CROWLEY, T., — An Introduction to Historical Linguistics.

Oxford University Press, Oakland (...), 1994. (Reprint 1st ed.). 331p. Paperback. Nice copy. Appears unread. ‘The field of linguistics began as historical linguistics, and historical linguistics began as Indo-European linguistics. Although a complete conceptual separation of the first two was achieved by the beginning of this century through the work of Saussure, in some quarters the second two have yet to be completely disentangled. It is a great merit of Crowley’s book that he relies primarily on examples drawn from non-Indo-European languages to elucidate the principles of historical linguistics, thereby reminding us of the independence of these principles from the particular facts that led to their formulation. The refreshing and novel character of this text (…) is to some extent a product of practical circumstances: in teaching historical linguistics to Pacific Island students at the University of Papua New Guinea, Crowley discovered that virtually all of the available textbooks are implicitly written for native speakers of English, and draw almost exclusively on Indo-European examples to illustrate points of method and theory. By keeping the nonnative English-speaker in mind, Crowley has succeeded in laying out the main outlines of historical linguistics in an exceptionally lucid and engaging style. (…) [The book - ND] begins with background material that includes an advisory on how to use the book (13-14), a chart of phonetic symbols drawn from the International Phonetic Alphabet (15), and maps of Australia, New Guinea, and a portion of Melanesia (16-19), those areas in which many of the languages referred to in the text are spoken. (…) The remainder (…) consists of thirteen chapters, each followed by a set of ‘reading guide questions’, a set of exercises, and recommendations for further reading. The book concludes with (1) eleven data sets (sets of reconstructed forms and their reflexes in one or more daughter languages (…); (2) a language index with 101 language names (…) ; (3) a list of references; and (4) an index of slightly over three pages. Chapter 1, Introduction, provides an exceptionally clear sketch of why systematic similarities exist between some languages, as well as a useful discussion of the social valuation of linguistic variation and of language planning. (…) Chapter 2, Types of sound change, has two broad purposes: to familiarize the beginning student with common types of sound change, and to reduce the exuberant diversity of attested sound changes to an orderly classification into basic types. On the whole, this is a well-constructed chapter that presents more detail in a clearer form than many older texts. (…) Chapter 3, Expressing sound changes, introduces some common formalisms for stating sound changes, particularly conditioned sound changes. It is a short, but useful chapter, (…). Chapter 4, Phonetic vs. phonemic change, is an excellent introduction to the classification of types of sound change, distinctly superior to the discussions in most other texts. (…) Chapter 5, The comparative method, provides a solid, hands-on introduction to linguistic reconstruction through a comparison of four Polynesian languages. (…) In summary, [this is - ND] an excellent book in need of further revision.’ (ROBERT BLUST in Oceanic Linguistics, 1996, pp.328-335). From the library of the late Prof. Dr. Ludo De Lannoy.