Half the ancient world.(The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages)(Book Review)

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages, edited by Roger D. Woodard; Cambridge University Press, 2004, $299.

ALTHOUGH THE TITLE of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages promises a great deal that might be of interest to a general reader interested in the subject or a student of linguistics, ultimately it fails to fulfil its encyclopedic aim by glossing over or ignoring much material that, even if controversial, does try to address the lacunae of our understanding. The result is a volume that by excessive cautiousness and an unwillingness to look at other avenues omits from its scope those areas of historical linguistics that have been somewhat of an embarrassment to it.

Whole language families that lie outside the Indo-European group are not even mentioned: Australian Aboriginal languages, Japanese-Korean, the Paleo-Siberian languages. None of these can be said to have arisen ex nihilo in the modern period, and yet there is not the slightest mention of them even in passing. The Tibeto-Burmese group is mentioned in passing as being a subdivision of the Sino-Tibetan language family, and although Ancient Chinese does have a chapter dedicated to it, no information is offered on the predecessors of Tibetan and Burmese. Apart from Mayan and Epi-Olmec, the language groups of most of the Americas are not dealt with.

In the preface the editor states that the volume contains "a linguistic description of all known ancient languages". The introduction further elaborates and defines the scope of the volume by setting the fifth century AD as its chronological limit. Each of the forty-five chapters focuses on a grammatical description of a language, namely the historical and cultural context, writing system, phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon and a concluding list of reference works. The introduction concludes with a short overview of undeciphered languages and lists a fraction of the languages for which we have insufficient records.

As attested by some of the excellent chapters in the present volume, such as the ones on Sumerian and Sanskrit, over the past 150 years historical linguistics has successfully decoded many puzzles for those languages that belonged largely to civilisations that led settled lives characterised by animal husbandry and agriculture and that developed a writing system. For hunter-gatherer civilisations, for whom, it could be argued, a writing system is not essential (here it is worth noting that many early texts deal with land ownership or use and records of agricultural production) the situation is more complex but we are not so totally deprived of clues as the lack of information in the present volume would imply. The interdisciplinary approach of genetics, linguistics and archaeology has been yielding some surprising and controversial results on the movements of ancient populations. The work of Spencer Wells on the Y chromosome, for example, has thrown new light on the enigma of the origins of the Basque population and their language, which, like Sumerian, is an isolate unrelated to Indo-European.

The main linguistic tool employed for reconstructing languages is the comparative method or comparative philology, first developed by Sir ...