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Routledge Language Family
The Slavonic Languages (Routledge Language Family Series) New edition by Professor Greville Corbett, Professor Bernard Comrie (2002) Paperback
This book provides a chapter-length description of each of the modern Slavonic languages and the attested extinct Slavonic languages. Individual chapters discuss the various alphabets that have been used to write Slavonic languages, in particular the Roman, Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets; the relationship of the Slavonic languages to other Indo-European languages; their relationship to one another through their common ancestor, Proto-Slavonic; and the extent to what various Slavonic languages have survived in emigration. Each chapter on an individual language is written according to the same general scheme and incorporates the following an introductory section describing the language's social context and, appropriate, the development of the standard language; a discussion of the phonology of the language, including a phonemic inventory and morphophonemic alterations from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives; a detailed presentation of the synchronic morphology of the language, with notes on the major historical developments; an extensive discussion of the syntactic properties of the language; a discussion of vocabulary, including the relation between inherited Slavonic and borrowed vocabulary, with lists of basic lexical items in selected semantic fields colour terms, names of parts of the body and kinship terms; an outline of the main dialects, with an accompanying map; and a bibliography with sources in English and other languages. The book is made particularly accessible by the inclusion of (1) a parallel transliteration of all examples cited from Slavonic languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet and (2) English translations of all Slavonic language examples.
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First published January 1, 1993
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July 16, 2007
The Slavonic Languages, edited by Bernard Comrie and Greville G. Corbett, is one of the best installments in Routledge's Language Family Description series. Originally published in library binding in 1993, it is now available in significantly less expensive paperback, making it finally accessible to students of linguistics.
Comrie and Corbett contribute an Introduction giving a synchronic sketch of some of the general features of the Slavonic languages, such as aspect, rich nominal and verbal morphology, and various oppositions of palatalization. Paul Cubberly has written a chapter on alphabets and transliteration that ranges from the polemic history of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets up to modern literary reforms and 20th century Cyrillic-Latin conversion schema. A chapter on Proto-Slavonic appears from Alexander Schenker, esentially identical to the same chapter in his later book The Dawn of Slavic (Yale University Press, 1996), treating the evolution of Common Slavonic out of (late, NW) Proto-Indo-European. There's also a chapter on the Slavonic languages in emigration, continuing the trend in this series (as in The Germanic Languages) of considering contemporary developments.
The Slavonic languages covered are Old Church Slavonic, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croat, Slovene, Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, Polish, Cassubian, Polabian, Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian. One regrets the lack of Rusyn, but students can rejoice that Polabian is covered in as exhaustive a depth as possible considering its limited attestation, and Cassubian is treated in its own right instead of just getting a brief mention as a "dialect" in the Polish chapter. The treatment of each language varies somewhat, but all include basically the same ordering of grammatical points, synchronically treated, and a section on lexicon. Substantial diachronic details enter only in the chapters on Old Church Slavonic and Polabian. Obviously these can only be sketches, but the bibliographies will send readers off to more detailed descriptions of each language. For Old Church Slavonic, one would do well to add the primers of Schmalstieg (Old Church Slavic) and Nandris (Handbook of Old Church Slavonic: I. Grammar) to the list David Huntley gives in his chapter.
There's very little I could find fault with in this volume. Since the material is from 1993, one might want more timely information on languages in flux such as Ukrainian and Belorussian. Also, if the book were updated, it would certainly be enriched by information on the Slavonic language one spoken in Pannonia (see e.g. Ronald Richard's monograph The Pannonian Dialect of the Common Slavic Proto-Language: The View from Old Hungarian published by UCLA in 2002). Nonetheless, this is the best reference currently out to the Slavonic language family in general, and merits a place in the home library of any student whose interests include comparative Indo-European linguistics or historical Slavonic philology.
Comrie and Corbett contribute an Introduction giving a synchronic sketch of some of the general features of the Slavonic languages, such as aspect, rich nominal and verbal morphology, and various oppositions of palatalization. Paul Cubberly has written a chapter on alphabets and transliteration that ranges from the polemic history of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets up to modern literary reforms and 20th century Cyrillic-Latin conversion schema. A chapter on Proto-Slavonic appears from Alexander Schenker, esentially identical to the same chapter in his later book The Dawn of Slavic (Yale University Press, 1996), treating the evolution of Common Slavonic out of (late, NW) Proto-Indo-European. There's also a chapter on the Slavonic languages in emigration, continuing the trend in this series (as in The Germanic Languages) of considering contemporary developments.
The Slavonic languages covered are Old Church Slavonic, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croat, Slovene, Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, Polish, Cassubian, Polabian, Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian. One regrets the lack of Rusyn, but students can rejoice that Polabian is covered in as exhaustive a depth as possible considering its limited attestation, and Cassubian is treated in its own right instead of just getting a brief mention as a "dialect" in the Polish chapter. The treatment of each language varies somewhat, but all include basically the same ordering of grammatical points, synchronically treated, and a section on lexicon. Substantial diachronic details enter only in the chapters on Old Church Slavonic and Polabian. Obviously these can only be sketches, but the bibliographies will send readers off to more detailed descriptions of each language. For Old Church Slavonic, one would do well to add the primers of Schmalstieg (Old Church Slavic) and Nandris (Handbook of Old Church Slavonic: I. Grammar) to the list David Huntley gives in his chapter.
There's very little I could find fault with in this volume. Since the material is from 1993, one might want more timely information on languages in flux such as Ukrainian and Belorussian. Also, if the book were updated, it would certainly be enriched by information on the Slavonic language one spoken in Pannonia (see e.g. Ronald Richard's monograph The Pannonian Dialect of the Common Slavic Proto-Language: The View from Old Hungarian published by UCLA in 2002). Nonetheless, this is the best reference currently out to the Slavonic language family in general, and merits a place in the home library of any student whose interests include comparative Indo-European linguistics or historical Slavonic philology.
Displaying 1 of 1 review