Vocabulario popoluca de Sayula: Veracruz, México By Lawrence E. Clark
1998; Linguistic Society of America; Volume: 74; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/lan.1998.0216
ISSN1535-0665
Autores Tópico(s)Linguistics and language evolution
Resumo438 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) 1362. In this reassessment of the evidence, Hall strives to validate an artifact dismissed by runologists , linguists, and medievalists during a century of intermittent argument. The book falls into three parts and sixteen chapters , with some redundancy in the last section. Part A, 'The text in context' (1-58), comprises seven chapters on physical attributes ofthe stone, including a detailed account of circumstances surrounding its discovery: Ch. 1, 'The stone' (1-18); Ch. 2, "The runes' (19-36); Ch. 3, 'Grammar and lexicon' (37-42); Ch. 4, 'The Gothland-Greenland connection ' (43-46); Ch. 5, 'Historical background' (47-51); Ch. 6, 'Significance' (52-53); and Ch. 7, 'The text' (54-57). Part B, 'Structural analysis and commentary' (59-84), covers technical aspects of the language inscribed on the stone: Ch. 8, 'Graphemics ' (59-60); Ch. 9, 'Phonology' (61-65); Ch. 10, 'Morphology' (66-68); Ch. 11, 'Syntax' (69-73); Ch. 12, 'Lexicon, semantics, style' (74-78); and Ch. 13, 'Conclusion' (79-83). Part C, 'Appendices' (85-122), traces the history of the debate, indicts the primary negator, and examines the controversy's implications: Ch. 14, ? century of debates' (85-93); Ch. 15, 'Wahlgren on Kensington' (94-104); and Ch. 16, 'Methodological insights' (105-22). A bibliography (123-29) and two indexes conclude the book ('Index nominum,' 130-32; 'Index rerum,' 132-36), which would have profited from more extensive editing. H falls short of his goal because, despite strong rhetoric, he presents no final evidence of the inscription 's authenticity. Rather, he relies overmuch on coincidence and conjecture. Early in the book, he emphasizes five affadavits signed in 1909 by witnesses to the stone's excavation a decade earlier (6-8). This sort of evidence does not convince: AU questions of individual credibility aside, such documents say nothing about the antiquity of the inscription . Further, titillating as it may be to imagine a 'Vinlandic' futhork and a Chinook-style Old Bohusl änsk pidgin trickling past Greenland through Hudson Bay to medieval Minnesota (45-46), concrete historical proof is needed to bring such notions beyond the realm of romance. In the absence of extensive Norse deposits at any Canadian or American sites other than L'Anse aux Meadows, H's thesis will continue to require a leap of faith like that taken by those who credit Scandinavian 'physical characteristics and cultural behavior-patterns of the Mandan Indians ' (82; cf. 47, 88). Manifestly, George Catlin's journals depict Mandan culture as Plains Native American, similar to Siouan though less nomadic. Tragically, albeit conveniently for the fabulists, this tribe succumbed to smallpox shortly after Catlin's work among them in the 1830s. Other evidence is equally suppositional, e.g. the coincidences of a Norwegian's king's Greenlandic aspirations in 1354 (47) and the Danish attack on Gotland in 1361 (48). Though ingenious, such "scenarios ' ' do not prove that a party of Norsemen penetrated Minnesota—much less the Dakotas—in 1362. Aside from various runic and linguistic anomalies in the inscription, it is in fact the pentadic date that ultimately discredits the stone, a problem H mentions without resolving (32-33). While pentadic numerals were indeed current in medieval Europe, they were not used with Arabic-style place value, i.e. in the system we use today, where collocations increase exponentially from right to left, giving us 'tens, hundreds, thousands,' etc. This objection, still unassailable , figures in the work of Eric Wahlgren from the 1950s (cited by H) to his last, definitive statement on the subject in Medieval Scandinavia (ed. by Phillip Pulsiano, et al., New York: Garland, 1993): 'Diligent promotion has made the Kensington inscription the kingpin of "Viking Romanticism" in North America . . . specialists in Scandinavian linguistics and runology have characterized it as a late 19thcentury hoax, perpetrated by Minnesotans in the interest of ethnic prestige' (352). Although his argument for authenticity fails to convince this reader, H does illuminate the saga of Scandinavian-American assimilation in the upper Midwest. Ultimately—to set aside highly charged issues of authenticity—such artifacts reveal much about the stressful process of acculturation endured by late nineteenth-century Scandinavian immigrants who left for Canaan and found the rugged plains...
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