American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Review
Reviewed Work(s): <italic>The Slavic Languages</italic> by Roland Sussex and Paul
Cubberley
Review by: Gary H. Toops
Source: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 52, No. 3 (FALL 2008), pp. 491-493
Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40651016
Accessed: 17-12-2018 10:36 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages is collaborating

with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavic and East European Journal

This content downloaded from 147.230.224.24 on Mon, 17 Dec 2018 10:36:35 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Reviews 491

Slavonic, Turkic, Mongolie, Indo-European, Caucasian, Uralic and Altaic Studi

are not mentioned. Has Iudakin thought they are not worthy of inclusion in h
my opinion some leading linguists were not mentioned, I do not want to give
mend whom to include and whom to leave out. At the same time, some of th
included (like myself) should not be included since one cannot call them "l
Nevertheless, most of the best-known linguists of Russia and the other co
mer USSR are mentioned. Personally, I read this encyclopedia like a detec
find here an abundance of useful information, usually completely unknow
around the world. Iudakin's decision to provide photos of the linguists in eac
wise. Every article includes a list of the person's most important articles a
thought myself to be an expert on the bibliography of the languages of Rus
books and articles unfamiliar to me. As a result, I'd recommend this encyclo
students and professors of all ranks, particularly since it is difficult to track all
ticles published in Russia nowadays, as many of them are put out by the
houses of local universities.
Let us consider, as an example, the structure of the entry in the encyclopedia on the author him-
self. Though I have known Iudakin's name for some 20 years, I learned much from the entry ded-
icated to him. First, I was really greatly surprised by the vastness of his scholarly work, as well as
the breadth of his writing. He has published books on a wide range of topics from evolutional ty-
pology and comparative grammar of Finno-Ugric languages to the practical problems of how to
learn 50 languages. He has also written a novel, Autumn Love (2005), and a detective story, "The
Color of Hatred" (1997). Iudakin has published articles and books on Sanskrit, Latin, Russian, En-
glish and many other languages (among them Finno-Ugric, Turkic, etc.). In order to see the wide
scope of his interests, let us just provide a short list of some of his major works: Uchebnik latin-
skogo iazyka [A Textbook of the Latin Language] (1994); Razvitie struktury iazyka v sviazi s razvi-
tiem struktury mysli [The Development of the Structure of the Sentence in Connection with the De-
velopment of the Structure of Thought] (Ariadna, 1984); Uchimsia govorit' po-angliiski [Let's
Learn to Speak English] (1996); Sravnitel'no-istoricheskaia grammatika flnno-ugorskikh iazykov
[A Comparative Historical Grammar of the Finno-Ugric Languages] (Ariadna, 1997); Mozhno li
izuchit'50 iazykov? Psikhologicheskie osnovy izucheniia i prepodavaniia inostrannykh iazykov [Is
it Possible to Learn 50 Languages? The Psychological Fundamentals of Studying and Teaching
Foreign Languages] (Ariadna, 1998); Uralo-Altaiskoe (Turko-Mongol'skoe) Iazykoznanie:
Entsiklopediia [Uralic-Altaic (Turkic-Mongolian) Linguistics: An Encyclopedia] (Ariadna, 2001);
Vedushchie iazykovedy kavkazskogo regional Entsiklopediia [The Leading Linguists of the Cau-
casian Region: An Encyclopedia] Ariadna, 2002); Finno-ugorskoe iazykoznanie: Entsiklopediia
[Finno-Ugric Linguistics: An Encyclopedia] (Ariadna, 2003).
It must be said that not one of Iudakin's projects had state support. He had to look for the
money to publish his interesting works elsewhere. The set of encyclopedias under review lists
the major works of leading world linguists. It is well organized, clear, and of great use to lin-
guists and non-linguists alike.

Yuri Tambovtsev, Dept of English and Linguistics, Novosibirsk Pedagogical University

Roland Sussex and Paul Cubberley. The Slavic Languages. Cambridge Language Surveys.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Map. Appendices. Bibliography. Index, xx + 638 pp.
$150.00 (cloth).

If one could imagine R. G. A. de Bray's Guide to the Slavonic Languages (Dent 1951; 1963;
Dent/Dutton 1969) and G. Y. Shevelov's A Prehistory of Slavic (Columbia UP, 1965) combined,
updated, and condensed into a single, 638-page volume, then Sussex and Cubberley 's The

This content downloaded from 147.230.224.24 on Mon, 17 Dec 2018 10:36:35 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
492 Slavic and East European Journal

Slavic Languages might well have been it. The text itself begins with an 1 8-page Introduction,
followed by Chapter 1 titled "Linguistic evolution, genetic affiliation and classification"
(19-59) and Chapter 2 titled "Socio-historical evolution" (60-109). The remaining nine
chapters deal with the phonology of the Slavic languages, their morphophonology, morphology/
inflection, syntactic categories and morphosyntax, sentence structure, word formation, lexis,
dialects, and sociolinguistic issues. Although thematically well-structured and attractively
typeset, The Slavic Languages is, regrettably, so full of typographical and factual errors that its
overall reliability as a reference work is seriously restricted. A complete discussion of all these
errors could be undertaken only in a lengthy review article. Therefore, I limit myself below to
mentioning only the most glaring misstatements and misrepresentations that the authors have
made about the Slavic languages with which I consider myself most familiar- Bulgarian,
Czech, Russian, and Upper and Lower Sorbian.
Sussex and Cubberley cite numerous Bulgarian verb forms, but their citations of such forms
raise more questions than they answer. For example, the authors claim that a "rarer alternative"
to the future tense formed with the invariant particle ste + finite verb (e.g., ste vizdam, ste vizdas
'I shall see, you will see') is the finite verb sta "with the vestigial infinitive" (e.g., sta vidja, stes
vidja, 289). Such future-tense forms (assuming they exist) are, however, alien to the
contemporary Bulgarian literary language (they are nowhere mentioned, for example, in the
three-volume Gramatika na sâvremennija bâlgarski knizoven ezik, Izd-vo na BAN, 1982-83).
The authors also cite Bulgarian stjáx da pâtúvam 'I was going to travel, would travel, would
have traveled' as a marked past conditional which they misleadingly gloss only as 'I would have
gone' (they make no mention of stjáx da sâm pâtúval); such forms, they maintain, compete with
"a new form which adds imperfect endings to the aorist (perfective) stem [...] procitá-se 'you
[Sg] would have read'" (298). Not only was a Bulgarian colleague of mine unable to confirm
the existence of such a form, but procita- is not even a perfective stem (procitase 'you/he/she
used to [get] read', for example, is an imperfect-tense form of the secondary imperfective
procitam; the [prefixai] perfective is procetá, procetés). Perhaps the authors were thinking of
forms like jadvam 'I would eat' which, according to the Bulgarian Academy Grammar, "are
rarely used in the standard spoken language and are even avoided in writing" {Gramatika 2:
371; translation mine- GHT). Ultimately, however, it is impossible for the reader to determine
what exactly Sussex and Cubberley had in mind.
The Czech and the Slovak Republics officially began their existence as separate states on
January 1, 1993, yet the authors insist that the "Czech Republic [...] was separated from
Slovakia to form the Czech Republic in 1992" (101) and later state that the "separation of
Czechoslovakia into the Czech and Slovak Republics occurred in early 1992" (104). With
respect to Czech phonology, we are told that "[w]hen long and stressed Id also tends to [e:] in
Czech [...]: Cz léto 'summer' [e:]" (158); this is incorrect, however, as the acoustic impression
clearly tends to [ae:] (even before a palatal consonant, cf. v létë ['vlaeit'e] 'in summer'). The
authors incorrectly cite "anglicti" as the nominative masculine animate plural form of anglicky
'English' (204), then cite the form incorrectly again as "anglicti" (269). Although the authors
are aware that the analogous form corresponding to cesky is cesti 'Czech' (209), the reader is
hard put to find the correct form anglicti. With respect to Czech adjectives, the authors also state
that "[a]djective predicates have agreement at the same level as the highest-ranked gender in the
subject" and illustrate this with "hrady [Masclnan] a cirkve [Femjysow krásné [Masclnan]" 'the
castles and churches are beautiful' (329); however, this illustration hardly proves the authors'
point, since the form krásné is both masculine inanimate plural and feminine plural!
Sussex and Cubberley appear to have little recent personal experience of Russia. In discussing
forms of address, they claim that "(previously already impolite) muzcina 'man' and zénscina
'woman' are no longer acceptable" (570), yet in recent years I personally have been addressed as
muzcina by various Muscovites, including a Russian teenager wanting to know the time and a
security guard trying to get my attention in a liquor store. The terms seem to be, in fact, quite

This content downloaded from 147.230.224.24 on Mon, 17 Dec 2018 10:36:35 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Reviews 493

current and acceptable (at least in Moscow). Here the authors might have a
Russians' popularization of the béjdzik (< English 'badge'), the name tag inc
today by restaurant servers, bartenders, and sales clerks which allows customer
employees by an acceptable form of their first name. The authors claim that
"the main combinations involve either 'forename + patronymic' or 'forename
three, but not usually [...] 'short forename + surname', on its own" (570); yet am
artists, names like Dima Bilan, Vlad Stasevskij, and Masa Rasputina are actually
A further dubious claim that the authors advance is that Russian émigrés in A
végn for 'station wagon' partly because in Standard Russian the concept is put
as mnogoméstnyj avtomobíV furgónnogo tipa (580). Actually, the Standard
'station wagon' is quite simply universal (see Slovar' inostrannyx slov, Russkij
whether certain generations of Russian émigrés are in fact familiar with this
matter).
With respect to contemporary reflexes of Common Slavic palatal /r1/, the authors note "the
unique reflex /s7 (after Iti in Upper Sorbian, after /p t k/ in Lower Sorbian)" (142), then
contradict this misstatement by maintaining that "Upper Sorbian also has the letter r,
pronounced /§/ after /p k/, and /s7 after Iti (thus, tri = [tsji]); Lower Sorbian has lèi in all these
cases, spelt s: tsi" (170). In fact, however, Lower Sorbian has no reflex /s7 after /p t k/, but
rather /s/, so the authors erred the first time, but managed to correct this error some twenty-eight
pages later. As for Upper Sorbian, it frequently exhibits /s7 after Iti (assuming that the phoneme
/c7 [tsj] can be phonetically decomposed as [t] + [sj], but not consistently: the digraph tr may
also represent [tç] (/c s z7 are soft in Upper Sorbian, hard in Lower Sorbian) as in tfeska
[(tçiçska] 'wood shaving, splinter'. As for the Upper Sorbian letter n, Sussex and Cubberley
mistakenly believe that this represents a palatalized nasal dental [nj], when in fact it represents
the phonemic sequence /jn/. Thus, they incorrectly transcribe kón 'horse' as *['kuonj] rather
than ['ku3jn] (158) and falsely regard Polish dzien 'day' as graphically and phonetically
identical to its Upper Sorbian cognate (172), which is actually dien with no palatalization word-
finally (['dz,ein]). They also mistake Upper Sorbian rjensi 'more beautiful' for a cognate of
Russian rán'sij and incorrectly gloss it as 'earlier' (129). The authors wrongly state that "both
Upper and Lower Sorbs refer to themselves as Serbja" (96), when in fact only the Upper Sorbs
do; Lower Sorbs call themselves Serby (the term Serby also exists in Upper Sorbian, but with
the meaning 'Sorbian Lusatia' or 'Sorbian-speaking areas' rather than 'Sorbs'). On the same
page (96), we are informed that "the genitive-accusative is found in no Lower Sorbian dialect,"
even though it is still found in most (probably all) Lower Sorbian dialects, as well as the Lower
Sorbian literary language, with plural masculine animate nouns occurring after quantifiers and
after the genitive-accusative pronouns nas and was (unqualified plural virile nouns also occur
optionally in genitive-accusative; see Manfred Starosta, Niedersorbisch schnell und intensiv,
Domowina, 1991, 1: 165). Finally, the authors would have us believe that the supine is found
"only" in "Czech" (Old Czech? See Frantisek Trávnícek, Mluvnice spisovné cestiny,
Melantrich, 1949, 1 : 543: "Supinum je dnes tvar mrtvy...") and Slovenian (279), despite the fact
that the supine is alive and well in Lower Sorbian and is one of the principal verb forms that
distinguishes that language from Upper Sorbian.
In sum, I cannot recommend Sussex and Cubberley 's The Slavic Languages. Too many of the
data are so distorted, contorted, or plainly wrong that the trustworthiness and scholarly utility
of the work as a whole are undermined.

Gary H. loops, Wichita State University

This content downloaded from 147.230.224.24 on Mon, 17 Dec 2018 10:36:35 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms