This volurne continues a series of publications, the main goal of which is to make accessible the many works left unfinished by the late Göttingen scholar Gerhard Doerfer (1920-2003) in the framework of the ambitious project "Nordasiatische Kulturgeschichte". Specialists in Tungusic studies are most certainly well acquainted with this initiative, as some important contributions were produced under its sponsorship (e.g. 0. Doerfer/W. Hesche/H. Scheinhardt, Lamutisches Wörterbuch, Wiesbaden 1980), and it is thanks to the tireless efforts of Michael Knüppel, one of Doerfer`s former students, that we can still profit from it. During the last decade or so, Knüppel laboriously recovered, completed, and sometimes even reconstructed, the original plans and guidelines outlined by Dörfer, in order to get works which right now are something more than auxiliary tools in Tungusic linguistics (e.g. G.Doerfer/ M. Knuppel, Etymologisch-ethnologisches Wörterbuch tungusischer Dialekte (vor- nehmlich der Mandschurei), Hildesheim/Zürich/New York 2004) published at last.
The main goal of this book is to gather and organize in a systematic fashion all the available materials of the so-called Arman language, a Tungusic variety which became silent in die 1970s. lt was originally spoken in a very small pocket in the region of the river Arman (....) at the Okhotsk Coast, surrounded by East Ewen dialects (Kolyma, Okhotsk, Ola). Annan speakers called themselves ääwnä, plural ääwnäl, and called speakers of the Ola region (whose dialect was taken as a basis for the literary Ewen language) oros, plural orosol, lit. "those having reindeers" (in its turn, Arman speakers were referred to by the latter as mänä, i.e. "(the) settled (ones)").
Our knowledge of Arman stems almost in exclusivity from a single work: L D. Rišes` Ph.D. thesis, Armanskij dialekt èvenskogo jazyka (ocerk grammatiki, teksty, slovar`), defended in Leningrad in 1947. All subsequent publications about the Arman language have exploited it to a greater or lesser extent.
Six sections follow after the table of contents (p. 5) and the preface (pp. 7-8): I. lntroduction (pp. 9-34), II. Arrangement of the dictionary (pp. 35-36), III. Bibliographic abbreviations (p. 37), IV. References (pp. 39-42), V. Arman-Russian-German dictionary (pp. 43-372), and VI. German Index (pp. 373-532).
The latter is an invaluable tool for those who are going to make use of the dictionary with some frequency. The authors must be congratulated on this, as the custom of compiling such indexes has regrettably fallen out of practice.
The introduction covers well the basics of Arman. Certain aspects of it, however, deserve some cornments. To begin with, it would have been instructive for the casual reader to give a brief account of the polemics surrounding the linguistic status of Arman, as it is not universally acknowledged that Arman is a "language". Both, L.D. Rišes, the scholar to whom we owe the privilege of knowing about Arman, and V.I. Cincius, an authority not only of Ewen, but of everything Tungusic, always referred to Arman as a dialect of Ewen, though they admitted its many peculiarities (see the East West-Arman dialectal division already described in L. D. Rišes, "Nekotorye dannye po zapadnomu dialektu èvenskogo jazyka", Ucenye zapiski 3, 1955, pp. 179- 203, esp. 179-180).
Curiously enough, the first scholar to argue about the pertinacity of Arman from a historical and comparative viewpoint was G. Doerfer (timid, if not just unsubstantial, allusions were made by other scholars, among them K.H.. Menges or K. A. Novikova ,see relevant passages on pp. 9 and 12, respectively, in the book under review), who quite accurately foresaw what an important contribution Arman could make to our rather narrow understanding of Northern Tungusic. Doerfer's opinions in this respect - especially the one expressed in his seminal paper "Classification Problems of Tungus" (in M. Weiers, ed, Tungusica, vol. 1: Beiträge zur nordasiatischen Kulturgeschichte, Wiesbaden 1978, pp. 1-26, esp. p. 10) where he correctly observed that Arman is a sort of transitory variety between Ewenki and Ewen (this is perfectly illustrated on p. 20 of the book under review with very iconic lexical comparanda,which we can expand here to highlight the differences between the varieties involved, e.g. West Ewenki nööltin ~nueltin "sun" >> Literary Ewen [ eastern dialects] nöölten >> Arman yoolten >> East Ewenki dialectal continuum yultän ~ nultän ~ dilacaa >> Literary Ewenki [= southern dialects] dilacaa ~siguun) - were generally well received outside the Soviet Union and, consequently, have since been echoed in some important publications on Northeast Eurasia history and linguistics, eg. J. Janhunen's Manchuria.- An Ethnic History (Helsinki 1996, p. 67).
In spite of few supporters only, Russian scholars remain rather unconvinced by Doerfer's (or other scholars', for that matter) arguments and continue treating Arman as an aberrant dialect of Ewen. Krejnovic belonged to those who most fiercely challenged the idea of Arman being a linguistic autonomous system (.........) Krejnovic´s argumentation is fairly unbalanced, because he put too much emphasis on the similarities of Arman with the surrounding (East) Ewen dialects, which he explains only by invoking inheritance, leaving no room tor other possible explanations, eg. diffusion from Arman, or secondary influence from (East) Ewen. (.....)
Coming back to the introduction of the book under review, it also attempts at showing through current research and historical documentation why Arman deserves to be treated as an autonomous system within Tungusic (pp. 9-22). Regrettably the discussion revolves on the historical attestatlon developmen of /s-/ (e.g. Literary Ewenki hiisäcin 'evening' vs. Arman sisäätnä) and /l-/ (e.g. Literary Ewen nam "sea" vs. Arman lam) which, though philologically speaking a very interesting issue, it is not enough to provide the reader with a general view of the main features distinguishing Arman from the rest of the Northern Tungusic languages. (....)
As far as grammar is concerned, a brief comparative Arman-Ewen-Ewenki sketch is offered on pp. 22-29 in the book under review, and three Arman texts with German translation are reproduced on pp. 30-33 for illustrative purposes. All this information is taken from L. D. Rišes` article "Osnovnye osobennosti armanskogo dialekta èvenskogo jazyka" (Doklady i soobscenija Instituta Jazykoznanija AN SSR 7, 1955, pp. 116-146), which is a very good summary of her own Ph.D. thesis rnentioned above. (.....)
All these features, both phonological and morphological, unambiguously set apart Arman frorn the rest of Ewen dialects and, at the same time, they show that Arman is a highly innovative component of the Northern Tungusic branch.
lncidentally, it would have been certainly advisable to describe in greater detail some of the Western sources containing Ewen materials referred to on pp. 13-19, as not all of them are well known, even arnong specialists. For example, until very recently, Lindenau's Arman materials, which rank among the oldest ones, were hard to come by (the bulk of them belongs in Lindenau's report "Beschreibung der Peschie Tungusen, oder so genannte[n] Lamuten, zu Ochot. 1742"; see now la. I. Lindenau, Opisanie narodov Sibiri (pervaja polovina XVII veka). Istorikotoriko-ètnograficeskie materialy o narodax Sibiri i Severo-Vostoka, perevod, podgotovka teksta, primecanija i predislovie Z. D. Titova. Magadan 1983, on Lindenau on pp. 6-17, Arman vocabulary on pp. 71-76), and even for those who had a chance to read basic literature on the history of Tungusic linguistics (see i.a. V. A. Gorcevskaja, Ocerk istorii izucenija tunguso-manczurskix jazykov, Leningrad 1959, esp. pp. 6-9, 16-17, and similar works), it will remain unclear who this Lindenau is (namely, Jakov lvanovic/Johann Lindenau [1700/1710-1795], a Russian-born Swedish member of the Second Kamchatkan expedition, also known as the Great Northern Expedition) and why we can find Arman materials at all in his writings.
The dictionary itself contains a total of 3571 items. These have been extracted from the sources described in the introduction - mainly the Russian-Ewen dictionary by V.I. Cincius and L. D. Rišes (Russko-èvenskij slovar', Moskva 1952) and the comparative dictionary edited by V.I. Cincius (Sravnitel`nyj slovar' tunguso-man'czurskix jazykov, 2 vols., Leningrad 1975-1977) - ‚ including four words in N. V. Sljunin's Oxotsko-kamcatskij kraj (Sankt-Peterburg, vol. 1, p. 376; the given page is reproduced on p. 34) and the obscure Arman word mentioned in Majewicz's edition of B. Pilsudski's Tungusic materials (The Collected Works of Bronislaw Pilsudski, vol. IV: Materials for the Study of Tungusic Languages und Folklore, Berlin 2011, p. 1206; see [2691] ourf'a = ävärgä).
All entries are numbered to make cross-reference easier (as is done in other dictionaries belonging to the same series), and include Russian and German translations.
In sum, this is a very welcome contribution that should help, among others, in the organization and systematization of Tungusic linguistic materials. lt may alsospur some fresh discussion about the intricacies of language/dialect classification and historical and comparative linguistics in the domain of Tungusic studies. The number of typos and misprints is within the reasonable (note, however, that the passage on p. 13 "...in den russischen Quellen des 12. Jh. unter der Form..." should read " 17. Jh." instead). The book, technically speaking, is well produced, with clean pages and a pleasant typeface.
José Andrés Alonso de la Fuente (Cracow)
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