Review of Nathan W. Hill (ed.): 'Mediaeval Tibeto-Burman Languages IV'. (Brill's Tibetan Studies Library. Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region.) x, 480 pp.Leiden and Boston: Brill,2012. €163. ISBN 978 90 04 23202 0

Abstract

It is a veritable rarity to find a volume containing no fewer than six state-of-the-art contributions by seven different scholars on Tangut, an extinct language written in its own ideogrammatic script and belonging to the Trans-Himalayan linguistic phylum, a.k.a. the Tibeto-Burman language family. These six dazzling new papers on Tangut are just one of the extraordinary features of this remarkable anthology, which also contains seven studies on the Tibeto-Burman languages Burmese, Lepcha, Pyu, Tibetan, Nam and Yi as well as one study on the historical development of the Austroasiatic language Mon, which is presumed to have exerted major contact influence on both Burmese and Pyu. Not only do the contributions contain much original text corpus in indigenous scripts, such as the beautifully rendered Tangut and Lepcha scripts, but the editor has seen to it that all Chinese forms rendered in Hànyǔ Pīnyīn are rendered correctly and consistently, i.e. complete with tone diacritics.