Book Reviews

• Published in: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde Vol. 121; no. 3; p. 366
• Main Authors: Wertheim, W F, Bosch, FDK, Galestin, Th P, JE van Lohuizen-de Leeuw, Nooteboom, C, Kooyman, S, Mylius, Norbert, Mesman, H R, Jane Richardson Hanks, Gonda, J, Shorto, H L
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Leiden Koninklijke Brill NV 01.07.1965
• Subjects: African studies; Austroasiatic languages; Austronesian languages; Chinese languages; Diachronic linguistics; Museums; Reference (Semantic); Thai language; Vietnamese; Word order; New York; United States > US; Thailand
• ISSN: 0006-2294; 2213-4379

[...]follow a chapter on clothing and the use of textiles in religious cult, one on ornamenting methods and on the material of Indonesian fabrics. The sessions of this study group were mainly devoted to methodological problems in the application of comparative methods to this area; the study of the Austroasiatic language family and other language groups on the S. E. Asian mainland; Austronesian languages and their relations to the tongues of the mainland; and, finally, the state of descriptive studies and the future prospects for comparative work. The results at which Honey and Simmonds arrive "there exists considerable general similarity in terms of class, order, and, to some extent, in class content" between the noun complexes in Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese is in itself not surprising, first because the number of possibilities, especially in flexionless languages, is limited, in the second place because definite types of word order are for various psychological and stylistic reasons apt to prevail in many languages. [...]Professor H. Kahler (Hamburg) surveys the present state of knowledge in the Austronesian field, drawing attention to the interest of these studies for anthropological research as well as to the indispensability of a diachronic and comparative approach to many problems, and suggesting priorities for future investigations.