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Himalayan Languages and Linguistics: Studies in
Phonology, Semantics, Morphology and Syntax. Editedby Mark Turin and Bettina Zeisler. Leiden: Brill, 2011. viii,
322 pp. $154.00 (cloth).
Gwendolyn Hyslop
The Journal of Asian Studies / Volume 72 / Issue 01 / February 2013, pp 199 ­ 200
DOI: 10.1017/S0021911812002021, Published online: 18 March 2013

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021911812002021
How to cite this article:
Gwendolyn Hyslop (2013). The Journal of Asian Studies, 72, pp 199­200 doi:10.1017/
S0021911812002021
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Book Reviews—Inner Asia

199

Himalayan Languages and Linguistics: Studies in Phonology, Semantics, Morphology and Syntax. Edited by MARK TURIN and BETTINA ZEISLER. Leiden:
Brill, 2011. viii, 322 pp. $154.00 (cloth).
doi:10.1017/S0021911812002021

This volume edited by Mark Turin and Bettina Zeisler is a collection of papers pertaining to languages and linguistics of the Himalayas, with a focus on Tibeto-Burman perspectives. Six of the nine papers in this volume were presented at the 2005 Himalayan
Languages Symposium, held in Bangkok, Thailand. Three additional papers (by Georgevan Driem, Heleen Plaisier, and René Huysmans) were invited to supplement the collection. The book is divided into four sections for the nine contributions: Himalayas in history,phonology and script, semantics, and morphology and syntax, respectively.
The first chapter, and the only contribution in the first section, is “Lost in the Sands ofTime Somewhere North of the Bay of Bengal” by van Driem. This twenty-six-page chapter
summarizes previous literature on the ethnolinguistic history of the Himalayas, focusing
on studies of Tibeto-Burman and Austroasiatic language families. In typical breadth,van Driem brings in data from genetics, paleobotany and archaeology to supplement
the linguistic picture. Topics addressed include the spread of Tibeto-Burman and Austroasiatic language families, the “Father Tongue” hypothesis, and the domestication of rice.
The next chapters address phonology and script. Plaisier presents an overview of thefour different transcription systems used to represent Lepcha, an indigenous language ofSikkim. Suzuki’s contribution is a presentation of phonologically rich Sogpho Tibetan.
This language, also called the “twenty-four villages” patois, is considered a Khams
variety spoken in western Sichuan province, China. With twelve vowels, fifty consonants,
and six phonetic pitch patters, Sogpho Tibetan displays a remarkably rich phonology.
Suzuki goes beyond presentation of the phonological system, making dialectal and historical observations as well.
Section three of the book consists of chapters by Dotson and Kiryu, united in semantics but representing very different approaches. The contribution from Dotson is philological, focusing on uses of the Tibetan word khrin in legal and ritual lexicons. After a veryrich and thorough discussion, Dotson concludes with a summary of the relationshipbetween khrin and khrims, ultimately showing that the two are related but separate
terms existing side by side, and not dialectal variants of the same word. Kiryu’s contribution is a functional approach to adjectives in Newar. He carefully shows that Newar
has three classes of adjectives, despite the fact that, on the surface, there may appear
to be minimal difference between adjectives and verbs. In this sense, Kiryu’s contribution
follows Post (2008)6 in demonstrating that defining word classes in a language can be anuanced but important linguistic endeavor.
The fourth and final part of the book touches on several morphosyntactic topics oftheoretical interest. The first chapter in this section, by Bartee, presents the “conjunctdisjunct” system in Dongwang Tibetan, showing the important role animacy plays inthe language. The phenomenon of “conjunct-disjunct,” first described by Hale(1980)7 for a contrast found in Newar, is an area of recent, intense interest in TibetoMark. W. Post, “Adjectives in Thai: Implications for a functionalist typology of word classes,” Linguistic Typology 12 (2008): 339–381.
7
Austin Hale, “Person Markers: Finite Conjunct and Disjunct Verb Forms in Newari,” in Papers inSoutheast Asian Linguistics No.7, ed. S. A. Wurm, 95–106 (Canberra: Australian National University, 1980).
6200

The Journal of Asian Studies

Burman linguistics. Bartee’s chapter will certainly be useful to scholars interested in
the theoretical debate regarding conjunct/disjunct or egophoric systems. The contribution by Huysmans will be of interest to Tibeto-Burmanists interested in pronominalization, or the indexing of arguments in the verb. Huysmans presents an analysis of theverbal agreement system in the Kiranti language Sampang, reflecting on the diachronicimplications.
Ergativity, the grammatical grouping of S and O arguments, apart from A arguments, is presented for the Indo-Aryan languages Kundal Shahi, Kashmiri, andHindko by Rehman. The final contribution in this section is by BETTINA ZEISLER ,who presents data on the Kenhat varieties of Tibetan, spoken in Ladakh. Her
chapter addresses the location where these varieties are spoken and discusses
several phonetic and morphosyntactic features of the language, often from a diachronic point of view.
In summary, the book presents a representative array of the current language andlinguistic research in the Himalayas, spanning topics as diverse as prehistory, philology,and new descriptions of linguistic phenomena in understudied languages. As such, chapters of the book should be of interest to Tibetan philologists, comparative TibetoBurmanists, Himalayan prehistorians, and theoretical linguists interested in tonogenesis,ergativity and egophoricity.
GWENDOLYN HYSLOPANU College of Asia and the Pacificgwendolyn.hyslop@anu.edu.au

JAPANJapan’s Siberian Intervention, 1918–1922: “A Great Disobedience against thePeople.” By PAUL E. DUNSCOMB. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011. xiii,
249 pp. $75.00 (cloth); $29.99 (paper).
doi:10.1017/S0021911812002033

The October Revolution of 1917 resulted in civil war and the withdrawal of Russia
from World War I. When Russia concluded a separate peace with the Central Powers
in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the eastern front collapsed, and some 50,000 soldiers ofthe Czech Legion found themselves behind enemy lines in Russia’s Far East. The
remaining powers of the Entente dispatched troops to Russia’s Maritime Region toaid the Czechs, but more to prevent the large caches of war matériel in Vladivostok
from falling into the hands of the Germans or Bolsheviks, to prop up a White
Russian government, and to reestablish the Eastern Front. In July 1918, President
Woodrow Wilson urged Japan to contribute 7,000 troops to the international coalition
converging on Siberia. By November, over 70,000 troops of the Imperial JapaneseArmy occupied the Russian Far East and northern Manchuria. This book focuses primarily on how this rapid escalation of Japan’s military presence in the region came to