The dawn of Slavic : an introduction to Slavic philology /

This unique book treats the historical and linguistic aspects of early written Slavic civilization. Other works have dealt with these aspects separately: the linguistic in W.J. Entwistle & W.A. Morison's Russian and the Slavonic Languages (1949, reprinted 1964), and in The Slavonic Languages, ed. by Bernard Comrie and Greville Corbett (1993) which are short on historical and cultural information; Slavic civilization in, for example, Francis Dvornik's The Slavs: Their Early History and Civilization (1956) and Marija Gimbutas's The Slavs (1971), which lack detailed linguistic information. Schenker's book is especially valuable since it summarizes and updates the above books and supplements them with a wealth of archaeological, textological, topological, paleographical, and liturgical data from a large variety of hard-to-find scholarly works and sources. The author (Yale) provides an extensive section on Proto-Slavic, a section on the isoglosses distinguishing the Slavic languages, and a very clear summary of Slavic accentology. The book has few, if any, misprints, unusual for a work of such linguistic diversity. The maps are clear, as are the photographs of early Slavic writings. Recommended for all libraries collecting in Slavic, Balkan, and Indo-European studies. B. K. Beynen Des Moines Area Community College