17.819, Review: Indo-European Langs: Schrammel et al. (2005)

Fri Mar 17 00:06:46 UTC 2006

LINGUIST List: Vol-17-819. Thu Mar 16 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.819, Review: Indo-European Langs: Schrammel et al. (2005)

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Wayne State U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>

Reviews (reviews at linguistlist.org) 
        Sheila Dooley, U of Arizona  
        Terry Langendoen, U of Arizona  

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, Wayne
State University, and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Lindsay Butler <lindsay at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

What follows is a review or discussion note contributed to our 
Book Discussion Forum. We expect discussions to be informal and 
interactive; and the author of the book discussed is cordially 
invited to join in. If you are interested in leading a book 
discussion, look for books announced on LINGUIST as "available 
for review." Then contact Sheila Dooley at dooley at linguistlist.org. 

===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 07-Mar-2006
From: Viktor El?ík < viktor_elsik at email.cz >
Subject: General and Applied Romani Linguistics 

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 18:57:56
From: Viktor El?ík < viktor_elsik at email.cz >
Subject: General and Applied Romani Linguistics 

EDITORS: Schrammel, Barbara; Halwachs, Dieter W.; Ambrosch, Gerd
TITLE: General and Applied Romani Linguistics
SUBTITLE: Proceedings from the 6th International Conference on 
Romani Linguistics
SERIES: LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics H29
PUBLISHER: LINCOM Europa
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2947.html 

Viktor Elsík, Department of Linguistics and Finno-Ugric Studies, 
Charles University, Prague

DESCRIPTION

The book under review is a proceedings volume from the Sixth 
International Conference on Romani Linguistics held in 2002 in Graz, 
Austria. The editors of this volume, who are all affiliated with Karl-
Franzens-Universität in Graz (the first named editor is, in addition, a 
PhD student at the University of Manchester), were also the 
organizers of the conference. The volume consists of 15 papers on 
Romani, an Indo-Aryan language spoken by Roms and related groups 
(''Gypsies'') in Europe and beyond, plus an ''Introduction'' (pp. 1-6) by 
two of the editors, Barbara Schrammel and Dieter W. Halwachs.

The remaining papers are grouped into five thematic sections. Section 
1 contains two papers on Romani dialectology. Yaron Matras, in 
his ''The classification of Romani dialects: a geographic-historical 
perspective'' (pp. 7-22), argues for a structure diffusion model of 
Romani dialects, and against a strictly genealogical, migration-based, 
model, which has been common in Romani linguistics. The author 
exemplifies major diffusion processes within Romani and provides 
them with an historical interpretation. Birgit Igla's paper ''Sinti-Manus: 
aspects of classification'' (pp. 23-42) looks into the internal diversity 
and external connections of a particular dialect group of Romani 
spoken in and around Germany, arriving at the conclusion that the 
group is ''astonishingly homogeneous'' (p. 40).

The descriptive Section 2 starts with ''The Plascuny and their dialect: 
preliminary notes'' (pp. 43-47) by Lev N. Cherenkov. This paper is a 
brief report on a little known Rom group of southern Russia, with some 
remarks on their Romani dialect. The author's preliminary analysis of 
the scarce linguistic data suggests that the variety is closely related to 
the so-called North Central dialects of Romani, which are otherwise 
spoken in and around Slovakia. Irene Sechidou's ''The dialect of Ajios 
Athanasios'' (pp. 48-59) is a more substantial sketch, covering 
phonology and morphology, but not syntax, of a previously 
undescribed Romani dialect spoken in a neighbourhood of the city of 
Serres, Greece. ''The vestiges of Caló today'' (pp. 60-78) by Ignasi-
Xavier Adiego is a descriptive study of what has remained of Spanish 
Caló, the secret Gypsy ethnolect of Spanish with numerous lexical and 
some grammatical borrowings from Romani. Unlike most of the 20th 
century Caló research, this paper provides original and reliable data 
acquired through fieldwork. Zoran Lapov's ''The Romani groups and 
dialects in Croatia: with a special emphasis on the Romani borrowings 
in the Croatian language'' (pp. 79-89) presents an overview of the 
numerous subethnic Rom groups in Croatia, including notes on their 
ethnolinguistic vitality. In the second part of the paper, the author 
analyzes 13 Romani loanwords in colloquial Croatian.

Consisting of five papers, the historical linguistic Section 3 is the 
largest of all. Desislava Draganova's ''Turkish verbs in Bulgarian 
Romani'' (pp. 90-98) is a comparative study on patterns of 
morphological integration of Turkish loanverbs in four Romani dialects 
of Bulgaria. The paper shows that although loanverbs from Turkish 
generally retain much of their source language inflection in Romani, 
Turkish morphology is subject to various language-internal (and 
dialect-specific) restructuring processes. Using a sample of three 
Romani dialects of Austria, Barbara Schrammel's ''Borrowed verbal 
particles and prefixes: a comparative approach'' (pp. 99-113) explores 
the role of language contact in the development of directionality and 
actionality markers in Romani, including their contact-induced 
grammaticalization from spatial adverbs. Helena Pirttisaari adopts ''A 
functional approach to the distribution of participle suffixes in Finnish 
Romani'' (pp. 114-127), showing how paradigm analogy, iconicity, and 
typological convergence with Finnish conspire in triggering the 
extension of a borrowed (Greek-derived) participle suffix into the 
indigenous (Indo-Aryan) lexicon. Norbert Boretzky, in his 
paper ''Metathesis and other, functionally related, sound changes in 
Romani'' (pp. 128-143), classifies the rather numerous instances of 
metathesis, prothesis and aphaeresis in the development of Romani 
and its dialects. He adopts a functional view of these phonological 
changes, relying on Vennemann's (1988) findings concerning 
universal preferences for syllable structure. Gitte Grønning 
Simonsen's paper tracks down the ''Semantic changes in body parts 
from Sanskrit to Romani'' (pp. 144-149), more precisely to the extinct 
but well described Welsh Romani.

Section 4 on computational linguistics contains a single 
contribution, ''ROMTWOL: an implementation of a two-level 
morphological processor for Finnish Romani'' by Kimmo Granquist (pp. 
150-162). Though the paper describes the formal structure of a 
language-specific implementation of a morphological parser, it also 
entails a rather detailed and useful sketch of inflectional morphology 
of Finnish Romani, an underdescribed and rather aberrant Romani 
variety.

The sociolinguistic Section 5 starts with Victor A. Friedman's ''The 
Romani language in Macedonia in the third millennium: progress and 
problems'' (pp. 163-173). The paper describes the de-central, usage-
based process of Romani standardisation in Macedonia and examines 
the challenges a stateless and non-territorial language like Romani 
poses to established models of language planning. Jelena Petrovic 
and Lada Stefanovic's ''Sociolinguistic aspects of language of Roma 
refugees from Kosovo: a comparative study'' (pp. 174-181) presents 
an overview of salient sociolinguistic issues in various groups of 
Kosovo Roms in Slovenia and parts of Serbia. The overview also 
includes groups such as Ashkali, whose members deny Rom ethnicity. 
The final paper in the volume, Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin 
Popov's ''Communications between nomadic Gypsy groups'' (pp. 182-
187), explores the patterns of out-group communication in three 
traditionally nomadic Rom groups of Bulgaria, showing how 
socioeconomic and cultural factors strongly disfavour linguistic 
contacts between different nomadic groups, and between nomadic 
groups and groups of sedentary Roms.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

Let me start with the defects of the book. First, I have a slight problem 
with the editor's characterization of Section 2 as 
containing ''descriptive studies on Romani varieties'' (p. 4), since only 
two papers out of four actually describe the structure of a Romani 
variety. Although Adiego's paper on Spanish Caló is a description of a 
variety that (a) is spoken by Gypsies, (b) contains a Romani-derived 
lexical component, and (c) is referred to as ''Spanish Romani'' by the 
author himself, Caló is *not* a variety of Romani in the genealogical 
sense; it is a variety of Spanish. Another contribution that does not 
seem to fit in Section 2 is Lapov's paper on Croatian Romani: the 
paper is basically sociolinguistic, although it also contains an appendix 
on Romani loanwords in Croatian, and so it would perhaps better fit 
the sociolinguistic Section 5. Unfortunately, I have not been able to 
see the academic relevance of Lapov's personal notes such 
as ''Saban [a popular Romani singer] 'confessed' to me that 'the 
Zagreb audience is super!''' (p. 83).

Second, the editors could have done a better job with the English of 
some of the contributions. For example, the context reveals that the 
modal in ''improving sound change *must not* take place'' (p. 139; 
emphasis mine) was intended to express negated necessity (''need 
not'') rather than necessity of a negated proposition, but this confusing 
interference from the author's native German has remained 
uncorrected. Also, there is certain sloppiness with regard to diacritics 
in the graphical representation of some languages, almost exclusively 
in references. For example, while the Czech surname Elsík is 
spelled correctly in two contributions, three contributors have used 
Elsik (e.g. pp. 6, 41, 59) and one Elsik (e.g. p. 140). It should 
be the task of the editors to correct such misspellings, unless they 
want to arouse the cultural sensitivity of a potential reviewer.

There are not many factual errors in the volume. Corrections of some 
of those I have noticed follow: 
East Slovak Romani does *not* possess productive causatives (pp. 9-
10), and the lexeme 'day' does *not* show de-palatalisation of its initial 
dental in this dialect (p. 13) [ë represents schwa -Eds.]; 
The Slavic-derived feminine suffix /-ëc-/ may combine with indigenous 
noun bases in Sinti-Manus (p. 23), e.g. /dzen-ëc-a/ 'female person' in 
Austrian Sinti; 
The North Central, but *not* the South Central, dialects possess the 
suppletive copula stem in /av-/ (p. 35); 
The lexeme /sapano/ 'wet' does exist in most North Central dialects (p. 
39), although it is not documented in easily accessible sources; 
most modern varieties of Finnish Romani do possess a ''new'' infinitive 
of subjunctive origin (p. 40); 
and more.

Being a proceedings volume from a conference with such a general 
theme as 'Romani linguistics', the volume under review inevitably 
contains thematically and methodologically diverse contributions. The 
publisher's squib on the book's cover is quite correct in stating that 
''[t]he collection reflects recent trends in Romani linguistics''. Apart from 
continuing efforts in documenting undescribed or underdescribed 
Romani varieties and in dialect classification, there is also a growing 
body of theoretically oriented contributions, which may be of interest 
to general sociolinguists, typologists, historical linguists and, 
especially, experts in language contact. All these subdisciplines are 
indeed represented in the volume. Several contributors made use of 
one of two major electronic resources that have recently become 
available for students of Romani, the Romani Lexical Database 
(ROMLEX) and the Romani Morphosyntactic Database (RMS). This is 
in line with another salient trend in Romani linguistics, viz. the use of 
modern technology for language documentation and research 
dissemination.

On the one hand, the volume suffers the usual proceedings' 
weakness of containing papers of unequal depth of analysis. On the 
other hand, there are several excellent contributions by junior 
researchers as well as by leading figures in Romani linguistics. If I 
were to highlight a single paper in this volume, I would choose 
Schrammel's well-thought-out and well-written paper on the contact-
induced development of directionality and actionality markers in 
Romani. In my view, no one who works on Romani can afford to miss 
the book, which also contains several contributions that will be 
inspiring to linguists from outside the field of Romani studies.

REFERENCES

RMS = 'The Romani Morphosyntactic Database'. Ed. by Viktor Elsík & 
Yaron Matras. University of Manchester.

ROMLEX = 'ROMLEX: Romani Lexical Database'. Ed. by Yaron 
Matras,  Dieter W. Halwachs & Peter Bakker. 
http://romani.uni-graz.at/romlex.

Vennemann, Theo. 1988. 'Preference laws for syllable structures'. 
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Viktor Elsík has worked as Research Assistant in the linguistics 
departments of the University of Manchester (1998-2004) and Charles 
University, Prague (since 2004). He has been involved in several 
international projects on language contact and linguistic typology, and 
has done extensive fieldwork on Romani. His publications include a 
book on Markedness and language change: the Romani sample (with 
Yaron Matras, Mouton de Gruyter 2006).

-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-17-819	