Customer Reviews

Language Relations Across The Bering Strait: Reappraising the Archaeological and Linguistic Evidence (Open Linguistics)

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Let me start with a major complaint. This book is ridiculously overpriced. I was fortunate enough to find a cheaper used copy, but even that price would have been expensive for a NEW book.

Fortescue has amassed a sizeable body of morphological and lexical evidence demonstrating that the Uralic, Yukaghir, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo-Aleut languages are genetically related. Most of the cognates look pretty solid and the morphological evidence linking Yukaghir with the rest of the languages was stronger than I'd expected based upon my own cursory examination of the Yukaghir languages. His discussion of typological similarities and differences between Uralo-Siberian and nearby languages was informative and interesting. He's spends a lot of time (too much time, IMO) discussing nonlinguistic evidence for the relationship.

But in many ways reading this book was frustrating. He proposes that the development of uvulars in Eskimo-Aleut and Chukchi-Kamchatkan were secondary, but the evidence that he presents contradicts his claims. Other proposed sound laws also contradict his own evidence. He attempts to reconstruct a pronoun *tek with various suffixes, from which 1st and 2nd person pronouns are to be derived, but he doesn't explain how the wide variety of forms could be derived from this. He merely says that it can be done with a minimal amount of steps.

All in all, this is a good book if you can get it cheaply and if you want to use it as a starting point for your own research.