Phonologies of Asia and Africa: Including the Caucasus (2 Volume Set)

This work has evolved over the course of the past few years and has involved the cooperation of 39 distinguished linguists. As such, uniformity in meth- odology and terminology has not been a desideratum, nor would it have been possible to attain. The achievements, nevertheless, have, in my opinion, proved to be remarkable. The goal of this publication is to provide a sum- mary of what is currently known about the phonology of selected Asian and African languages. In addition, three languages of the Caucasus are in- cluded. What I, as editor, have strived to do here is to give each author enough leeway to allow for the presentation of interesting facts in an infor- mative way, while paying strict attention to what is most significant about the language(s) under investigation. Of course, the readership will ultimately have to take it upon itself to decide the extent to which I have succeeded. I would like to express my sincere thanks to all the contributors for their efforts, and above all, for their extraordinary patience while the book was in production. These collaborative projects often take much more time to complete than was originally envisaged, as I found out once before with the two volumes containing approximately 1,800 pages by 134 scholars I edited in 1991: Semitic Studies in Honor of Wolf Leslau on the Occasion of His Eighty-Fifth Birthday .