17.1511, Review: Lang Description/Indo-European Lang: Tenser (2005)

Tue May 16 21:35:06 UTC 2006

LINGUIST List: Vol-17-1511. Tue May 16 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.1511, Review: Lang Description/Indo-European Lang: Tenser (2005)

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1)
Date: 11-May-2006
From: Harald Hammarström < harald2 at cs.chalmers.se >
Subject: Lithuanian Romani 

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 16 May 2006 17:32:59
From: Harald Hammarström < harald2 at cs.chalmers.se >
Subject: Lithuanian Romani 

Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-2754.html 

AUTHOR: Tenser, Anton 
TITLE: Lithuanian Romani
SERIES: Languages of the World/Materials 452
PUBLISHER: Lincom GmbH
YEAR: 2005

Harald Hammarström, Graduate School of Language Technology, 
Chalmers University of Technology/Gothenburg University 

The book at hand is aimed at describing Lithuanian Romani, a 
previously undescribed variety of Baltic Romani. The book is clearly 
written, chapter-wise evenly balanced and very concise -- only 62 
pages -- it can be read from cover to cover in an hour or two.

Since there isn't any, the introduction contains no history of research 
but, in addition, it is in very scant on ethnographic information. 
Speaker numbers are assessed and the relevant political history of 
region is drawn up but no information is presented on the social 
conditions, subsistence patterns or history of the speakers in 
question. However, as linguists, we can glean some history through 
loans, which are predominantly from Polish and Russian, but 
curiously, in spite of a long time in Lithuanian territory, Lithuanian 
Romani has borrowed little or nothing from Lithuanian. The 
explanation given is that, although Lithuanian was spoken by a 
considerable population, it was not the dominant official or upper class 
form of communication during these times.

With this publication, the classification of Lithuanian Romani can be 
confirmed to be within the Northeastern (''Baltic'') group of Romani (as 
preliminarily assessed by Matras (2002: 10). However, the status of 
Lithuanian Romani or Baltic Romani as a separate language as 
opposed to dialect does not seem to have interested the author at all.

The book sets off describing phonology and the morphology of nouns, 
adjectives, verbs and the rest in the standard order and the standard 
way -- just the way one wants it. Every morpheme has been analyzed 
as to whether it is inherited or borrowed and its relation to other 
Romani varieties. These matters are obviously the main interest of the 
author and are masterfully categorized. Lithuanian Romani has 
borrowed massively into its lexicon and inventory of grammatical forms 
and functions. Except for old (mainly Greek) loans, everything is 
borrowed from Slavic, predominantly Polish and Russian. In this 
regard, one suspects the wording of the author is unnecessarily 
vague; often given as 'from Slavic', but the present reviewer has not 
found anything that is necessarily non-Polish non-Russian Slavic, let 
alone something necessarily South Slavic (unless absence of 
infinitives counts as South Slavic influence). 

Despite the brevity, the author managed to attend to all the important 
matters; palatalization, stress, derivational, inflectional, valency 
changing morphology etc. However, only one or two exceptions to the 
presented paradigms are mentioned. Surely, in a language like this 
where we find fossilized case forms and lots of old stem classes, it 
would be remarkable if there weren't more individual idiosyncratic 
words.

Likewise, all major questions on clausal syntax are answered and 
phrasal syntax appears straightforward enough to glean from 
examples. Remarkably well-portioned tables and glossings give the 
reader an instant eagle-eye shot of the language. But to be able to 
speak the language one would need to know more details.

The description is based on the recordings of the Romani 
Dialectological Questionnaire (RDQ) (Elsík and Matras 2001) filled in 
by the author with 8 speakers, and in addition personal 
communication with recent Lithuanian Roma immigrants to 
Manchester. This brings me to my only disappointment with the book; 
everywhere in the descriptions of various morphological and syntactic 
phenomena we find comments like ''only such and such occurred in 
the sample'' so soon one builds up a great curiosity to know what and 
how much ''the sample'' contains. Presumably, the sample refers to the 
RDQ but nowhere is the scope and content of RDS elaborated on. If 
one wants to know, one has to set about to obtain the hard-to-find 
RDQ publication from Manchester University. It would have been 
much better if this information were contained within the covers of this 
book. Moreover, there are a couple of unnecessary gaps that should 
have been re-checked with the speakers when the sample wasn't 
enough. For example, only two ordinal number formations 
(vavir 'other/second' and oxto-to 'eighth', p. 15) are taken up, and we 
are told ''rarely yes/no questions are formed by the head-movement of 
the copula'' (p. 57). It would have been simple to elicit the information 
needed for a full treatment of these two cases.

CONCLUSION

This, although short, book is a great contribution in that it documents 
a previously undescribed variety. It has a few minor gaps in coverage 
but is in contrast very strong on the historical side.

REFERENCES

Elsík, V. and Y. Matras (2001). Romani dialectological questionnaire. 
Department of Linguistics, University of Manchester.

Matras, Y. (2002). Romani: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge 
University Press. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Harald Hammarström is a PhD Student in Computational Linguistics at 
the Depertment of Computing Science at Chalmers University of 
Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. His current research topic is 
Unsupervised Learning of Concatenative Morphology but interests go 
significantly wider and include linguistic typology and computational 
linguistics in general.

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