LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY 1019

tegral part mechanisms accounting for inher- ent linguistic dynamism and change. The Sense ofchange provides such a perspective. I t is in- tended as a companion volume to The Sense of Grammar: Language as Semiotic (Indiana Uni- versity Press, 1983), written by the same au- thor. Both share a reliance on the concept of language developed by Charles Sanders Peirce. Shapiro’s theory of linguistic change is shaped by Peirce’s concept of teleology (re- garding final causation).

Teleology has always had an unclear posi- tion in linguistics for a number of reasons: its unclear philosophical status, the multiplicity of different senses associated with the term, and the undesired consequences of teleological explanations that necessarily block the possi- bility of attaining full predictiveness of lin- guistic change. Linguists, however, seem to have reached a general consensus concerning theories of language change: as they are not autonomous, theories of language change can- not be fully predictive. Apart from grammat- ical change they utilize information about cul- tural and social change. Consequently, teleo- logical explanations that are inextricably con- nected with the primacy of the energeio rather than ergon view of language (i.e., the social ra ther than the individual psychological layer) are more promising for historical lin- guistics. And this is what Shapiro manages to show in his publication. Linguistic change in his theory is teleological; that is, it ensures the continuity of language and aims at constant systematization in the sense of Aristotle’s con- cept of final causation.

Shapiro makes a n important observation concerning an essentially teleological struc- ture of semiosis (ch. 2). It is a goal of interpre- tation that, at least potentially, there should exist for each sign “a present possibility” con- tained in it, making language and change in- herently teleological. The question, however, that may bother a student of Peirce, is the na- ture of the ultimate goal toward which lan- guage is proceeding. Shapiro proposes that the final interpretant (i.e., an ideally adequate concept) exerts a directed pressure on the symbol via the cumu6aation of dynamic interpre- tants. Shapiro puts himself in a philosophi- cally difficult position, having to evaluate lin- guistic changes in terms of their fitness to an ideal truth. T o avoid such uncomfortable judgments, Shapiro proposes concepts of a (near-) final degree of “truth” or a provisional status of meaningfulness and truth. In chapter 5, Shapiro concentrates primarily on the changes of conceptual meaning, that is, on the growth of symbols in Peirce’s parlance. Do sym- bols have a teleology and d o words have an en-

telechy? T o answer these questions Shapiro gives the reader a n erudite analysis of the Slavic myth of the Indo-European Divine Twins. Unfortunately, relations between sym- bols, growth, and continuity are not imrnedi- ately evident from this chapter. Though the old Slavic beliefs form a “theory” in Peirce’s terms, the “practice” is not evidenced, and one might question whether “successive inter- pretations” do indeed finally produce the en- telechy.

For somebody with a philosophical stand different from that of the author, the search for one perfect, absolute truth may not sound con- vincing; in more cognitively oriented models of language and linguistic evolution there is room for more than one truth ofequal validity. Nevertheless, for the philosopher, linguist, and anthropologist, The Sense of Change pro- vides a new theoretical option, while the ad- ditional bonus for the Slavicist is the wealth of data substantizing the theoretical claims.

Sprung from Some Common Source: In- vestigations into the Prehistory of Lan- guages. Sydney M . Lamb and E. Douglas Mitch- ell, eds. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 199 1. 426 pp.

LYLE CAMPBELL Louisiana State University

This volume presents the papers of a 1986 symposium to commemorate the 200th anni- versary of Sir William Jones’s declaration that the Indo-European ( I E ) languages a r e “sprung from some common source,” com- monly cited as the origin of comparative lin- guistics.

The papers cluster around three topics. One is the history of linguistics (Lehmann, Can- non, Greenberg). Jones’s interest was not lan- guage per se; he planned to write a history of humankind, utilizing evidence from lan- guages, philosophy, religion, sculpture and ar- chitecture, and written sources. While Can- non’s assessment of Jones is excellent, a his- torically more realistic account would have been better. Connections among IE languages were known long before Jones (e.g., Gelenius 1537, Jager in 1686, and Ihre in 1769), and a connection between Sanskrit and other I E languages had been observed (e.g., Stevens in 1583 and Coeurdoux in 1768). Moreover,

Jones erroneously asserted that Chinese and Indo-Aryan a r e related, Japanese is de- scended from the same stock as Chinese, and languages from Madagascar to the Philip- pines and the remotest islands have Sanskrit

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as their common parent. Greenberg declares that Jones used mass comparison (Green- berg’s method), and that since Jones knew Ar- abic, Hebrew, and several IE languages, this “enabled him to see a valid grouping based on differential resemblances” (p. 127). However, it is the failings of this method that permitted Jones to link Chinese, Japanese, and Pacific languages to IE languages. Cannon (p. 36) and Greenberg (p. 127) go too far by attrib- uting the comparative method to Jones, Bopp, and Schlegel, neglecting Sajnovics, Gyarma- thi, and their predecessors, who developed this method and who influenced Bopp and Schlegel.

A second theme is IE studies beyond lan- guage: Puhvel, “Whence the Hittite, Whither the Jonesian Vision?”; Polomi, “Indo-Euro- pean Religion and the Indo-European Reli- gious Vocabulary”; Gimbutas, “Deities and Symbols of Old Europe and Their Survival in the Indo-European Era: A Synopsis.”

The third and largest theme is distant ge- netic relationships among languages. Most of the authors favor remote relationships, in con- trast to most historical linguists, who demand substantial evidence for long-range proposals. Lamb and Mitchell judge remote relationship research a fitting way to “inject some new vi- tality into comparative linguistics”; they en- courage linguists “to let their full creative powers loose in a field that [is] in danger of stifling itselffrom an excess ofcaution” (p. 2). However, specialists find .the field fully vital, as seen in the energetic debates on glottalic theory, recently proposed IE homelands, IE syntax, and IE law and religion. Lamb and Mitchell seem to invite spectacle in place of standards of scholarship. They speak of (un- documented) indignation against proposals of distant genetic relationship, asserting “those who are thus indignant insist that the only way to discover the existence of genetic rela- tionships is by means of regular phonological correspondences” (p. 5; see also Greenberg, p. 127). This is not true; even the most cautious scholars also recognize grammatical corre- spondences as evidence. Also, no one insists that languages should be compared only two at a time (p. 5).

Greenberg discusses two grammatical ele- ments of his proposed Eurasiatic stock. Lodge presents evidence to connect IE and Afroasi- atic. Levin compares some Semitic and IE phenomena. Shevoroshkin and Manster Ra- mer discuss the Nostratic, Sino-Caucasian, and Dene-Caucasian proposals. Egerod pre- sents a useful overview of genetic and typolog- ical proposals among Far Eastern languages. Catford considers classifications among Cau-

casian languages and beyond. Martin reviews the Japanese-Korean evidence, while Miller surveys disapprovingly opinions against the Altaic hypothesis. Ruhlen assumes Green- berg’s controversial Amerind grouping and investigates its “internal subgrouping.”

In contrast, Austerlitz cautions against ex- ceeding the evidence for grouping languages genetically and recommends other alterna- tives. Oswalt’s computer method of assessing distant relationships also calls for caution (p. 403). Embleton’s “Mathematical Methods of Genetic Classification” is a valuable, accessi- ble survey.

This book will no doubt achieve its editors’ apparent goal of arousing additional contro- versy (p. 2). Several of the articles are signifi- cant contributions in their own right. Never- theless, in the long run, the book’s dominant focus-a laissez-faire orientation to remote linguistic relationships-will prove no lasting contribution.

Verbal Art in San Blas: Kuna Culture through Its Discourse. Joel Sherzer. Cam- bridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture, 21. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.292 pp.

CHRISTOPHER LOETHER Idaho State University

The Kuna Indians of Panama are the larg- est Native American group in the South American tropics, numbering approximately thirty thousand. They have been able to main- tain their unique cultural life through a pro- cess of synthesizing the old with the new, and creatively adapting their traditions to novel circumstances, even as the wider Panamanian political and economic scene impinges upon them.

Joel Sherzer has been a student of the Kuna since 1968. The focus of his research has been on the intersection between language and cul- ture. In his latest work, Verbal Art in Sun Blas, Sherzer focuses on Kuna verbal life; but this work is more than an ethnopoetic analysis of -Kuna verbal art. His analyses are both lin- guistic and ethnographic, in that he is con- cerned with such issues as context, creativity, and the emergent quality of culture as re- flected through discourse.

Sherzer believes that his “discourse-cen- tered and verbal art-centered approach” has ramifications that go beyond linguistic de- scription: Since so much of culture is encoded in language, the study of a society’s use oflan- guage can reveal how and what its members