International Society for Iranian Studies

Language in Society: Eight Sociolinguistic Essays on Balochi by Carina JahaniReview by: Brian SpoonerIranian Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Sep., 2003), pp. 452-453Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of International Society for Iranian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4311571 .

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452 Reviews

times on the same footing as the painstaking traditional scholarship of the past and pre- sent? Here is part of the answer to our initial question of the author's aims. When he claims that "Without Coleman Barks, the demand for the book you currently hold in your hands would be slight,"(592) he clearly indicates that his target public is nonspe- cialist and western. This scholarly work, then, seems to have been written primarily for a non-scholarly public and this explains why the author was led to distort the relative value of the different parts of his research. May we also voice a nagging frustration about a possible lack of balance between the detailed, careful, and extremely pointed research in the chapters devoted to the biographies of Rumi and his family and friends, and the rather too brief synthesis of the parts of Rumi's work and teachings, to our mind immeasurably more significant? In these parts, Lewis has applied himself to giving a very useful overview of existing scholarship in every possible language, but even his nonscholarly public might have benefited more from a detailed analysis of the language and thought in all or some of the quotations by Rumi and his circle.

Taking into account these two remarks, however, we still recommend Rumi, Past and Present, East and West to all students of Persian literature as an astonishingly com- plete reference work on Rumi, a most notable piece of scholarship in the field, an excellent attempt at historical reconstruction, an intelligent collation of existing sources, an outstanding translation of Rumi's poetry and, lastly-and this might become typical of twenty-first-century scholarly publications-an example of how traditional academic research can hope to cope with, promote, put right, and retain a larger public's interest in and image of a medieval Persian Sufi poet.

Christine van Ruymbeke University of Cambridge

Language in Society: Eight Sociolinguistic Essays on Balochi, edited by Carina Jahani, Uppsala, 2000, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Iranica Upsaliensia 3, ISSN 1100-326X; ISBN 91-554-4679-5.

This slim collection is a welcome addition to the meager literature on Baluchi. It con- tains eight articles on various aspects of the recent history of the language as used in different parts of the far-flung Baluch diaspora. The editor hopes that it will contribute to our understanding of the "interaction between the Balochi language and the different social settings where it is spoken" (9). It grew out of a "mini-symposium" which was held in the Iranian Section of the Department of Asian and African Studies at Uppsala in 1997 and is the second work on Baluchi to have appeared in this series as a result of the energy and interest of Dr. Carina Jahani. Her introduction, though useful to the non- specialist, contains a number of formulations that may be disputed by specialists, and others that are interesting but not documented, such as "Balochi was more widely spo- ken in the 19th and early 20th centuries than nowadays" (12). The eight essays are divided among four sections.

The first section, on "Mother Tongue Education and Language Maintenance" suf- fers from the fact that neither social scientists nor linguists (the authors are linguists)

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Reviews 453

have yet provided us with studies that can serve as a basis for assumptions about why some languages die out while others survive seemingly against the social odds. Asso- ciation, or lack of association, with political power or economic rewards certainly cor- relates well with some cases, but not with all. It is even more problematic that all three authors in this section take for granted the conventional UNESCO position that educa- tion is more efficient if carried out in the mother tongue. While some cases may be per- suasive, it is important to note others, where people have resisted mother-tongue educa- tion on the grounds that it excludes them from access to political and economic oppor- tunities. Without more disinterested comparative research on language loss the argu- ment that failing languages in general can be kept alive by public action is not convinc- ing. The cases of Irish and Scots Gaelic are obvious cases to consider. Also since it is in the nature of language to change continuously, there is no easy answer to the question of specifically what of value is in fact lost when a language disappears.

The two articles on orthographic efforts, in Cyrillic and Roman, in the second sec- tion are more interesting for the historical information they contain, some of it coinci- dental, than for the systems they record. This is particularly true of the essay by Joseph Elfenbein because of his long association with Gul Khan Nasir, who was for so long an important figure on the Baluchi scene.

The two articles of the third section deal with the Baluch in East Africa and in Turkmenistan. In one of these, Abdulaziz Lodhi gives a useful summary of the history of the Baluch presence in Zanzibar and adjacent areas. The other, by Vyacheslav Mosh- kalo, contains less newly compiled information on the Baluch in Turkmenistan, but coincidentally mentions a community of 100,000 Kurds there.

The single article in the last section, by Jan Muhammad Dashti, is valuable for what must be a unique review of modern published Baluchi literature.

The Bibliography contains some interesting items that rarely appear in bibliogra- phies.

Overall, this is a book of uneven quality but contains enough that is new and of interest to be a useful addition to the small field of Baluchi studies.

Brian Spooner University of Pennsylvania

Phonostatistics and Phonotactics of the Syllable in Modern Persian, Seyyed Morteza Alamolhoda, Helsinki: The Finnish Oriental Society, 2000, Studia Orientalia, Vol. 89, ISBN 951-9380-45-0, ISSN 0039-3282, xiii + 238 pp.

This book is a description of well-formed syllables in Modem Standard Persian. The author has attempted to provide a statistical description of the properties of syllables in Modern Persian with special attention to phonotactic constraints. Literary Tehrani dia- lect is the version of Modern Persian considered in this study.

The method of analysis used for the investigation of syllable well-formedness is mainly based on the guidelines set by Malone (1936) and Trubetzkoy (1939) (see his

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