12. Book Announcements

Ogmios is very happy to have any items that appear in this section reviewed by readers. As per usual practice, the reviewer keeps the review copy. Please contact the editor if you are interested: naturally this depends whether the publishers are willing to send us a review copy. Titles marked with an a asterisk (*) have already been assigned to a reviewer.

Valentin Vydrine: Esquisse contrastive du kagoro (Manding).
Köln: Köppe, 2001. Mande languages and linguistics, vol. 4. ISBN 3-89645-073-5.

The author, who received the first FEL grant to support some of the research published here, wrote to us: [it is] in French, which will make it accessible to those speakers of the Kagoro language who are literate in the official language of their country. The other problem is that prices of books published by Köppe are usually high, and an average Malian won't be able to buy such a book, but hélas, I can do nothing about it... I asked the editor to send one copy of the book to the FEL. which we have received, and is available for review. - Ed.

I have just returned from a 4-month trip to Africa (Côte d'Ivoire, Mauritania, Guinea) where I worked on different Mande languages, and discovered one unknown language in Guinea, in Futa-Jallon...

We have a brief report on his recent activity, a Joint Research Project on the lexicography of Mani-Bandama (South Mande) languages, which is to appear in the next Ogmios. He adds: Strictly speaking, it doesn't deal with dying languages (the smallest among them, Wan and Tura, are spoken by 50,000-60,000 people). The languages I was working with in Guinea (such as Kakabe and Mogofin) also don't seem to be dying, even if they remain undescribed.

Frances Karttunen and Jan-Ola Östman, ed.: Issues of Minority Peoples.
Dept. Linguistics, University of Helsinki, 2000. 140 pp.

This contains papers:
Alfred W. Crosby: Expansion and collision.
Frances Karttunen: Raising the alarm for endangered Languages.
Jan-Ola Östman: Ethics and appropriation — with special reference to Hwalbáy.
Helena Hamari: Towards additive multilingualism: ... Alabama and Coushatta in Texas
Diana ben-Aaron: Language and minorities on US Independence Day: ‘a note of color’
Alfred W. Crosby and Frances Karttunen: Biodiversity and linguistic diversity in North America: collision and reduction.

Luisa Maffi, ed.: On Biocultural Diversity: Linking language, Knowledge, and the Environment

Luisa Maffi writes maffi@terralingua.org about this, coming out from Smithsonian Institution Press in May.
Based in part on the international working conference Endangered Languages, Endangered Knowledge, Endangered Environments" Berkeley, California, 1996, it unites an interdisciplinary and multicultural group to discuss the common threats to the world's biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity. In addition to theory and case studies, book chapters deal with indigenous peoples' cultural, linguistic, and traditional resource rights and outlines counter-actions needed. For content and ordering information, see http://ucjeps.herb.berkeley.edu/
Maffi-book.html.

She adds:
Also, my NGO Terralingua: Partnerships for Linguistic and Biological Diversity (http://www.terralingua.org) collaborated with WWF International on the project Indigenous and Traditional Peoples of the World and Ecoregion Conservation. The project yielded a cross-mapping of the world's ethnolinguistic groups onto the world's ecoregions and a report outlining an integrated approach to conserving the world's biological and cultural diversity. The report contains recommendations on best practices in working with indigenous peoples in ecoregion conservation, with a special focus on issues of traditional ecological knowledge and use and management of traditional resources. Both the map and the report are available on the web at http://panda.org/resources/
publications/sustainability/indigenous.

John Lynch: The Linguistic History of Southern Vanuatu
(PACIFIC LINGUISTICS 509)

The languages of Erromango, Tanna and Aneityum in Southern Vanuatu form a closed subgroup of Oceanic, and have often been regarded as 'aberrant', especially in terms of their phonological history. In this book Lynch shows that, under a cloak of aberrancy, they are in many ways quite conservative Oceanic languages. Three chapters are devoted to the phonological history of these languages, and there is also a detailed discussion of historical developments in their morphology and syntax. Appendices include lists of lexical reconstructions and of apparent lexical innovations.
2001 ISBN: 0 85883 500 2 334 pp
Price: AUS $49.50 International $45.00

Publications Administrator, Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200 Australia
Tel: +61 (0)2 6249 2742
Fax: +61 (0)2 6249 4896
mailto: jmanley@coombs.anu.edu.au http://pacling.anu.edu.au

Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, ed.: Sourcebook on Tomini-Tolitoli languages: General information and word lists
(PACIFIC LINGUISTICS 511)

This sourcebook presents an edited version of the fieldnotes gathered during an extensive linguistic survey of the Tomini-Tolitoli languages, a group of eleven languages spoken in northern Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. The introductory sections present general information about the Tomini-Tolitoli languages and about the survey, including detailed maps and a few notes on phonology and morphology. The main part holds word lists of each language (between 700 and 1,400 entries per language, often including information on dialect variation). The book thus makes available a rich collection of primary data on Tomini-Tolitoli languages.
2001 ISBN: 0 85883 516 9 xxii + 436 pp.
AUS $59.40 International $54.00
For ordering, see above under John Lynch.

David Rose: The Western Desert Code — An Australian Crypto-grammar
(PACIFIC LINGUISTICS 513)

This volume is a description of the language of Australia's Western Desert peoples, from the perspective of Western Desert culture, focusing on what M.A.K. Halliday has characterised as 'ways of meaning' in the culture. C.M.I.M. Matthiessen (Macquarie University) called it 'an outstanding contribution to semiotic and linguistic scholarship in general and to the description and understanding of Australian Aboriginal languages in particular... the first contribution ever to give a comprehensive account of the semiotic complex of an Australian Aboriginal language-culture, using the resources of a powerful theory to map out this complex along a number of dimensions... K. Davidse (University of Leeuven) writes: '... a tremendously inventive effort of interpretation... I know of no other work which has so consistently related to the relation between code, register, semantics, lexicogrammar and phonology as this Ph.D. thesis'.

2001 ISBN: 0 85883 437 5 xvi + 482 pp.
AUS $59.40 International $54.00
For ordering, see above under John Lynch.

William Lamb: Grammar of Scottish Gaelic
University of Edinburgh and Colaisde Bheinn na Faoghla

This new grammar is the most up-to-date one available. It includes many topics that have never, or only rarely, been dealt with in the available literature, e.g. information structure, complex clause formation, and various types of discourse-related constructions. The grammar ends with sections interjections and exclamations, the influence of English, and a full oral folktale with interlinear translation. It has been informed by an ongoing corpus-based study of register variation in the language, highlighting some of the initial differences that have been found in this data set. It is fully-referenced throughout for further information on Gaelic grammar and sociolinguistics. It also includes a statistically-derived list of the 100 most frequent words in Gaelic with definitions.

ISBN 3 89586 408 0.
Languages of the World/Materials 401.
Ca. 100pp. USD 40 / DM 64 / 22.00. Sept. 2001. A Students' and course discount of 40% is offered to the above title.

LINCOM EUROPA, Freibadstr. 3, D-81543 München, Germany; FAX +49 89 62269404
http://www.lincom-europa.com
LINCOM.EUROPA@t-online.de

Peter Bakker and Marcia Rooker: The political status of the Romani language in Europe

27 June 2001
http://www.ciemen.org/mercator

Tebtebba Foundation: Highlights of the International Conference on Conflict Resolution ...,
Manila, 6-8 Dec 2000

Highlights of the International Conference on Conflict Resolution, Peace Building, Sustainable Development and Indigenous Peoples, at: http://www.tebtebba.org

Mark Warschauer: Technology and Indigenous Language Revitalization — Analysing the Experience of Hawai'i

Hawaiian educators have made ambitious attempts to use new online technologies in language revitalization programs. These efforts have included the development of one of the first bulletin board systems in the world completely in an indigenous language. This paper reports on 2 years of research. It addresses the role of the Internet in affecting linguistic diversity, the relation of multimedia computing to non-Western patterns of communication, and the Internet as a medium to explore cultural and social identity. The results are consistent with a critical theory of technology as a site of social struggle.

Available at:
http://www.gse.uci.edu/markw/
revitalization.html

Contents.