Publications received / Ouvrages reçus / Eingegangene schriften

. 2000 . The Keys of Egypt: The race to read the hieroglyphs . London : HarperCollins , x1 , 335 pp. [The authors, husband-and-wife archaeologists with several semi-popular books on classical archaeology to their credit, have done a first-rate job of recounting the rivalry between the English polymath Thomas Young (1773–1829) andthe French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) to earn their nation the credit for deciphering hieroglyphic writing. The story is set against the backdrop of British-French warfare in the time of Napoleon, to whose fortunes those of Champollion andhis elder brother-cum-godfather Jacques-Joseph Champollion-Figeac (1778–1867) were directly tied. It is no surprise that Champollion le jeune emerges as hero, and deservedly so, given the persistence and independence of mind with which he pursued a solution based on two premisses no one else thought viable: that the languages of the hieroglyphs might be related to modern Coptic, and that their representation might be a mixture of the ideographic and the phonographic with the latter predominant. But it is refreshing to see Young partially reemerge from Champollion’s shadow to receive due credit for discoveries crucial to the eventual decipherment. The received myth that the Rosetta Stone was the key to this is thoroughly exploded – it did no more than confim a few already established deductions. The villain of the piece is A. J. Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838), with excerpts from his correspondence revealing a self-serving, double-dealing petty tyrant, abusing his position at the top of the French linguistics hierarchy by promoting loyal mediocrities and doing his best to destroy those with promise who might one day bid for his throne. The technicalities of the decipherment are explained with a judicious use of linguistic examples that pose no obstacle to anyone unfamiliar with the languages involved.]

ed. 2001 . Von Eleganz und Barbarei: Lateinische Grammatik und Stilistik in Renaissance und Barock . (= Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, 95 .) Wiesbaden : Otto Harrassowitz in Kommission ( for Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel ), 288 pp. [The volume resulted from an Arbeitsgegespräch (workshop) heldat the renowned Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel (where Lessing was once the chief librarian), 7–8 October 1999. (For a detailed conference report, see Ludger Kaczmarek, “Von Antibarbaren, goldenen und anderen Zeiten”, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft 9.250–268 [1999].) To this volume the paper by Franz Josef Worstbrock on Niccolà Perotti’s (1429–1480) Rudimenta grammatices has been added. After a brief introduction by the editor, the contributions begin with ReinholdF. Glei’s “Die Grammatica speculativa des Thomas von Erfurt (um 1300)” (11–28), and end with Markus Beck’s, “Antibarbari Halensis” (255–277), actually on Christoph Cellarius (1638–1707) andhis popular Liber de Latinitate mediae et infimae aetatis siue Antibarbarus, first publishedin 1677. The back matter consists of a “Personenregister” (279–288), which unfortunately does not provide any life-dates. Among the other contributions to the volume are “Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457), Elegantiarum linguae Latinae libri sex (1449)” by the ed.; “Von den Aufgaben des Grammatikers: Julius Caesar Scaligers De causis linguae Latinae (1540)” by Dieter Cherubim; “Les Institutiones grammaticae Latinae de Nicolas Clénard(1538)” by Pierre Swiggers, and“Die grammatischen Werke des Gerardus Iohannes Vossius [(1577–1649)]” by Jürgen Leonhardt. – E. F. K. Koerner.]

Bibliographie Linguistique de l’année 1997 et compléments des années précédentes / Linguistic Bibliography for the Year 1997 and supplements for previous years Edited by Mark Janse & Sijmen Tol with the assistance of Inge Angevaare & Theo Horstman [ anda number of international contributors – see pp. v – vii , for their listing ]. Dordrecht – Boston – London : Kluwer Academic Publishers , 2001 , xci1 , 1,609 pp. [This is another fat BL volume carrying a total of 23,434 entries, which makes it about what now seems to have become the norm since the early 1990s. Judging by the sheer number of publications, linguistics is alive and well; given its importance for the field, the only long-standing regret is that BL appears so many years late. One keeps hoping that this will change, with monies that have traditionally been going to host the International Congress of Linguists every five years (an exercise which surely has lost its value at a time that there are more conferences available for everyone than s/he couldaffordto participate in) being redirectedto increase the staff at the BL office locatedin the Royal Library of the Netherlands in the Hague. BL is by far the most sizable andstill the most important bibliographical sourcebook in the field. The full “Index of names” (1423–1609) also includes references to book reviews, a useful feature introduced several years ago. (The page references to the latter are given in italics.) Given the breadth of the subjects, areas, and periods covered by historiographers, users of the BL interestedin linguistic historiography will appreciate that the History of Linguistics section continues to be subdivided into a variety of subsections from “Western traditions” more generally via “Antiquity”, “Middle Ages”, etc. down to “Non-Western traditions”, “Indian tradition” as well as “Arab tradition”, areas in which scholarship has continued to be sizeable. The day that the History of Linguistics in China will require an extra subsection (cf. the report publishedin the Miscellanea section of this double issue) may not be too far off. However, the existence of this HoL section shouldnot prevent historians of linguistics from consulting other sections in BL, such as the one inscribed“Festschriften/Mélanges in honorem” and those listing congress reports as well as the general subsections in sections devoted to specific language fields or preceding (or sometimes even dispersed within) those devoted to general linguistic theory and philosophy of language, not to mention the “Biographical data” section (pp. 118–143: 439 entries altogether) which carries accounts of the life andwork of scholars in the language sciences, bibliographies, obituaries, testimonials, Grußadressen, andthe like. Another more recent – andwelcome – feature maintained in the HoL section is the regular addition of life-dates of authors in entries on individual authors wherever available. We must remain grateful for the existence of such a valuable reference tool. – E. F. K. Koerner.]

eds. 2001 . Alphabets slaves et interculturalité . (= Slavica Occitania, 12 .) Toulouse : Tolosa [ send orders to: Roger Comtet, 256 av. de Grande-Bretagne, F-31300 Toulouse ], 437 pp. [This collective volume contains 17 articles, arranged alphabetically by author, by scholars from many countries, all of them in French (a number of them translatedfrom the English, German or Russian by one of the editors or by Christel Simon). From the contents: Vladimir Mixajlovicˇ Alpatov, “Un projet peu connu de latinisation de l’alphabet russe [directed by Nikolaj Feofanovicˇ Jakovlev (1892–1974) with the assistance of Lev Ivanovicˇ Žirkov (1885–1963), Aleksej Mixajlovicˇ Suxotin (1888–1942), and others during 1929–1930)]”; Sylvie Archaimbault, “Transcription et translittération dans la Grammaire et méthode russes et françaises de Jean Sohier (1724)”; Olivier Azam, “L’histoire controversée de la naissance du premier alphabet slave” (49–91); Roger Comtet, “Aux sources de la transcription du russe en allemand: Wilhelm Heinrich Ludolf (1655–1712)” (135–169); Aleksandr Dmitrievicˇ Dulicˇ enko, “Changements d’alphabets et doubles alphabets dans les langues slaves orientales: Histoire et pratique”; Xavier Galmiche, “Romaine contre gothique: Aspects culturels des options alphabétiques et typographiques dans les pays tchèques au XIXe siècle”; Werner Lehfeldt, “L’écriture arabe chez les slaves”; Irina Vilku-Pustovaïa, “Le roumain/moldave: Histoire d’une guerre des alphabets”. No index. – E. F. K. Koerner.]]

eds. & translators 2001 . George Dalgarno on Universal Language: The Art of Signs (1661) , The Deaf andDumb Man’s Tutor (1680), and the unpublished papers . Oxford& New York : Oxford University Press , xi1 , 456 pp. [A long-awaited work that clearly justifies its extended gestation. A 79-page introduction by the editors situates the work of Dalgarno (c.1620–1687) in the context of 17th-century universal language schemes generally, andtraces the development of his own system across his works. This is followed by five relatively short texts from 1657–1660 in which Dalgarno’s first scheme was put forward (in one case by RichardLove rather than Dalgarno himself). Here, as throughout the volume, the English texts are reproducedin the original orthography, andthe Latin texts are accompanied by a facing English translation. Next comes The Art of Signs (150 pp. including Latin original andEnglish translation), andthen Didascalocophus, or, The Deaf and Dumb mans Tutor in the original English (156 pp.). Then we have three previously unpublished papers by Dalgarno: the Autobiographical Treatise, On Interpretation, andOn Terms of Art.; and lastly, eight letters Dalgarno wrote to various correspondents. Also included are a glossary of the radicals and particles in Dalgarno’s universal language, and a fold-out folio size reproduction of his Lexicon Grammatico-Philosophicum. Substantial bibliography andindex.]

. 2001 . Invisible Genealogies: A history of Americanist anthropology . (= Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology, 1 .) Lincoln, Nebr. & London : University of Nebraska Press , xxvii1 , 373 pp.; 10 portraits . [This first volume in a new series launchedby Regna Darnell andStephen O. Murray is of distinct interest to historians of American linguistics, given that anthropology in North America has a long-standing tradition in studying the indigenous languages of the Americas. From the list of the ten scholars of which the author has provided us with portraits – Ruth Benedict, Boas, A. L. Kroeber, Sapir, Paul Radin (1883–1959), Whorf, Elsie Clews Parsons (1875–1941), A. Irving Hallowell (1892–1974), Lévi-Strauss, andMargaret Mead – we can see that for at least half of these anthropologists the study of Amerindian languages was the main subject. Following an Introduction, in which the author explicates her concept of ‘invisible genealogies’ and points to the distinctive features of the Americanist tradition, there are the following chapters: 1, “History andpsychology as anthropological problems”; 2, “Culture as superorganic [a term coined by Kroeber in 1917]”; 3, “Culture internalized”; 4, “Philosophizing with the ‘other’”; 5, “Linguistic relativity and cultural relativism”; 6, “The challenge of life histories [of American Indian people]”; 7, “Blurred genres and fiction”; 8, “Will the real Americanists please stand?”, and 9, “Reconstructing the metanarrative of anthropology”. Bib. (341–362); general index (363–373). – E. F. K. Koerner.]

. 2001 . Four Ages of Understanding: The first postmodern survey of philosophy from ancient times to the turn of the twentieth century . Toronto-Buffalo-London : University of Toronto Press , xxiii1 , 1019 pp. [This massive tome is a leading American semiotician’s attempt to rewrite the history of philosophy with the linguistic sign at its centre. It is written in a conversational tone and with a generous helping of supposedly postmodern gestures such as labelling its 90-page bibliography “Historically LayeredReferences”. The four parts of the book are more soberly titled: 1. Ancient philosophy: the discovery of ‘reality’; 2. The Latin Age: philosophy of being; 3. The Modern Period: the way of ideas; 4. Postmodern times: the way of signs. The last part begins with Peirce, whom Deely calls the last of the moderns and the first of the postmoderns – thus ensuring that the term ‘postmodern’ cannot possibly mean anything at all (not that it needed much help). Despite these quibbles I cannot help finding this book quite enjoyable to read, though I fear I could not go so far as Thomas A. Sebeok does on the dust jacket: “This magisterial conspectus, nothing less than John Deely’s Summa semioticae, attends to the lofty sweep of Western philosophy from its foundations to the threshold of, and across to, the new millennium […] inseparably intertwining it with the doctrine of the sign […]”.]

. 2001 . La conquista del senso: La semantica tra Bréal e Saussure . Prefazione di René Amacker . Roma : Carocci , 274 pp. [Translated from back cover: The author rereads Saussurean linguistics in relation to that of Bréal andto others in the secondhalf of the 19th century, particularly in France. The aim is to restore certain aspects of Saussure’s thought neglectedby the structuralist Vulgate, andto undo the widespreadbelief that his linguistics lacks a theory of the signified. In fact, far from proposing a semantics centred on the abstract andautonomous structure of langue, Saussure interweaves the notion of ‘system’ with that of ‘subject’. Affirming the psychological nature of associative relations, not only does he bind the system of langue tightly to the speaking subject, he also returns the signified to its subjective matrix, and in so doing connects it to the psychological debates of the time. These aspects, which are now once again very current – the position of the sciences of memory are just one example – emerge in the great attention Saussure pays to the motivation that the speaking subject imposes upon the structuring of meaning, and they delineate a principle of linguistic naturalness within which the radical arbitrariness of the sign is inscribed. The book, investigating the links between Bréal and Saussure, attacks analytically those points at which the theme of the signifie de merges with greatest force (the linguistic sign, the langue/parole dichotomy, diachrony). This theoretical trajectory illustrates the laborious process by which was conquered the research domain of modern linguistic semantics, namely, meaning.]

. 2001 . Gemenschap Tussen de Gothische Spraecke en de Nederduytsche . Fotomechanische herdruck van de editie-1710. Met als bijlage Jean Le Clerc, “Convenance des Langues Gothique @ Flamande” (1710). Ingeleid en bezorg door Igor van de Bilt en Jan Noordegraaf . (= Cahiers voor Taalkunde, 9 .) Amsterdam : Stichting Neerlandistiek VU Amsterdam ; Münster : Nodus Publikationen , 34 [editors’ introduction], 83 [reproduction of ten Kate 1710], and7 [Le Clerc’s review] pp. [This text has as its centre piece the 1710 essay of Lambert ten Kate (1674–1731), to which has been added a lengthy introduction and a reprint of Jean le Clerc’s (1657–1736) review of the essay, first publishedin Bibliothèque Chosie: Pour servir de suite à la Bibliothèque universelle 20.303–314 (1710). – E. F. K. Koerner .]

. 2001 . Aenleiding tot de kennisse van het verhevene deel der Nederduitsche sprake . Facsimile reproductin of the 1723 original , with an introduction by Jan Noordegraaf and Marijke van der Wal . 21 quarto-size vols. Alphen a/d Rijn : Canaletto/Repro Holland BV [address: P. O. Box 107, NL-2400 AC Alphen a/d Rijn, The Netherlands], 1,500 pp. [Lambert ten Kate Hermansz. (1674–1731) is generally regarded as one of the greatest Dutch linguists. His reputation as a pioneering scholar in the field of comparative-historical linguistics has stood the test of time. After almost three centuries, the long-standing admiration for his work is still growing, especially for his Aenleiding tot de kennisse van het verhevene deel der Nederduitsche sprake (‘Introduction to the knowledge of the exalted part of the Dutch language’) of 1723. Ten Kate, an erudite and versatile Amsterdam merchant-scholar, was active in various fields of arts and sciences. From 1710 to 1723 he was engagedin the preparation of the Aenleiding, resulting in two massive volumes of some 750 pages each. In this typographically magnificent publication – regarded as the acme of comparative-historical grammar in the 18th century – Ten Kate shows himself to be thoroughly familiar with the older stages of not only Dutch, but also of many other European languages. His new, well-argued method of grouping the European languages, his classification of the strong verbs and his well-founded etymologies gained Ten Kate great admiration among the leading 19th-century scholars, both within the Netherlands and abroad. Recent research has highlighted other aspects of Ten Kate’s classic, such as his strictly scientific methodology; his observations and descriptions of many language phenomena in contemporary Dutch; the attention he paidto dialectal and ‘sociolinguistic’ variation; and his ideas on morphology. The Aenleiding is an outstanding specimen not only of the Dutch linguistic heritage of the 18th century, but it is also of great importance for the historiography of Germanic studies and of linguistics in general. – E. F. K. Koerner.]

. 2001 . Linguistique arabe: Sociolinguistique et histoire de la langue (= Arabica 48:4.417–609 .) Octobre Leiden : E. J. Brill , 193 pp. [Contents: P. Larcher: “Introduction” (417–418); Jonathan Owens: “Arabic Sociolinguistics” (419–469); Kees Versteegh: “Linguistic Contacts between Arabic and Other Languages” (470–508); Christian-Julien Robin: “Les inscriptions de l’Arabie antique et les études arabes” (509–577); P. Larcher: “Moyen arabe et arabe moyen” (578–609). – E. F. K. Koerner.]

. 2001 . Les origines animales de la culture . Paris : Flammarion , 368 pp. [The author, a philosopher and ‘ethologist’, teaches cognitive science at the École Normale Supérieure and conducts research with the eco-anthropological team at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle. According to the back cover (from which I translate), “Re-examining the notions of tool, communication and rationality,” the author “shows that cultural behaviour does not constitute a breach specific to humans, but emerges progressively in the history of living beings. He suggests moreover that certain animals must be considered as authentic subjects endowed with a history, a self-consciousness, and complex representations”. The book makes a serious attempt at situating current research within the historical framework as it developed from the 17th through the 20th centuries. The nicely detailed chapter entitled “Est-ce que les animaux disent quelque chose à quelqu’un? Paradoxes et complexités des communications animales” (pp. 169–233) is accompanied, as is every other chapter, by a substantial discussion of bibliographical sources (in this case 7 pp. set in small type). It would be hard not to be impressed with an index in which Malebranche figures between two chimps named Macho and Mama.]

ed. 2001 . Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics . Oxford & New York : Pergamon , 1,032 pp. in small-4° . [This is yet another spinoff volume from the 10-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics of 1994. It contains altogether 285 articles, including 80 entries on (mostly living) scholars since, for the editor at least, “sociolinguistics as a specially demarcated area of language study only dates to the early 1960s” (p. 1). Many of the articles have been updated and some 40 of them are entirely new. (From the 80 biographical entries altogether 50 are original.) The regular articles are organized under the following headings: “Foundations of Society and Language”; “Language and Interaction”; “Language Variation: Style, situation, function”; “Language Variation and Change: Dialects and social groups”; “Language Contact [with no entry on ‘language conflict’]”; “Language, Power and Inequality”; “Language Planning, Policy, Practice”; “Language and Education”; “Methods in Socioinguistics”, and – a useful innovation – a section on “The Profession”, with articles on “Institutions and resources”, “Endangered language projects”, “Internet resources for sociolinguistics”, etc. – To give an idea of the kind of articles included in this massive volume from “Anthropological Linguistics” (Elizabeth Keating” to “Vernacular” (Ronald K. S. Macauley): “Ecology of language” (J. M. Y. Simpson); “Multiculturalism and language” (John R. Edwards); “Saussurean tradition and sociolinguistics” (John E. Joseph); “Phatic communion” (David Abercrombie); “Speech act theory: overview” (Keith Allan); “Forensic phonetics and sociolinguistics” (Paul Foulkes & J. P. French); “Foreigner talk” (Michael Clyne); “Language enclaves” (Klaus J. Matteier); “Manipulation” (Norman Faircloth); “Standardization” (Einar Haugen); “Applied linguistics and sociolinguistics” (Dennis R. Preston); “Ebonics and African American vernacular English” (John Baugh); “Pidgins, creoles and minority dialects in education” (Jeff Siegel); “Corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics” (Mark Sebba & Steven D. Fligelstone, revised by William A. Ketzschmar, Jr.). One regrets the absence of an article on the history of sociolinguistics, a subject on which useful information (including a rich bibliograhy) can be found in the present writer’s paper on “William Labov and the Origins of Sociolinguistics” in Folia Linguistica Historica 22.1–40 (2001). It makes special reference to late 19th and early 20th century dialectological andpre-1960 socio-linguistic work which appears to have been written out of the record, as the absence of names like Theodor Frings (1886–1968), Paul Hanly Furfey (1896–1991), Louis Gauchat (1866–1942), Jakob Jud (1882–1952), Gesinus Gerhardus Kloeke (1877–1963), André Martinet (1908–1999), Sever Pop (1910–1960), and others from the “Profiles of Sociolinguistics” section suggest, which by contrast includes a number of others (like M. M. Bakhtin, Franz Boas, Sir George Grierson, Wallace Lambert, Edward Sapir, or Randolph Quirk), whom one might not expect to find. (Entries on Muriel R. Saville-Troike (b.1936), Robin Lakoff (b.1942), Deborah Tannen (b.1945) do not include their year of birth.) There is a name index (of 29 pages) and a very detailed subject index (of 48 pages), but also an alphabetical list of articles anda list of contributors. – E. F. K. Koerner.]

. 2000 . Van Hemsterhuis tot Stutterheim: Over wetenschapsgeschiedenis . Münster : Nodus , 216 pp., 5 illustr . [Here is yet another collection of recent papers by the author; 9 regular articles, and 5 sketches of a more biographical nature. The first are entitled “De wetten van de taal”; “Achttiende-eeuwse taalbeschouwing”, “Inleiding tot Lambert ten Kate [see also the entries on ten Kate in this rubric]”, “Brugsma, Wurst en Becker: Taalkundige relaties in de negentiende eeuw”; “Matthias de Vries en het einde van de retorica”, “Uit het verleden van een historicus: De taalkundige ambities van de jonge Huizinga”, “Constituentenanalyse: Het spoor terug”, “De bloemen van het kwaad”, and “Carry van Bruggen over taalmeesters: C. F. P. Stutterheim en de taalkunde”. The other part of the book is inscribed “Pro memorie”, andcontains the following pieces: 1, “Nog eens Weiland en Adelung: Een aanvulling op Eickmans; 2, “L. A. te Winkel en de brooddronken jongelui”; 3, “Gonne: Uit het familiealbum van Matthias de Vries”; 4, “Gabelentz en Hoogvliet over partikels”, and 5, “Noam Chomsky en zijn Nederlandse uitgevers: Twee retouches [on which compare the note in HL 28:1/2.225–228 (2001)]”. The volume is rounded out by an “Index nominum”. – E. F. K. Koerner.]

. 2000 . Saussure . (= Figures du Savoir, 24 .) Paris : Les Belles Lettres , 174 pp. [Claudine Normand has an almost legendary stature among French historians of late 19th/early 20th-century linguistics. This little book, published in a series of not overly-simplified guides to important thinkers, offers a clear-headed view of Saussure as a figure within his time, minus the misreadings of later generations. In a highly original approach, Normand devotes the first part of the book to the Cours de linguistique générale, read in its own terms, and the second part to the ‘questions and controversies’ raised by the source materials. The book includes brief biographical notices on 22 linguists who figure in the book as well as a chronology of Saussure’s life. The bibliography is also brief, and there is no index.]

. 2000 . I See a Voice: A philosophical history of language, deafness and the senses . London : Flamingo . [This is the paperback edition of a book first published in 1999 by HarperCollins. Although wide-ranging and aimed at a general audience, this is a solidly researched piece of work that deserves the attention of historians of linguistics. Its 30 chapters include ones entitled: “Spiritual Etymology: Language, history and the source of the soul”, “‘ Seeing Words’ and the Beginnings of Deaf Education: Speech and writing, face-reading and hand-language, 1550–1670”, “Methodical Signs and Spiritual Salvation: Signs, syntax and abstract ideas: the Abbé de l’Épée and deaf education in France, 1745–1780”, “Tradition and the Power of Speech: De Gérando and the second reaction against sign language in France, 1825–1860”, “Writing and the Analysis of Speech: Phonetics, phonology and the reinvention of the alphabet, 1775–1916”, “The Science of Sign Languages: Language and non-language rom Saussure to Stokoe, 1950–1995: Science, metaphysics and linguistic structure”. Richly illustrated and with a comprehensive index.]

[( 1710–1796 )]. 2000 . An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense . Critical ed. by Derek R. Brookes . (= The Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid, [unnumbered] .) Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press , xxv1 , 345 pp. [This is the first paperback publication of Brooke’s 1997 edition of Reid’s first important work, which appeared in 1764. It includes a brief but helpful introduction to Reid and to the debate with David Hume that gave rise to this and the two other books by Reid which laid the foundation of Scottish ‘common-sense’ philosophy. It has particular interest for linguists because of the central role occupied by the structure of languages in determining the validity of our analytical concepts, as well as the position occupied by our understanding of innate ‘natural signs’ as the basis of visual perception. The 15 pp. of explanatory notes are all useful, and more would not have been unwelcome. This critical edition is based on the 4th ed. of 1785, the last to appear in Reid’s lifetime, and all the “substantive variants” among the four editions are given in the textual notes. Finally there is a short selection of manuscript essays relating to the topics of the Inquiry, and an exchange of letters with Hume. A register of the editions of the work, and a page concordance for the most important of these, are followed by a comprehensive index.]

. 2000 . Logic and the Art of Memory: The quest for a universal language . Transl. by Stephen Clucas . London : Athlone , xxviii1 , 333 pp. [Translation of the 2nd ed. of Clavis universalis: Arti della memoria e logica combinatoria de Lullo a Leibniz, an important and pioneering work (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1983) which first appeared in 1960. It argues that the development of systems of ‘real characters’ needs to be read in the context of the ‘logico-encyclopaedi’ and mnemnotechnical traditions. The book includes nearly fifty pages of relevant original Latin, Italian andFrench texts that are difficult to access; no translation of these is provided. There are extensive notes and a good index.]

. 2002 . Écrits de linguistique générale . Édition de Simon Bouquet et de Rudolf Engler, avec la collaboration d’Antoinette Weil . (= Bibliothèque de Philosophie, [unnumbered] .) Paris : Éditions Gallimard , 364 pp. [As the great majority of people interested in Saussure’s work can read French, it occurredto me that I could reproduce the text of the summary that is printed on the back of the cover of this most interesting book, which is Based largely on materials by Saussure himself discovered only in 1996, eighty years after the publication of the Cours. These texts, in places supplemented by selected passages from students notes (pp. 139–237) which Engler had previously made available in the édition critique (1968, 1974) but in a fragmented way, confirm many statements in the ‘vulgata’ text, but also offer a number of specifications and nuances to what we have known of Saussure’s linguistic thinking. The book makes for intriguing reading. The present volume contains a detailed “Index rerum” (337–348), many times better than the one of the Cours, which does not even include a single reference to Saussure’s term ‘terme’, which is so central to his argument. – “La découverte en 1996, dans l’orangerie de l’hôtel de Saussure à Genève, des manuscrits d’un « livre sur la linguistique générale » qu’on croyait définitivement perdu jette un jour nouveau sur la pensée du refondateur moderne des sciences du langage. Publiées pour la première fois dans la présente édition, ces pages sont réunies avec l’ensemble des écrits de Saussure concernant la linguistique générale conservés à la Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Genève. Grâce à ces textes, une nouvelle lecture de la pensée saussurienne peut prendre forme, permettant de briser une gangue épaisse de préjugés. Ils obligent à revoir l’image qui s’était fixée sur la foi de la reconstruction de la pensée du maître par ses élèves, effectuée dans le Cours de linguistique générale, paru en 1916. Le linguiste genevois apparaît aujourd’hui, dans ses écrits originaux, à la fois comme un épistémologue de sa discipline et comme un philosophe, soucieux de dénoncer les illusions de toutes sortes dont le langage est l’occasion pour repenser les fondements de son étude. À l’orée du XXIe siècle, l’héritage retardé de cette pensée entre en résonance de façon étonnamment actuelle avec les questionnements des sciences du langage, des sciences humaines et des philosophies du langage. La manière saussurienne de s’interroger sur la nature du sens du langage demeure, plus que jamais, dérangeante.” An index of names wouldhave been a nice feature to have, since historians of linguistics might wish to study those passages in which Saussure refers to Baudouin de Courtenay, Brugmann, Curtius, et tous ces gars. – E. F. K. Koerner.]

1998 . Western Linguistics: An historical introduction . Oxford& Malden, Mass. : Blackwell , xv1 , 570 pp. [Although marketed as a textbook, this volume presupposes a considerable amount of previous familiarity with various trends, traditions, and theories of language and of linguistics. It has two main parts. The first contains the following chapters: 1, “Linguistics from Antiquity till the seventeenth century” (pp. 3–48); 2, “The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (49–139); 3, “The twentieth century: Europe” (140–176), and 4, “The twentieth century: America” (178–296); the second part is devoted to Chapters 5, “Predicate Calculus: from Aristotle to generalized quantifiers [in the work of Frege, Russell, and their modern successors]” (297–366); 6, “The study of [largely formal approaches to] meaning [from Leibniz to 20th-century logicians and/or philosophers]” (367–458), and 7, “Meaning and grammar [from the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions to Generative Semantics of the 1960s and1970s]” (459–527). Bib. (528–559); general index (560–570). – As the above list suggests, the author has in effect written two books, something which has been recognized by others as well; for instance, very recently a German translation, by Michael Richter, of Part I has appeared under the title of Sprachwissenschaft des Abendlandes: Eine Ideengeschichte von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren, 2001), v, 439 pp. An interesting little story is Seuren’s Section 4.4.5 on the history of tree diagrams (219–226), which he traces back to Wilhelm Wundt’s (1832–1920) Logik: Eine Untersuchung der Prinzipien der Erkenntnis und der Methoden wissenschaftlicher Forschung (Stuttgart: Enke, 1880), notably p. 57, although it is rather doubtful that any of the transformationalists, Chomsky included, took their ‘trees’ from there. More likely, they got the idea from Eugene A. Nida’s (b.1914) very popular and widely used 1946 textbook Morphology (2nded., Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1949), p. 87. For fuller reviews of Seuren’s book, see F. G. Droste in Linguistics 37:4.65–77, Julia S. Falk in Language 75:4.813–816, Laura & Radu Daniliuc in Linguist List item 10–887, and Reinier Salverda in Bulletin of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistics No. 33 (all dating from 1999) – E. F. K. Koerner.]