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Album phonétique
314
REVIEWS
--
COMPTES-RENDUS
The subject t h a t is dealt with here warrants close attention; although the book is quite rea.dable, I believe the author was misled by a number of people, including the publishers, into thinking that his study merited publication in book form. The title is far too wide for the narrow experiment that was undertaken. The details given about the experimental procedure were largely irrelevant whereas a solid piece of evidence that was vital in the whole test, viz. the acoustic specification of the spectral composition of the spoken stimufi, was missing. References to the literature in the bibliography were adequate on the whole (although Norbert Wiener's name is curiously and persistently misspelt) but its exposition in the text was not. All in all, this book has misfired; it should never have appeared as such and the author should have been warned against it b y better advisers. He himself writes clearly and pleasantly and he is to be con~atulated for having undertaken a study such as the present one, considering that he starts with the handicap of being an outsider in speech studies and comes up with the right kind of authors to consult and conclusions to be made. Indeed, he deserves better guidance for the future of his scientific career.
Institute [or Perception Research, Eindhoven
A. COHEN
G. STRAKA, Album Phon~tique. Les Presses de l'Universit6 Laval, Quebec, Canada, 1965.33 pp. (text) ; 188 pp. (plates, loose leaved). This collection of plates, 136 in all, owes its existence to a course of lectures given by Prof. Straka at Laval University, Quebec, in 1961 and 1964, on the theme of General Phonetics. They are offered now to a wider public in the absence of a promised handbook on this subject whose publication, the author tells us, has been held up by other pressing business. In the accompanying text the author expresses the hope that students of phonetics will be helped in their courses by the profuse illustrations, particularly towards developing their powers of observation. In this they will also be encouraged by the rather detailed letterpress accompanying the individual plates. It is clear, therefore, that this enterprise is based on didactic ,grounds and as such it looks like being a successful endeavour.
REVIEWS
-
COMPTES-RENDUS
315
With this objective in mind it would seem like quibbling if one were to deplore the use of two and at times even three types of phonetic transcription ; a 'transcription fran~aise' based on Rousselot and Gilli&on, the I.P.A., and the Boehmer type presumably used in Indo-European and Romance comparative linguistics~ The longest and strongest section is taken up by plates dealing with the articulatory aspect of speech sounds which are clearly presented and together carry sufficient and reliable information for the enquiring student. The section on the acoustic aspect is more open to objection: it is shorter and contains information which is not always unimpeachable; on p. 68 the concept of formants is introduced and described as determined by regions of harmonics of the fundamental reinforced by back and front cavity respectively, thus constituting F1 and F2. Now this is at best an impermissible simplification, particularly in Laa~ nvLa vl l'alit allUt ULI[~I:~, Wilt) I I ~ L V ~ satlsiactonly shown that the relationship between these two cavities and the formants is by no means so simple a matter. This section simply is not sufficiently up to date nor is the bibliographical material in the text. Though spectrograms are shown in a number of case L narrow and wide band registrations, when presented for the first time in plate 57 as compared with the following one, plate 58, are given without any explanation or even ind'cation of their difference in the captions. Only once, viz. plate 57, is a time basis given in the spectrographic recordings and it is by no means clear whether this scale can be used to calibrate subsequent registrations. In spite of these imperfections one gets the overall impression that the rich material presented here, based on such diverse methods of registration a s X-ray photography, palatography, kymography and oscillography, has been very carefully provided with lucid captions. The composition of the whole album, divided as it is into evenly spaced sections and three appendices, is nicely balanced. Nevertheless one cannot help getting the impression that the older types of registration, notably kymographic, unduly prevail over more modern means such as are afforded by the oscillograph and spectrograph, the first being given twice as much space as the other two taken together. In spite of this somewhat period flavour, the obvious enthousiasm v~l,,,'vv
HI
316
REVIEWS
-
COMPTES-RENDUS
with which the whole album has been prepared has ingratiated the author with at least one of his critics, who feels disarmed by Straka's obvious intention of rendering a service to prospective studer.ts of phonetics as well as their teachers. For this he deserves our gratitude albeit accompanied by the hope that he will see fit to bring some of the material more up to date in the near future.
Institute/or Perception Research, Eindhoven
A. COHEN
JOSEPH E. GRI~tES, Huichol Syntax. J a n u a Linguarum, Series Practica XI. Mouton & Co., The Hague, London, Paris 1964. 108 pp. Gld. 18.--. Linguistic research on Huichol in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was fragmentary. Francisco Pimentel, working in the 1860's with lexical and grammatical comparisons of Tarahumara, Nahuatl, Opata, Cora, Eudeve, Cahita, Tepehuan, Pima and Huichol, assigned Huichoi to the 'Opata-Tarahumare-Pima family,' offering early recognition of Huichol-Taracahitian resemblances. Carl Lumholtz visited the Sierra Nayarit at the turn of the century; he was far from being a linguist, and the comparative vocabulary of his Unknown Mexico II (1903), w.~th Huichol and cognate forms, has little contemporary value. Theodor Preuss made his first trip to the Cora and Huichol in 1905. He published a splendid volume on Cora and intended to do the. same for Huichol and Mexicano. Apparently h~ failed of this objective; no Huichol manuscript of his is on record so far as I have been able to determ!~ne. L6on Diguet, using data collected in 1897, 1898 and 1900, published an imperfect sketch of Santa Catalina Huichol as well as a comparative vocabulary for Huichol, Cora, Tepehuan and Cahita (Yaqui), JSA m 8 (1911) 23-54. Diguet indicates that the Huichol dominated a n area north of the central plateau of Mexico in present-day San Luis Potosi and parts of Zacatecas and Coahuila. Later they were defeated by their enemies and took refuge in the mountains of Nayarit and Jalisco in west central Mexico. There they formed a confederation with the Cora and Tepehuan. A new phase of linguistic research b~gan in the 1940's with work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Instituto Lingiiistico de Verano). John B. Mclntosh collected data tor 'Huichol Phonemes,' !JAL 11 (1945) 31-5, at La Piedra Gorda in 1941-1943, He and
REVIEWS
--
COMPTES-RENDUS
The subject t h a t is dealt with here warrants close attention; although the book is quite rea.dable, I believe the author was misled by a number of people, including the publishers, into thinking that his study merited publication in book form. The title is far too wide for the narrow experiment that was undertaken. The details given about the experimental procedure were largely irrelevant whereas a solid piece of evidence that was vital in the whole test, viz. the acoustic specification of the spectral composition of the spoken stimufi, was missing. References to the literature in the bibliography were adequate on the whole (although Norbert Wiener's name is curiously and persistently misspelt) but its exposition in the text was not. All in all, this book has misfired; it should never have appeared as such and the author should have been warned against it b y better advisers. He himself writes clearly and pleasantly and he is to be con~atulated for having undertaken a study such as the present one, considering that he starts with the handicap of being an outsider in speech studies and comes up with the right kind of authors to consult and conclusions to be made. Indeed, he deserves better guidance for the future of his scientific career.
Institute [or Perception Research, Eindhoven
A. COHEN
G. STRAKA, Album Phon~tique. Les Presses de l'Universit6 Laval, Quebec, Canada, 1965.33 pp. (text) ; 188 pp. (plates, loose leaved). This collection of plates, 136 in all, owes its existence to a course of lectures given by Prof. Straka at Laval University, Quebec, in 1961 and 1964, on the theme of General Phonetics. They are offered now to a wider public in the absence of a promised handbook on this subject whose publication, the author tells us, has been held up by other pressing business. In the accompanying text the author expresses the hope that students of phonetics will be helped in their courses by the profuse illustrations, particularly towards developing their powers of observation. In this they will also be encouraged by the rather detailed letterpress accompanying the individual plates. It is clear, therefore, that this enterprise is based on didactic ,grounds and as such it looks like being a successful endeavour.
REVIEWS
-
COMPTES-RENDUS
315
With this objective in mind it would seem like quibbling if one were to deplore the use of two and at times even three types of phonetic transcription ; a 'transcription fran~aise' based on Rousselot and Gilli&on, the I.P.A., and the Boehmer type presumably used in Indo-European and Romance comparative linguistics~ The longest and strongest section is taken up by plates dealing with the articulatory aspect of speech sounds which are clearly presented and together carry sufficient and reliable information for the enquiring student. The section on the acoustic aspect is more open to objection: it is shorter and contains information which is not always unimpeachable; on p. 68 the concept of formants is introduced and described as determined by regions of harmonics of the fundamental reinforced by back and front cavity respectively, thus constituting F1 and F2. Now this is at best an impermissible simplification, particularly in Laa~ nvLa vl l'alit allUt ULI[~I:~, Wilt) I I ~ L V ~ satlsiactonly shown that the relationship between these two cavities and the formants is by no means so simple a matter. This section simply is not sufficiently up to date nor is the bibliographical material in the text. Though spectrograms are shown in a number of case L narrow and wide band registrations, when presented for the first time in plate 57 as compared with the following one, plate 58, are given without any explanation or even ind'cation of their difference in the captions. Only once, viz. plate 57, is a time basis given in the spectrographic recordings and it is by no means clear whether this scale can be used to calibrate subsequent registrations. In spite of these imperfections one gets the overall impression that the rich material presented here, based on such diverse methods of registration a s X-ray photography, palatography, kymography and oscillography, has been very carefully provided with lucid captions. The composition of the whole album, divided as it is into evenly spaced sections and three appendices, is nicely balanced. Nevertheless one cannot help getting the impression that the older types of registration, notably kymographic, unduly prevail over more modern means such as are afforded by the oscillograph and spectrograph, the first being given twice as much space as the other two taken together. In spite of this somewhat period flavour, the obvious enthousiasm v~l,,,'vv
HI
316
REVIEWS
-
COMPTES-RENDUS
with which the whole album has been prepared has ingratiated the author with at least one of his critics, who feels disarmed by Straka's obvious intention of rendering a service to prospective studer.ts of phonetics as well as their teachers. For this he deserves our gratitude albeit accompanied by the hope that he will see fit to bring some of the material more up to date in the near future.
Institute/or Perception Research, Eindhoven
A. COHEN
JOSEPH E. GRI~tES, Huichol Syntax. J a n u a Linguarum, Series Practica XI. Mouton & Co., The Hague, London, Paris 1964. 108 pp. Gld. 18.--. Linguistic research on Huichol in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was fragmentary. Francisco Pimentel, working in the 1860's with lexical and grammatical comparisons of Tarahumara, Nahuatl, Opata, Cora, Eudeve, Cahita, Tepehuan, Pima and Huichol, assigned Huichoi to the 'Opata-Tarahumare-Pima family,' offering early recognition of Huichol-Taracahitian resemblances. Carl Lumholtz visited the Sierra Nayarit at the turn of the century; he was far from being a linguist, and the comparative vocabulary of his Unknown Mexico II (1903), w.~th Huichol and cognate forms, has little contemporary value. Theodor Preuss made his first trip to the Cora and Huichol in 1905. He published a splendid volume on Cora and intended to do the. same for Huichol and Mexicano. Apparently h~ failed of this objective; no Huichol manuscript of his is on record so far as I have been able to determ!~ne. L6on Diguet, using data collected in 1897, 1898 and 1900, published an imperfect sketch of Santa Catalina Huichol as well as a comparative vocabulary for Huichol, Cora, Tepehuan and Cahita (Yaqui), JSA m 8 (1911) 23-54. Diguet indicates that the Huichol dominated a n area north of the central plateau of Mexico in present-day San Luis Potosi and parts of Zacatecas and Coahuila. Later they were defeated by their enemies and took refuge in the mountains of Nayarit and Jalisco in west central Mexico. There they formed a confederation with the Cora and Tepehuan. A new phase of linguistic research b~gan in the 1940's with work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Instituto Lingiiistico de Verano). John B. Mclntosh collected data tor 'Huichol Phonemes,' !JAL 11 (1945) 31-5, at La Piedra Gorda in 1941-1943, He and