WEINSTEIN, Charles, 2010 Parlons Tchouktche. Une langue de Sibérie, Paris, L’Harmattan, 241 pages.

This book, the title of which can be translated into English as “Let’s speak Chukchi. A language of Siberia,” is one of the popular “Parlons…” series, by the Parisian publisher L’Harmattan. This series apparently aims to present relatively nontechnical accounts of a variety of languages, usually with some pedagogical component, and their sociohistorical, sociopolitical, or ethnographic context, for the general non-linguist public. It is therefore remarkable that Chukchi, a little known and endangered language of the Chukotko-Kamchatkan family of the Russian Far East, would be presented in this series to the French-speaking public. It is, indeed, the only monograph on this language in French, and one of the few in a language other than Russian. The book starts with a small map, a brief historical introduction, and then, without overarching chapters, goes on with unnumbered sections on phonetics, the pronunciation (of the standard Cyrillic alphabet used in Russia for Chukchi), various phonological processes, male and female speech, morphological typology, noun formation, the plural, noun inflection, adjectives, adverbs, determiners, numerals, postpositions, personal pronouns, inflection and derivation of verbs, participles, gerunds, deverbal adjectives, and comparatives. The last grammatical section is called “elements of syntax” (pp. 128-133). Then follow some pronunciation exercises, conversational sentences in phrasebook format, little stories, “words to say fast”—I assume tongue-twisters, riddles, taboos, “oral tradition” (i.e. traditional myths and tales, poetry and songs), and brief Chukchi-French and French-Chukchi lexica. Oddly, the brief bibliography presents Russian-language references in French translation only, and the non-specialist reader has no way of telling whether, except for the first two references by Bogoras and the two by Kurebito, they are actually written in Russian. A brief table of contents, but no index, completes the book. In a sense, this is an impressive book, quite a bit more informative and more demanding and richer in data than many other books in the “Parlons…” series. There is no doubt that the author has a profound knowledge of Chukchi grammar. I have reservations, however, about what this book can achieve for the non-linguist, or even for the non-specialist linguist. With the knowledge gathered in the grammar sections and the lexicon, I doubt whether a devoted linguist, not to mention a non-linguist, would be able to analyze the texts at the end of the book. In the next four paragraphs, I will comment on these problems. First, Chukchi examples, sentences, and texts are given without morpheme-by-morpheme or word-by-word glosses. A loose translation comes after the example or text. In the author’s short account of the language for linguists in this journal (Weinstein 2007), morpheme glosses were provided, and as a result I found that publication of his quite a bit easier to follow than this one! An index of constructions and morphological elements (prefixes, suffixes, and circumfixes) would also have been helpful. Second, the phonological and morphosyntactic descriptions are too impressionistic and too informal. While there is too much detail in some sections, there is not enough in others. For example, pp. 69-79 provide verb paradigms, but without analysis. The curious reader will have to go through them with a pencil to figure out what the inflectional morphology is, and will not find that morphology to be obvious. On the other hand, there is detailed discussion of the meanings of the verb tenses, of auxiliary verbs, and of comparatives and superlatives. Third, the terminology is often idiosyncratic. For example, on pp. 28-33, the author calls “incorporation” what most linguists would call “compounding” (and they would consider incorporation a subtype of compounding), and he calls “compounding” a type of frozen or lexicalized “incorporation.” Fourth, the presentation of the grammar …