Studies in General Linguistics and Language Structure

(Proquest Information and Learning: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)N.S. Trubetzkoy. Studies in General Linguistics and Language Structure. Sound and Meaning: The Roman Jakobson Series in Linguistics and Poetics. Edited and with an Introduction by Anatoly Liberman. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. xv, 324 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $24.95, paper.Here is a sure-fire gift idea for anyone with a connection to Slavic philology, a book that would be welcome on any Slavist's shelf. It reads from cover to cover smoothly, informatively, often entertainingly, on subjects as wide-ranging as the theory of the phoneme, Balto-Slavic accents, and the Latin subjunctive, with ample amounts of professional gossip from the 1920s and 1930s thrown in.The credit for turning into virtually light reading the shorter articles and major conference presentations of, arguably, the founder of modern phonology, N.S. Trubetzkoy, goes to co-translators Marvin Taylor, responsible for the articles and papers written mostly in German, some in French, and Anatoly Liberman, who translates from Russian selections from Trubetzkoy's letters to Roman Jakobson. The translators achieve an admirable clarity and consistency of style that, one is certain, was not present in the originals.Having resolved to present Trubetzkoy's work not as artifacts of historical interest, but as scholarship which may still be consulted in its own right, the translators take care not merely to preserve but to enhance the scholarly apparatus. Abstracts are provided for each piece. There is a long bibliography of works and authors cited; a longer index of languages referred to (some 250 in all); an even longer index of words cited from these languages; and a subject index. Except for a few words from Caucasian languages, all linguistic forms cited by Trubetzkoy have been independently verified by the translators.One or two pieces do seem quaint, but nevertheless make engaging reading, for example, an article concerning the desired sound system of the ideal artificial language, an excursion into the realm of applied phonological theory. Trubetzkoy would allow the classical five-vowel system a, e, i, o, u, but only the stops p, t, k, the fricative s, the glides y, w, and the nasals m, n. Here, as everywhere, Trubetzkoy's encyclopedic knowledge comes into play:Of all the fricatives, only s is acceptable in such a system, for it occurs in every language of the world (except for an isolated few, such as Nuer, in the Egyptian Sudan, or the Australian aboriginal language, whose cultural significance is so limited that they may be left out of account), (p. 64)Because of the tendency of French speakers to stress the end of a sense-group, rather than the end of a word, Trubetzkoy commonsensically recommends that French speakers of the international language "stress the first syllable of each word-something they can easily learn with practice" (p. 71).As Taylor and Liberman note in the introduction, "Language barriers are no less strong among linguists than elsewhere." Their aim, then, in providing English translations for Trubetzkoy's articles and letters, is to bring his works of significance to a broader audience and to help better characterize his scholarly output for those who know the scholar primarily as the author of foundational works in synchronic structural phonology. His posthumously published Grundzuge der Phonologie has been translated into many languages, including English. Having died at the age of 48, Trubetzkoy never came out with the "big book," nor was he able to oversee the publication of personally edited volumes of his collected works in the way, for example, that his close colleague Roman Jakobson was.Trubetzkoy's contributions to historical Slavic, Balto-Slavic, and Indo-European linguistics, not to mention Caucasian and Finno-Ugric, are every bit as impressive as his works on synchronic phonology. …