FORTESCUE, Michael, 2005 Comparative Chukotko-Kamchatkan Dictionary, Berlin and New York, Mouton de Gruyter, Trends in Linguistics Documentation, 23, 496 pages.

Fortescue’s new Comparative Chukotko-Kamchatkan Dictionary ("CCKD") deals with the languages of the next group of indigenous people of Asian Russia past the Siberian Eskimos across the Bering Strait and the Bering Sea from Alaska. The Chukotko-Kamchatkan language family, which has also been called "Luorawetlan," has two branches: the four languages of the Chukotian branch, which are Chukchi (which is the one situated geographically closer to the Eskimo area), Koryak, Alutor, and Kerek, and the one language of the Kamchatkan branch, Itelmen (also called Kamchadal). A comparative dictionary such as CCKD will be of interest to scholars of Eskimo-Aleut langauges on several grounds. It is another comparative dictionary of a family of indigenous languages of the North, many endangered (if not moribund), their lexicons documented to an uneven extent, just as is the case with Eskimo-Aleut, so that the present dictionary is, in a sense, a companion or complementary volume to the Comparative Eskimo Dictionary with Aleut Cognates (1994), "CED" compiled by Fortescue with two others (one of whom is the present reviewer). If one is interested in a possible deep relationship between these two language families that between them straddle the Bering Strait, the "crossroads of continents," CCKD is a very good tool. And, the three Eskimo languages spoken on the tip of Siberia and on St. Lawrence Island Alaska have borrowed hundreds of words, especially from Chukchi. A few words from Chukotko-Kamchatkan are found in mainland Alaskan Yupik and Inupiaq, and even as far away as Greenland there is one such borrowing, the word for "birch" (wəlɣi on p. 334 of CCKD, and ulɣilə on p. 366 of CED, realized as uliɣiiliq, uliɣiilik ‘loose, brittle driftwood’ in Greenlandic). CCKD is a good source of information on the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages for the English speaker who finds reading Russian toublesome, since dictionaries of the various individual Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages give listed lexemes in Cyrillic orthography and have glosses in Russian. It must be stressed, however, that CCKD cannot be used as a full substitute for dictionaries of the individual languages of the family, because many words found only in one language of the family will not be represented by any of the cognate sets of CCKD since, "The main criterion for setting up a reconstructed […] set is that cognates should be attested in at least two of the […] languages" (p. 5). CCKD begins with a nice overview of the Chukotko-Kamchatkan language family, history of its documentation, assessment of the vitality of each member language, and the sources used in compiling the dictionary which include Fortescue's own fieldwork. It then goes on to describe the format of the dictionary and the way each of the five languages in question relates to the hypothesized phonetics of the proto-language(s): proto-Chukotian (PC) or proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan (PCK). Next in CCKD is the main section, some 334 pages of comparative sets, slightly more PC than PCK, and some, not many, sets with a loan-word origin, in many cases, from Eskimo. A protoform is reconstructed and glossed in English, and then daughter forms in each of the languages Chukchi, Kerek, Koryak, Alutor, where they have been found, and for PCK sets, Itelmen also, each daughter form written in the uniform scientific IPA orthography of CCKD, and glossed in English. Alphabetization here is according to the reconstructed protoform. Next come 50 pages of proto-Itelmen (PI) cognate sets, each headed by an English gloss. Protoforms are not reconstructed because of difficulties due to the relatively scanty documentation of some of the now extinct dialects of Itelmen. The reason for a special section for only Itelmen dialects is Itelmen's …