REVIEWS713 here—as in faithfully marking all the vowels for tone, rather than leaving an unmarked one for either high or low tone—a practice that seems to characterize ER 74's reports. Note also that there is no motivation for her analysing the same verb stem in different ways : tut and túy(á) 'place' (107). One could cite other questionable analyses or debatable matters raised by R's description. This is to be expected. What I do not understand is the insularity of this study. It describes an African language with practically no reference at all to other studies of related dialects and languages. It does not even relate itself to the very sophisticated literature in African linguistics that has arisen in the last decade or so. One gets a sad impression of intellectual isolationism. REFERENCES Noss, Philip A. 1973. Introduction to Gbaya. Meiganga, Cameroon: Centre de Traduction Gbaya. Pp. 265. (Mimeographed.) Samarin, William J. 1966. The Gbeya language. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. [Received 27 June 1977]. The non-Semitic languages of Ethiopia. Ed. by M. Lionel Bender. (Committee on Ethiopian Studies, Occasional papers series, monograph 5.) East Lansing, Michigan: African Studies Center, Michigan State University, 1976. Pp. xvi, 738. $10.00. Reviewed by F. R. Palmer, University of Reading To a large extent, the non-Semitic languages of Ethiopia are co-extensive with those that were formerly all called Cushitic, but have more recently been divided into Cushitic and Omotic ; several Cushitic languages (in the restricted sense) are spoken in the south and east of Ethiopia (Somali is an obvious example). Other languages in the west are, very tentatively, classed together as NiIoSaharan . Even today, little is known about most of these languages; hence this book, with contributions from more than twenty different scholars, is very welcome. It has five parts: 1, 'Background'; 2, 'Cushitic'; 3, 'Omotic'; 4, 'Nilo-Saharan'; and 5, 'Other topics'. Most of the chapters in the three central parts are structural sketches of individual languages. Those that are new are extremely useful. The chapter on Beja (Richard A. Hudson), however, has appeared before, with minimal differences; that on Dasenech (Hans-Jürgen Sasse) is an elaboration of an earlier article. There is one oddity among them, the TG-type analysis of Afar (Loren Bliese). It is not simply that the TG framework disguises the typological characteristics that relate the language to others; Bliese's own presentation is unhelpful. Only the first four PS rules and part of the lexicon are in the familiar TG symbolization. The remaining PS rules (called 'subcategorization rules'), the T rules, and the P rules are stated in full English sentences with terms such as 'become', 'is found in', and 'is derived from', in place of the symbols. This loses the essential explicitness of the model (which Bender praises in his justification of the chapter, 14), as well as its economy. Not surprisingly, Bliese's chapter is a very long one; and its length is extended by the decision to take up a whole page with a distinctive-feature matrix of the phonemes. This is wholly uninformative, since anyone could have arrived at a similar 714LANGUAGE, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3 (1978) matrix on the basis of the phonemic inventory alone—and the section on phonological rules is wholly in terms of phonemes, with no reference at all to these features. There seems to be little point in this whole exercise. Anyone who cannot or will not understand the symbolization of TG will not find this any easier or more acceptable. The structural sketches are useful as a source of typological information, but they differ widely in their treatment of the material. There are, of course, problems of analysis and terminology, and therefore of what can be treated as comparable. Thus, in 'Highland East Cushitic', Grover Hudson says that all the languages show probable traces of 'polarity', seen in the reversal of gender between the singular and the plural of nouns. But we have to wonder what sense it makes to say that mase. pi. and fem. pi. forms are feminine and masculine respectively; we may see more sense in the decision by Jean Lydall in 'Hamer' to refuse...
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Dec 1, 1979
A.V Issatschenko 
Open Access