Der Einfluss obersorbischer Lexik auf die niedersorbische Schriftsprache. Ein Beitrag zurEntwicklungsgeschichte der niedersorbischen Schriftsprache by Anja PohontschReview by: Gerald StoneThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 81, No. 3 (Jul., 2003), pp. 526-528Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4213747 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 11:00

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

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

.

Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and EastEuropean Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavonic andEast European Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.154 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 11:00:55 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

526 SEER, 8 i, 3, 2003

the stressed plural suffix -a referred to on p. 345 as a southern dialectal feature (presumably non-standard) while three lines further on the plural form inzenera is labelled 'substandard'? 'Substandard' is not used in Western European and North American sociolinguistics.

There is no reference to the huge amount of analysis of spontaneous spoken Russian by Zemskaja, Lapteva, Shmelev, Kitajgorodskaja and many others.

The treatment of syntax is brief and uneven. For example, discussing examples 'Mne nuzna eta kniga', Cubberley states (p. 2I6) that 'In some impersonal constructions the logical object may appear in the Nominative, though one may argue that the Nominative is as much logical subject as object'. Nuizna is neither transitive nor a verb, the clause is active and kniga is nominative. How could it be a logical object (Patient)? 'Logical object' is undefined (pp. 215-I6), and the definition of 'logical subject' (p. i85) collapses Agent with theme/topic.

Middle voice (p. I 96) is said to be essentially a morphological issue, but it is equally a valency issue and a discourse issue to do with how middle voice functions in texts. What does it mean to say that reflexive verbs are one way of expressing the Passive (p. I97)? Cubberley neither explains nor defines 'Passive Voice'.

Crisp discussion of the genitive-accusative with negated verbs requires the concept of reference to specific and non-specific entities and the distinction between singular and plural nouns and concrete and abstract nouns. Cubberley's account has none of these.

Non-Russianists will profit more from relevant books in the LINCOM EUROPA series. Rich data and clear 'non-technical' syntactic analysis are offered in T. Wade's A Comprehensive Russian Grammar (Oxford, 200 I) or D. Offord's Using Russian. A Guide to Contemporagy Usage (Cambridge, I 996). For information about on-going changes in Russian students will consult Ryaza- nova-Clarke and Wade's The Russian Language Today (London, I 999).

Three books in English have yet to be written: a historical and variationist account of standard spoken and written Russian and the many non-standard varieties; an introduction to style and the analysis of Russian discourse; a sociolinguistic account of the emergence and elaboration of standard Russian. Where Cubberley has gone astray is in trying to hit all these targets and reach two different audiences.

Theoretical and Applied Linguistics JIM MILLER School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Studies University of Edinburgh

Pohontsch, Anj a. Der Einfluss obersorbischer Lexik auf die niedersorbische Schrftsprache. Ein Beitrag zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der niedersorbischen Schriftsprache. Schriften des Sorbischen Instituts/Spisy Serbskeho instituta, 30. Domo- wina Verlag, Bautzen, 2002. 368 pp. Tables. Notes. Appendices. Biblio- graphy. ?22.90 (paperback).

THOUGH the question whether Sorbian is one language or two is unanswerable, there is no doubt about the existence of the two standard languages. Until the

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.154 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 11:00:55 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

REVIEWS 527

I840s they were both used to produce predominantly devotional literature. The national movement among the Upper Sorbs stimulated the appearance of various secular publications, including a weekly newspaper, but among the Lower Sorbs it was on the initiative not of national activists but of the Prussian authorities that a weekly newspaper was founded in i848. The Bramborski serbski Casnik, as it was called, circulated in a few hundred copies among the 72,000 Sorbs estimated to have been living in Lower Lusatia at that time. Since then it has changed its name several times and suffered a few interruptions, but it has managed to survive to the present day (since I949 as Nowy Casnik). Longevity alone makes it a uniquely valuable linguistic source and Dr Anja Pohontsch has chosen wisely in taking it as the basis for this excellent study of Upper Sorbian lexical influence on the Lower Sorbian standard language. A vocabulary analysing 858 Upper Sorbian borrowings used in the Lower Sorbian weekly between i 848 and I 995 forms the nucleus of the book. The preliminary chapters include a helpful survey of the historical background and the vocabulary is followed by a chronological account relating lexical to historical events and by an examination of the treatment of the borrowings of lexicographers. This is a thoughtful contribution to the history of the Lower Sorbian standard language, providing significant new insights into the mind of its users.

Identifying words borrowed by one Slavonic language from another is particularly difficult when the languages in question are as closely related as Upper and Lower Sorbian. Formal criteria alone are often inadequate. One might, for example, regard the presence in a given word of Proto-Slavonic *g (absence of the Upper Sorbian sound change g> h) as evidence that it is not a borrowing; but it has been observed, not only in the Sorbian situation (e.g. Uriel Weinreich, Languages in Contact. Findings and Problems, 2nd edn., London, The Hague and Paris, I 963, p. 2), that bilingual speakers familiar with regular correspondences are quite capable of making conversions automatically, as they transfer words from one language to the other, thereby obliterating the evidence of borrowing. Establishing the date of the word's first attestation is crucial to the argument. The methods used here to identify the borrowings are shrewd and persuasive, but one word in the list that does not belong there is kraj (land, country), which despite having eluded the Lower Sorbian sound change kr > ks is not a borrowing. Attested in the Lower Sorbian Bible (e.g., Matt. 8: 28) as early as the seventeenth century (H. Schuster-Sewc (ed.), Das Neue Testament der niedersorbischen Krakauer (Berliner) Handschrift. Ein Sprachdenkmal des I 7. Jahrhunderts, Bautzen, I 996, p. go), and in dialects (Sorbischer Sprachatlas, 9, Bautzen, I984, map 48), kraj probably moved into ks- territory after the metaphony was complete. The variant ksaj is also known.

The Upper Sorbian weekly began publication six years earlier than the Bramborski serbski Casnik, so Upper Sorbian writers were the pioneers in the field of finding new words to deal with new subjects. They chose to avoid Germanisms and borrow from Czech, but words borrowed from Czech were used not only to refer to new concepts but also to replace old German borrowings. Their standard language thus became more Slavonic but less comprehensible. When the Lower Sorbs encountered these challenges a few years later, they could easily have followed a similar path using either Upper

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.154 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 11:00:55 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

528 SEER, 8i, 3, 2003

Sorbian or Czech to supply their lexical needs. But, as Dr Pohontsch's statistical analysis shows, contributors to the Lower Sorbian weekly were at first fairly impassive. Though they did borrow a little from Upper Sorbian, they were only slightly inhibited in their use of Germanisms. Of the 858 Upper Sorbian borrowings in the vocabulary, only 55 were introduced in I 848- I 9 I 5. After the First World War there was a great surge: the number for the period I9I6-33 was 269. In 1947 Lower Sorbian was introduced to the school system, but many of the teachers in Lower Sorbian schools were Upper Sorbs. Upper Sorbs also contributed to Lower Sorbian publications. Not surprisingly, this led to the greatest increase of all in the influence of Upper Sorbian: between I 947 and 1959, 367 new borrowings appeared. Significantly, since the mid i 970S there has been a marked decrease in both the adoption and use of Upper Sorbian borrowings, while Germanisms have been staging a comeback.

Herford College, Oxford GERALD STONE

Piacentini, Marcello (ed.). Traduzione e rielaborazione nelle letterature di Polonia Ucraina e Russia, XVI-XJXIII secolo. Slavica. Collana di studi slavi, 3. Edizioni dell'Orso, Alessandria, 1999. 474 pp. Tables. Notes. Index. L7o,ooo.

THIS collection of twenty-three papers, delivered at an international confer- ence at Gargnano on Lake Garda, northern Italy in September i 996, illustrates how little the problems confronting translators and the solutions they have devised for them have changed over the centuries. Despite the internet, databases and modern translation theory, present-day translators resort to much the same techniques as their predecessors of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. As the collection's title indicates, 'target' languages include Church Slavonic, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish. Among the 'source' languages are Italian, Latin, French, English and the Greek of the Septuagint and the New Testament. Most of the contributions deal with translations of specific works; a few are more general; two explore aspects of translation theory.

According to A. Borowski in the first of these papers (pp. 23-38), the Polish translators of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries postulated three ways of translating. One is word for word, literal translation, which is recommended for translating 'spiritual books'. A second is to deploy to the full the translator's ownI concepts and inventiveness with the aim of producing something like a free adaptation. A third way arose in response to the enthusiastic interest which the sixteenth-century Polish translators from the Italian took in politics. They were well aware of the gulf which separated the Italian culture of the Cinquecento from the mentality of the contemporary Polish reader. So, for such a translator, 'translation did not mean [ ...] any literal transmission of images, ideas or patterns of culture ... .1 the perfect translator should not follow mechanically the original. His task was to remodel it according to native needs and in regard to customs' (pp. 36-37). This is a striking anticipation of modern localization theory.

This content downloaded from 62.122.72.154 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 11:00:55 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions