Details: Category: Reviews

Review of Georgij A. Klimov Etymological Dictionary of the Kartvelian Languages (Trends in Linguistics, Documentation 16, Mouton De Gruyter, xv + 504 pages, 1998), in BSOAS

This attractive volume represents in English translation an updated version of the author's 1964 306-page similarly titled Russian original. Sadly, Klimov did not quite live to see his translation through to publication, but there can be little doubt that it will long serve as a fitting memorial to a distinguished all-round linguist who throughout his career made significant contributions to Caucasian (especially Kartvelian) studies, being a rarity among Russian (actually half-Russian, half-German) Caucasologists in having mastered both written and spoken Georgian. It is substantially the author's own English rendition that is here presented, and it largely reads most fluently; apart from an occasional lapse in morphology (e.g. 'secondarity' for 'secondary nature'; 'derivatory' for 'derivational'; addition of unnecessary suffix '-ic' in such phrases as 'present(ic)/aorist(ic) [tenses]'), the one recurring stylistic oddity is over-use of the impersonal active for impersonal passive construction (e.g. 'One has [= It has been] proposed that..'). American spellings tend to be used (though we have 'plough'), and glottalisation is marked by subscript dot -- when not directly quoting, I use the more normal apostrophe.

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