Constructive Interdependence: The Response of a Senegalese Community to the Question of Why Become Literate (Sonja Fagerberg-Diallo) 10. Literacy for Gonja and Birifor Children in Northern Ghana (Esther Goody) Central and South American Case Studies. 11. Literacy and Intercultural Bilingual Education in the Andes (Luis Enrique Lopez.) 12. The Uses of Orality and Literacy in Rural Mexico: Tales from Xaltipan (Elsie Rockwell) Asian Case Studies. 13. Developing a Literate Tradition in Six Marginal Communities in the Philippines: Interrelations of Literacy, Education and Social Development (Maria Luisa Canieso-Doronila) 14. Issues of Literacy Development in the Indian Context (Chander Daswani.) 15. Women and Empowerment Through Literacy (Malini Ghose) Part III: Conclusion: From Research to Policy. 16. Literacy and Social Development: Policy and Implementation (Ingrid Jung and Adama Ouane) Name Index. Subject Index.

The Handbook of Linguistics (review)

Reviewed by: The handbook of linguistics ed. by Mark Aronoff, Janie Rees-Miller Susan Steele The handbook of linguistics. Ed. by Mark Aronoff and Janie Rees-Miller. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. Pp. xvi, 824. My generation of linguists came of age when much of our literature was unpublished papers, reproduced by mimeo or ditto; when thinking beyond syntax and phonology was an act of [End Page 177] imagination; and when some said that within six months or so of beginning training a linguist could be producing work on the field’s cutting edge. For these linguists of a certain age, The handbook of linguistics will underscore how things have changed. Designed to serve as a nontechnical ‘repository for what is known about language as we enter the twenty-first century’ (xiv)—and successful in its design—this volume should also cause members of the discipline to think about how far we have come and to reflect on the breadth and the depth of what is now known about human language. Each of the 32 chapters is intended to provide a free-standing description of the current state of our knowledge of one aspect of human language. However, the chapters are grouped by larger themes. Ten chapters cover the traditional core of linguistics, broadly construed, beginning with phonetics (by John Laver), phonology (by Abigail Cohn), morphology (by Andrew Spencer) and the lexicon (by D. A. Cruse), and concluding with semantics (by Shalom Lapin) and pragmatics (by Ruth Kempson). Because of the ‘dominance of syntactic research in linguistics over the last half century’ (xvi), syntax takes pride of place in this section, with four chapters devoted to it: ‘Syntax’ (by Mark C. Baker), ‘Generative grammar’ (by Thomas Wasow), ‘Functional linguistics’ (by Robert D. Van Valin, Jr.) and ‘Typology’ (by William Croft). Beginning with an introductory chapter (by Janie Rees-Miller), another seven address various aspects of applied linguistics: educational linguistics (by James Paul Gee), linguistics and reading (by Rebecca Treiman), clinical linguistics (by David Crystal), forensic linguistics (by Roger W. Shuy), translation (by Christoph Gutknecht), and language planning (by Frank Anshen). Six of the remaining fifteen chapters offer an interesting collection of overviews that ‘consider the origins of language as species-specific behavior [by Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy] and describe the raw material with which linguists work (languages of the world [by Bernard Comrie], historical linguistics [by Brian D. Joseph], and writing systems [by Peter T. Daniels]), frame the discipline within its historical context [by Lyle Campbell], and look at how linguists acquire new data from previously undescribed languages (field linguistics) [by Pamela Munro]’ (xv). Finally, there is a set of topical chapters, many covering linguistic areas that have come into existence only fairly recently: discourse analysis (by agnew Weiyun He), linguistics and literature (by Nigel Fabb), first and second language acquisition (by Brian Macwhinney and Vivian Cook respectively), multilingualism (by Suzanne Romaine), sign languages (by Wendy Sandler and Diane Lillo-Martin), sociolinguistics (by Florian Coulmas), neurolinguistics (by David Caplan), and computational linguistics (by Richard Sproat, Christer Samuelsson, Jennifer Chu-Carroll, and Bob Carpenter). As the editors intended, each chapter can indeed be read independent of the rest. But each of the organizational chunks—with the possible exception of the set of topical chapters—guides the reader in making connections among the chapters. And, clearly, the sum provides the comprehensive coverage that the volume’s title promises. While the chapters are of uniformly high quality, they vary a bit in their effectiveness. They can be quite good in handling chronic presentational problems, issues that we all struggle with in making our exposition clear even to other linguists. Wasow’s chapter on generative grammar, for example, is a model in making accessible the abstractions upon which...

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The Korean Alphabet: Its History and Structure (review)

Reviewed by: The Korean Alphabet: Its History and Structure Florian Coulmas The Korean Alphabet: Its History and Structure, edited by Young-Key Kim-Renaud. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997. 317 pp., appendixes. $68.00 cloth; $39.95 paper. As every student of Korean knows, the Korean alphabet is a writing system on which many superlatives have been heaped and of which Koreans are rightly proud. With its formal simplicity and systematic beauty, it cannot fail to impress the student of writing, too. The present reviewer [End Page 198] belongs to the latter category rather than to the former. It is, therefore, only from this point of view that this review can offer some comments on this collection of articles. Thus my first question: Can this book be read with benefit by those not well-versed in Korean? The answer is an unqualified yes. This is not to say that Koreanists will find it less interesting. After all, not everyone is an expert in the history, development, systematic makeup, and linguistics of the Korean writing system. The various papers in this volume offer a wealth of information about these matters and at the same time reflect the up-to-date state of the discussion of controversial issues. Four appendixes containing illustrative reference materials are particularly helpful to those with only limited knowledge of Korean. The second question to be asked about a collection of essays that has grown out of a symposium is whether it makes a book. In this regard, The Korean Alphabet deserves exceptionally high marks. There is remarkably little overlap between the papers, although they are thematically closely related. This testifies to the symposium organizer cum editor's considerable skills, both in securing the cooperation of distinguished authors and in crafting their contributions into a coherent whole. The result is a book that covers the most important aspects of the Korean writing system, ranging from the story of its invention to the systematic analysis of sound letter-correspondence, problems of orthography and standardization, and to principles of calligraphy and typography. While one or two of the authors, notably S. Robert Ramsey, who deals with phonological change, are more interested in the Korean language than in its remarkable script, their papers still contribute important insights about the alphabet by discussing some of the details of how exactly it relates to the language. The third and most important question I want to consider is what I have learned from reading the book. A great deal is the general answer, but there are far more things than I can mention here. I shall therefore limit my comments to a few points that particularly interest me. As a sociolinguist, I have always been intrigued by the notion that an enlightened monarch invented a demotic script for the benefit of his subjects but never quite knew what to make of the attribution of han'gŭl's creation to King Sejong. Ki-Moon Lee presents strong evidence that puts to rest any doubts about the king's decisive role. In his review of the (Mongolian) 'Phags-pa alphabet origin hypothesis, Gari Ledyard lends further support to the view that Sejong himself was the genius behind the script's design, although he also stresses the role of Sin Sukchu, a gifted young scholar who is said to have spoken Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, and Jurchen. Sin was a capable phonetician. At the time, this meant that he had a good [End Page 199] command of Chinese rime books and knew how to apply his skills to the phonological analysis of Korean, on which the alphabet is so clearly based. In other papers, the invention of the script is touched upon in passing. The common view that transpires from these accounts is that without the great king's scholarship and wisdom, the Korean alphabet would never have seen the light of day, Sin Sukchu's input notwithstanding and no matter whether or to what extent the 'Phags-pa alphabet served as a model. Another question of some theoretical interest is whether han'gŭl is aptly characterized as an alphabet, a syllabic script, or a featural script. Chin W. Kim points out that han...

Systemcharakter und Relativität der Sprache By August Dauses (review)

206 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 1 (1998) it proposes a model based on the notion of different types of boundaries. In two more technical papers, Dale Gerdemann and Erhard Hinrichs attempt to solve remaining problems with head-driven generation algorithms in unification based grammars by using atomic values in logical form, while Tsuneko Nakazawa presents an LR parsing algorithm for feature based grammars. In Part III, the general overview of computational phonology by John Coleman is followed by two more technical papers: one by Jennifer Cole on eliminating cyclicity in phonology, and one by Julia Hirschberg and Richard Sproat on predicting pitch accent from text analysis. In addition to being an already important reference , this book can be used as supplementary readings in a computational linguistics course, and I would highly recommend it. [Dominique Estival, University ofMelbourne.] The Blackwell encyclopedia of writing systems. By Florian Coulmas. Oxford & Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996. Pp. xxxviii, 603. $74.95. The spate of large reference books in linguistics issued in recent years by several continental and British -based publishers now includes some titles in the field of grammatology, including the valuable work under review. One other is the two-volume Handbuch edited by Hartmut Günther et al. under the title Schrift und Schriftlichkeit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994-96); still another is The world's writing systems (WWS), edited by Peter T. Daniels and me (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). It seems appropriate for me to declare my possible bias here since it could be thought that Coulmas' book is in some sense a competitor to WWS. In fact I see the two books as complementary, and I hope that all research libraries and interested scholars will acquire both. It is noteworthy that the Library of Congress has classified these two works under separate headings : WWS under 'P' (Language) and Coulmas under 'Z' (Bibliography). In contrast to the other works mentioned above, which are organized topically, Cs book is arranged alphabetically, lending itself well both to quick reference and to enjoyable browsing. Many of its other distinctive qualities result from the fact that—unlike more typical reference volumes, but like David Crystal 's highly successful Cambridge encyclopedia of language (1987)—Cs work is not an edited volume but was written by his hand alone. The clear advantages of this lie in tightness of organization, coherence of statement, and consistency of voice. The main disadvantage, of course, results from the fact that no single author can be equally expert in all the topics covered by such a wide-ranging book. For example, a user who looks under Japanese writing—with the supplementary entries for kana, katakana, hiragana, kanji, and kanbun—will find highly authoritative statements since this is an area ofCs expertise. By contrast, a user who looks under Devanagari—the script used for Sanskrit, Hindi, and some other languages of India—wiU find many details that are bound to be unclear or misleading to nonspecialists; e.g., the archaic phonetic terms 'guttural ' and 'cerebral' are employed here instead of the 'velar' and 'retroflex' which are used elsewhere in the book. Vowel letters are said to occur in two forms, 'initial and medial'—which is accurate for Sanskrit, but not for Hindi, in which the 'initial' form also occurs medially after other vowels; and so on. Cross-references are somewhat weakly developed; the reader of the Devanagari article has no way of knowing that furtherrelevantinformation is available under the headings Sanskrit, Hindi, and Syllabic alphabet . Readers who experience uncertainties will be grateful for the book's abundant bibliographical references . However, there is no index. One doesn't normally expect an index, of course, in a dictionarytype work; however, in this volume it could have compensated for the relative shortage of cross-references . Thus, although the Devanagari article mentions that the script is used for Marathi and Nepali, the reference user has no direct access to those language names. [William Bright, University ofColorado .] Systemcharakter und Relativität der Sprache. By August Dauses. Stuttgart : Steiner, 1996. Pp. 102. As in his previous publications, Dauses discusses the theory of relativity in language and questions idealistic, ontological, and mechanistic models of language and language change. The communicative function...

Language adaptation Edited by Florian Coulmas (review)

BOOK NOTICES 393 Part 2, 'The ontological question', considers in more detail the ontological implications of the view discussed in Part 1 . One chapter contrasts Cs proposal with certain varieties of materialism , reductionism, and dualism, as well as token physicalism. Another chapter treats views that regard linguistic objects as social realities of some kind. The final chapter discusses, among other things, the Platonism of Jerrold Katz. Cs proposals are not convincing. As he notes (125-6), the sentence/utterance distinction is central to his view, reflecting a fundamental ontological divide. Yet, utterances must take their form from the 'intersubjective' entities he takes sentences to be. Thus, when fully elaborated, his framework must provide some realization of the sentence and other linguistic objects in individual psychology; it becomes unclear what is achieved by adopting Cs ontology. Linguistic research might adopt as its proper focus the psychological manifestations of his intersubjective realities. A further problem is that C nowhere explains why. if sentences are intersubjective realities, the prospect of intersubjective comparison or integration never comes up; his view is that rules exist only insofar as they express generalizations that are true of some group of individuals . How is it then that, even adopting Cs ontology, we would never be moved to ask whether some group of individuals actually agrees on the properties of a given sentence? Of course, if C were to agree that systematic (perhaps experimental) comparisons across individuals had some role to play in establishing the nature of the intersubjective realities he posits , then the methodological divide he sees between linguistics and more typical scientific enterprises would collapse, at least in principle. But it is exactly that divide that he sets out to explain. Cs book has a place among the readings in a graduate course in the philosophy of linguistics . The methodological contrast from which he begins has been a continuing source of confusion , and this work can help to focus discussion aimed at uncovering its sources and implications. [Wayne Cowart. University of Southern Maine.) Readings in translation theory. Ed. by Andrew Chesterman. Helsinki: Oy Finn Lectura Ab, 1989. Pp. 200. This book might have made a good textbook for a course in translation theory; unfortunately, it is not one. Only one point comes across clearly in this anthology, namely, that good translation is hard work. The unsatisfactoriness of this collection of papers cannot be attributed to the various authors, among whom are John Dryden on 'Metaphrase , paraphrase, and imitation' (7-12), Roman Jakobson with 'On linguistic aspects of translation' (53-60), J. C. Catford on 'Translation shifts' (70-9), and Eugene A. Nida on 'Science of translation' (81-98). The book's shortcomings are primarily due to the editing. Chesterman's selections are too brief to convey any well-reasoned point: the average length of the sixteen articles here is under twelve pages. (Actually, it is little more than ten, if one discounts the editor's introduction for each paper.) No depth of thought on the involved subject of translation can be developed in so little space. Worse still, a number of the selections were not written to stand independently as they do here; the editor lifted them out of the middle of longer works. Chesterman does provide just enough background to make these articles almost comprehensible on their own, but the reader still aches to understand the authors' full contexts. The psychological effect of reading through this book is that of walking into a university building and standing by the door of each classroom for only five minutes. Mechanical lapses in the editing mar the book as well: one finds throughout the use of the hyphen for the em-dash, noncompound words inexplicably hyphenated in the middle of lines, assorted typos, and a line dittography (9-10). The editor has translated a number of the articles from French and German for this allEnglish anthology. I cannot vouch for the translations , but they generally read smoothly and coherently. The editor intended this book to serve as an overall introduction to the field of translation theory (5); at best the reader will make an acquaintance with the names ofa handful of translation theorists. [Brian M. Sietsema, Meniam-Webster. Inc...

Florian Coulmas (ed.), Conversational routine: Explorations in standardized communication situations and prepatterned speech. The Hague: Mouton, 1981. Pp. xii + 331.

Florian Coulmas (ed.), Conversational routine: Explorations in standardized communication situations and prepatterned speech. The Hague: Mouton, 1981. Pp. xii + 331.

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access FLORIAN COULMAS (ed.) A Festschrift for Native Speaker The Hague: Mouton, 1981. 406 pp. JANET HOLMES JANET HOLMES Victoria University of Wellington Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Applied Linguistics, Volume 5, Issue 1, Spring 1984, Pages 66–67, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/5.1.66 Published: 01 March 1984 Article history Received: 01 May 1983 Published: 01 March 1984