The Armenians in History and the Armenian question . By Esat Uras. An English translation of the revised and expanded second edition. pp. xiv, 1048. Ankara, Documentary Publications, 1988.

Abstract

Avar word for "h i t " is not q'abize but Xabize, and tunkize really means "bump into" or "knock" (p. 253). A number of authors deal with more broadly philological topics. Jan Braun makes a brief and unconvincing attempt to prove the identical function of -i as a definite article marker in Georgian and Basque (pp. 38-41); more judicious use is made of Basque data in Donald Rayfield's extensive survey of sheepkeeping terminology in the Caucasus (pp. 239-50). Michel van Esbroeck proposes and elegantly supports an Arabic etymology for Georgian bzoba (pp. 42-50), while Jost Gippert in something of a tour de force (at least regarding the extent of its documentation 297 footnotes!) gives an exhaustive account of the attestation and etymology of each of the Old Georgian names for the months (pp. 87-154). Edward Szymanski provides a very useful survey of the works of Arab geographers relating to the Caucasus (pp. 298-308), while Wolfgang Feuerstein in papers on the toponymy of Lazistan (pp. 51-68) and on legends about the Man of the Woods (pp. 69-86) succeeds in conveying something of his enthusiasm for the culture and mythology of the Laz. The volume is produced to a high technical standard, especially in view of the wide range of languages cited, and typographical errors are few (p. 2161. 15 up "don'nt", p. 254 second table "markes" for "markers", p. 259 example 23 lacks an explanatory translation, p. 303 1. 21 "Muridit" for "Muridist" and 1. 24 " A r b " for "Arab", p. 306 1. 5 " m " instead of a comma and on p. 7 we are informed in an endearing Scandinavianism that the colloquium took place " i Oslo "). Inevitably some of the topics covered are a little esoteric, but taken as a whole the book provides an excellent picture of the current state of Caucasian linguistics. Hans Vogt, long time professor at the University of Oslo and one of the most eminent representatives of the older generation of caucasologists, died shortly after the Oslo colloquium. The second of the volumes reviewed here is a collection of twenty-seven of his articles published in a number of places between 1930 and 1975. The breadth of Vogt's interests and erudition is shown by the number of his papers which touch on themes raised at the 1986 meeting: genetic relationships between the Caucasian languages ("La parente des langues caucasiques", pp. 152-67 and " Indoevropejskie jazyki i sravnitel'nye metody", pp. 500-5), the reconstruction of proto-Kartvelian ("Remarques sur la prehistoire des langues karthveliennes", pp. 462-8), toponymy (" Remarques sur les noms de lieux du Caucase", pp. 168-76) and the study of Ubykh ("In search of an unknown language", pp. 449-57, made available here to a wider audience in an English translation from the Norwegian). In "Le basque et les langues caucasiques" (pp. 317—43) Vogt subjects Rene Lafon's lists of proposed correspondences to detailed analysis, on the basis that such painstaking work on individual items is more valuable than the construction of broad theoretical hypotheses about relations between language families.