Book Review

The book under review is the first attempt at a large-scale examination of the sound and grammatical systems of Hamar (a South Omotic language) and, as such, meets a dire need for detailed documentation and description within this most under-described corner of Afroasiatic (cf. Hayward 2000). The grammar is based primarily on ten months of fieldwork (spanning 2013 and 2014) and includes a corpus of 40 annotated texts as well as informal conversations and targeted elicitation (7). The scope of this review includes a catalog of contents and organization, a brief description of particularly interesting findings in Hamar, and strengths/weaknesses of the work. The first chapter provides an overview of the language’s geographical setting, variation across space, patterns of use. The author mentions previously published work (mainly wordlists, comparative work as well as substantial ethnographic and anthropological work by Ivo Strecker and Jean Lydall, among others) and unpublished work as well (sketches of morphology and phonology, mainly). The grammar’s subsequent chapters include phonology and morphophonology (Chapter 2), nouns (Chapter 3), pronouns and pronominal clitics (Chapter 4), minor word classes (Chapter 5), verbs (Chapter 6), basic syntax (Chapter 7), noun phrases (Chapter 8), simple clauses (Chapter 9), complex clauses (Chapter 10), interrogative clauses (Chapter 11), negative clauses (Chapter 12), classification (Chapter 13). Chapters are followed by three appendices: texts (Appendix A), Hamar-English lexicon (Appendix B), and EnglishHamar lexicon (Appendix C). Some of the more interesting findings include relevant stress and tone, a seven-vowel system with contrastive length, and head-final clause vs. headinitial noun phrase orders. While the vast majority of Omotic languages are tonal, Hamar is described as exhibiting a system involving both stress and tone (40–52). Cues of stress include increases in amplitude and duration as well as high pitch. Stress can be assigned to any syllable of a two or three syllable noun. It appears that for the vast majority of the data only one high tone is found per JALL 2018; 39(1): 107–110