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COPYRIGHT 1996 University of Illinois Press
Edited by Ekkehard Konig and Johan van der Auwera. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Pp. xv + 631. $99.95.
A caveat concerning this review: Quite unusually (I thought), the publisher provided JEGP with a set of uncorrected page proofs rather than a finished book, and it is those page proofs I have worked from. I simply have to assume that the book didn't change too much before it was actually printed, but I can't get too picky about obvious typographical errors either (I did find a bunch).
A second interesting problem presented by this situation is the following: Should I now go out and buy this book for myself, given its rather steep price, or just have our library get it? I've decided to buy a copy, so one can see this review as a justification for that choice.
Following the lead of such works as Comrie (ed.), The World's Major Languages (1987), and more specifically Harris and Vincent (eds.), The Romance Languages (1988), this book gives a remarkably comprehensive, though compact, overview of the modern Germanic languages (twelve of them here, though the editors admit, p. ix, that the boundaries are somewhat arbitrary), and, less in depth, of the older Germanic languages which preceded them. The discussion is structured as follows: An initial chapter briefly introduces the reader to Germanic as a family, and seeks to place the languages to be treated in their proper relationship to each other. This is followed by four chapters on historical dialects, specifically chapters on Gothic, Old and Middle Scandinavian, Old and Middle Continental West Germanic (about the successfulness of this grouping, see more below), and Old and Middle English....
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
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