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@Linguist_CIOL DECEMBER/JANUARY The Linguist 25 SECTION HEADER REVIEWS This is an unusual work, if only for the sheer range of languages that have been studied in the remotest parts of the world: it covers South East Asia, Oceania, Africa and South America (with particular reference to the Amazon). Enormous efforts must have gone into collecting data and following up on the various hypotheses that have emerged with regard to the way in which languages can spread with movements of population. These can then diversify, though it is interesting to see the ways in which some languages seem to have had more influence than others. Contact is not always easy, though the sheer range of languages to be found even in relatively limited areas is quite remarkable. Of the 700 or so languages thought to have been spoken in the Amazon basin (an area of 2 million sq km) when the Portuguese arrived, fewer than half have survived, and many of those are under threat as land is taken over for mining, logging and farming. In contrast, New Guinea (just under 290,000 sq km) is home to over 1,000 languages, many of which have survived despite cultural disruption associated with factors such as colonisation, slavery and the spread of Western diseases. This is a highly specialised area and to fulfil the promise of the book's subtitle – 'a global perspective' – a variety of teams have been brought together from universities across the world. They present carefully researched material with a whole range of charts and maps. It is perhaps unfortunate for the less specialised reader that they go into topics such as genetic phynologies and partible paternities, but the first section of the book covers general approaches to the subject, including key concepts relating to language diversity and contact. That makes for very interesting and informed reading. Professor Tim Connell HonFCIL Language Dispersal, Diversification and Contact Mily Crevels and Pieter Muysken (eds) Oxford Linguistics, 2020 360 pp; ISBN 978-0198723813 Hardback £75 syntax. The last part alone comprises a forensic analysis of person, number, tense, mood and voice. A close reading of an extract from a canonical text follows (e.g. The Iliad, Annals, Beowulf ). Its script, transliteration, word-by-word translation and final version are worked through painstakingly. Similar forms and meanings traced across linguistic boundaries are highlighted as "points of contact" between languages: 'kin', 'loud' and 'ode' have Ancient Greek origins. The numerals one to ten are usually the best conserved words in a language; the pronunciation may change, but the spelling rarely does. Kinship words behave similarly. Indo-European family resemblances are clear: pitar (Sanskrit), patēr (Greek), pater (Latin), 'father' (English), Vater (German). The changes in initial and middle consonants are accounted for by Grimm's Law. The reason for greater flexibility in word order is made clear. More opaque, from an anglophone perspective, is tracing the complete meaning of a word with a stem that has six or eight case endings. When the Romans needed new words to talk about mathematics, philosophy and theology, they looked to Sicily and other Greek outposts. These words passed into other European languages via monasticism and the vernacular tongues. Latin phrases carry a heavy semantic load and impress with their brevity: cēterīs paribus ('other things being equal'); fiat lux ('let there be light'). English, in contrast, no longer has the inflected forms of its Old and Middle variants. Instead, we use word order, pronouns, prepositions and auxiliary verbs. The subjunctive is now expressed in part by modality (e.g. 'must', 'should', 'will'). Indo-European inflections occur in predictable patterns, but phonological change can disrupt them. New verbs are regular by default (e.g. vacuum+ed) while old words display established forms (e.g. 'man'/'men'). This is because "language users don't create irregularity spontaneously; but they are certainly happy to retain it." Change occurs at different rates. 'Summer has come' was sumer is icumen in Middle English, closely related to the modern German sommer ist gekommen. Other languages covered here are Old Irish ("arguably the most difficult… almost willfully so"), Welsh ("quite straight forward by comparison") and Hebrew, not Indo-European but included because of biblical scholarship and its influence on ancient languages. A couple of minor criticisms: the sections on phonological change would benefit from diagrams and more widely understood script. And 'dead' languages? 'Ancient' would be better. Now, I'm off to find my Latin primer! Graham Elliott MCIL How Dead Languages Work Coulter H George OUP, 2020 240 pp; ISBN 978-0198852827 Hardback £20 Do the Greeks have a word for it? Whatever it may be, the answer is yes, according to the author of this erudite and scholarly work. A classicist, linguist and professor at the University of Virginia, he claims that Ancient Greek – via its highly inflected grammar, epic tales, Socratic inquiry, Olympic spirit and more – presents the reader with unique insights. His task is to convince the 'Greekless'! For each language under scrutiny, he reviews the phonology, morphology and