Lawrence A. Reid: Reviews
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Item"A Grammar of Mantauran (Rukai) by Elizabeth Zeitoun": A Review( 2009)REVIEW: Mantauran is one of the six dialects of the Formosan language Rukai, spoken in the south central region of Taiwan. It is spoken by only 250–300 people and is highly endangered, with only a few elderly speakers still fluent. This alone is reason enough to document the language that in a generation or so will probably no longer be spoken. But Rukai is unique in that it apparently exhibits an accusative case-marking system, while most other Formosan languages are arguably ergative, and it does not exhibit the widespread “focus” system characteristic of the so-called “Philippine-type” languages of Taiwan, such as Amis, Kavalan, Bunun, Thao, and Atayal.
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Item"Nominalization in Formosan Languages by Elizabeth Zeitoun": A Review( 2003)REVIEW: This volume is a collection of ten papers focusing on various aspects of nominalization in Formosan languages from different theoretical perspectives. (Two of the languages discussed are not actually Formosan: Yami is spoken on an island to the southeast of Taiwan and subgroups genetically with the Philippines, and Tagalog is, of course, a Philippine language.) The papers are the output of a workshop of the same name held at Academic Sinica in Taipei, October 21-22, 2000. This is an important contribution to the rapidly growing literature on Formosan (and Philippine) linguistics, not only because of the highly focused nature of the studies, enabling comparisons to be drawn with similar phenomena in other languages of the groups, but also because several of the studies are on highly endangered or nearly extinct languages.
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Item"Ilocano Dictionary and Grammar: Ilocano-English, English-Ilocano by Carl Ralph Galvez": A Review( 2002)REVIEW: Among the Philippine languages, Ilokano is ranked third in terms of its number of mother-tonguespeakers (probably over 8,000,000), yet there has never been a good, widely available dictionary of the language until now.
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Item"A Hunter-Gatherer Language of Northern Indochina by Jørgen Rischel": A Review( 1996)REVIEW: Among the endangered languages of the world, few are more endangered than those spoken by small groups of hunter-gatherers, eking out a precarious existence in the rainforests of Southeast Asia. In the face of the ever-decreasing resources of their preferred habitat, and the need to interact with agriculturalists to supplement their meager diets with cultivated foods and to provide spouses for their children, they are of necessity gradually abandoning their native tongues for those of their settled neighbors with whom they must interact. Although the very existence of some of these groups is doubted by some members of the scientific community, exist they do. Rischel' s book documents the language of one such group, the Minor Mlabri living in the mountains of northeastern Thailand, whose language and culture are now close to extinction, with fewer than a dozen people (eight adults and three children) still able to speak the language