Re: Review Request - Indo-Aryan Languages

Neeraj Mathur wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I was wondering if anybody would happen to know of any reviews of two books
> titled *The Indo-Aryan Languages*, the one being in the Cambridge Language
> Surveys series by Colin Masica (1993), and the other edited by George
> Cardona and Dhanesh Jain, in the Routledge Language Family Series (2003). I
> had a chance to have a quick peek at them in a library this morning, and was
> intrigued. Their approaches are complementary: Masica treats more or less
> the modern languages and examines linguistic issues across the entire
> family, while Cardona and Jain give detailed descriptions of various
> 'national' languages within the family, and include chapters on Old and
> Middle Indo-Aryan.

You've just described the difference between the Cambridge Green series
and the Routledge (then Curzon, now RoutledgeCurzon) Language Family
Descriptions. (You might try to track down my article in the Wm. Bright
Festschrift, *A Life for Language*.)

Nick Masica's book was greeted rapturously.

The best place to look for reviews is the annual international
Linguistic Bibliography, which the last time I checked had gotten as far
as materials published in 2000. (If there's an on-line version, NYPL
couldn't find it.)

> If anybody knows of where I might be able to find reviews of both or either,
> I'd be much grateful; if anybody would be able to offer a critique
> themselves, I'd be most delighted. I'm particularly curious about the value
> of the Routledge book; it does some things which I found surprising (like
> giving separate chapters to Hindi and Urdu, for instance), and its preface
> mentions various setbacks which do not sound encouraging (it seems that
> their first-choice authors were often not willing to write; some unwilling
> to improve work that was found discouraged; some areas they had planned to
> include ended up needing to be omitted). Are there second editions planned
> for either book?

Reviews of the Routledge book might be appearing about now. The chapter
on scripts (by Richard Salomon) is disappointing because it's
underillustrated.

I've been waiting a year now for The Iranian Languages in the same
series (ed. Windfuhr). The last time I checked for a publication date,
it was October 2005. (But it's still listed at "only" $150; the others
in the series now average twice that, except for the few early ones that
have been paperbacked.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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