HOLST, Jan Henrik, 2005 Einführung in die eskimo-aleutischen Sprachen, Hamburg, Buske, 280 pages.

This “Introduction to the Eskimo-Aleut Languages” has three major parts. Part one deals with Greenlandic, part two discusses the “Eskimo-Aleut language family,” part three is an attempt at reconstructing a relationship to the Wakashan language family. To familiarise the reader with what turns out to be characteristic of the book, the part on Greenlandic starts with a “typological” positioning of Greenlandic in relation to other languages spoken in the “northern hemisphere,” namely Finnish, Hungarian, Basque, Turkish and Chukchi; vowel harmony, case marking systems, word order, including adjective-noun ordering, person marking, existence of prefixes and some other features are taken as points of comparison (p. 53). Explicitly disregarding the standard orthography of Greenlandic, the author develops a phonemic representation of his own. This later on turns out to be of considerable importance, since quite a few of the attempts at reconstructing Proto-Eskimo-Wakashan rely on these representations. Holst exclusively draws on the work of others, criticising it, but in his discussion of orthographies, speculating about stages of development with respect to Labrador Inuttut and Greenlandic, he himself neglects important sources, such as Kleinschmidt’s correspondence with Theodor Bourquin (Holtved 1964). Contrary to Holst’s claim, Kleinschmidt judged Labrador Inuttut to be “corrupted” by the influence of the German speaking Moravian Brethren, but Greenlandic to be the more conservative, “true” language. It is very unlikely that in designing his orthography Kleinschmidt was guided by the principles of historical-comparative linguistics; in none of his letters any reference to such is made. Kleinschmidt’s expressed concern was to come up with a description of Greenlandic addressing those, “who are exposed to the language day by day” (Kleinschmidt 1991: viii). Turning to grammatical issues, it is evident that there is nothing but superficial knowledge pieced together from sources available. The descriptions given are often misleading or show a lack of insight. For those readers who have not encountered ergativity yet, the lengthy explanations may be informative. When it comes to an application to Greenlandic, it is just case marking which is considered, examples given being of the type “the man sees the woman.” While this discussion is just dull, some of the liberties taken are disturbing. Holst applies the differentiation of “Set A” and “Set B” affixes traditionally employed for Maya person marking to Greenlandic. Disregarding the fact that in Maya languages person marking is highly agglutinative, with distinct representations as prefixes as opposed to suffixes, being mirrored by the word order of the corresponding lexical arguments, he does not care to point out that such is not the case in Greenlandic. I cannot help but feel that here a language is just cut up into bits and pieces as it pleases, moving freely between different historical stages, just to provide material for any kind of comparison. The lack of differentiation between contemporary, spoken languages and reconstructed, hypothetical forms carries over to the other parts of the book, too. The unsuspecting reader can never know whether s/he is confronted with reconstructions or with descriptions of genuine synchronic phenomena. The strange neglect or even disregard for grammar is most disturbing; nothing is said about the functions of the inflectional systems, let alone the repercussions on syntax. Moods are neatly divided into coordinating and subordinating ones, disregarding the fact that coordination of verbal complexes is accomplished by a “subordinating mood” (Fortescue 1984: 120ff; Nowak 2002). Derivation is dealt with on one page, and the impression is created that it is just a handful of affixes which incorporate (p. 125). Consequently, polysynthesis is characterized as being “less spectacular than some linguists assume” since polysynthetic languages just differ in “quantity,” not in “quality” …