Reviews for Guardian of the East India Company: The Life of Laurence Sulivan

The average rating for Guardian of the East India Company: The Life of Laurence Sulivan based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-02-10 00:00:00 Dan Yergeau Cliff Goddard's THE LANGUAGES OF EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA is a textbook examining the general features of the languages of this part of the world. Chinese, Lao, Thai, Malay, etc. all share many things in common, such as tone, lack of inflection, (in some cases) non-alphabetic writing systems, honorific pronouns, and so forth. The material is divided into six sections. "Language families, linguistic areas and language situations" is an overview of genetic affiliation and areal convergence. "Words: origins, structures, meanings" discusses the formation of the lexica of these languages, through such things as borrowing, derivation, and compounding. "Grammatical topics" is mainly about aspect, and marking of sentence elements. "The soundscape of East and Southeast Asia" is, as the title makes clear, about phonology and beyond the phoneme inventory covers (over three pages) tones and tone sandhi. "Writing systems" contests the common sentiment that writing is not part of "pure" linguistics and shows how systems such as that of Chinese is bound tightly with the spoken language. Finally, "The art of speaking" examines what eloquent speech means here, such as the use of proverbs and sayings, honorific forms, and "cultural scripts". As THE LANGUAGES OF EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA is a textbook, each chapter closes with a list of linguistic terms meant to be memorised, and at the end of the book are exercises and their solutions linked to each exercise, as well as a general glossary. I was disappointed to find that the perspective is purely synchronic, historical linguists will find little of interest here. There are many places where the author could have many revelant diachronic points. For example, lexical tone is very common in these languages, but each language developed at different times, with Chinese generating tones from now-lost final consonants only during the Middle Chinese period. For students interested in these languages as they are now, this book will nonetheless provide some enjoyable reading.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-09-12 00:00:00 James Schiavi Excellent introduction to SEA and Asian languages.