Libu Lakhi (Li Jianfu, Dawa Tenzin) with Tsering Bum and Charles Kevin Stuart. 2009. China's Namzi Tibetans: Life, Language and Folklore. Volume One. (Asian Highlands Perspectives Volume 2A). Xining City: Plateau Publications. PREFACE This remarkable book is the product of a fruitful collaboration among a native speaker of Namzi, Tibetan and Chinese consultants, and a dedicated group of Westerners resident in China. It affords the reader an intimate glimpse into traditional Namzi life, now well on its way to disappearing along with hundreds of similar minority cultures in the world. In Part One we learn something about the extraordinary biography of the central character in this enterprise, a polyglot Namzi man called Libu Lakhi (also known as Li Jianfu in Chinese, Dawa Tenzin in Tibetan and Zachary in English), whose inspiring pursuit of education has involved the acquisition of four Sino-Tibetan languages (Namzi, Yi Nuosu, Tibetan, Chinese), as well as English. Part Two of the volume (Introduction) contains short essays on aspects of Namzi life and culture. Especially interesting are accounts of the elaborate New Year's celebrations, and the section on Engagement and Marriage, where we hear the sad story of Libu Lakhi's sister Sanjin's attempts to avoid an arranged marriage. The heart of the book is Part Three (Texts), which consists of eleven texts, presented in an ingenious format. Each Namzi khato sentence is given word-by-word glosses in English, Tibetan and Chinese, with each word occupying a separate cell in a table; this is followed by connected translations in each of the three languages. These interlinear presentations are followed by separate fluent translations in each glossing language, with additional material inserted to clarify points omitted by the speaker since they were taken for granted by their original Namzi audience. These stories, with their often wild and fantastic narrative motifs, will be of great interest to folklorists. A couple of them are origin myths reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, where the purpose was to 'explain' why some phenomenon in the world is the way it is (e.g., how the leopard got his spots, how the camel got his hump, how the rhinoceros got his skin). Thus the story 'Two Sisters' offers an explanation for why our fingers are of uneven length. The story 'Rabbit Father-in-law' ends with a motif very much like the Abraham and Isaac story, where a man is asked to slaughter his own son to show his loyalty, but is stopped at the last minute once it is clear he is actually going to do the deed. Finally, we have a Glossary of Namzi khato words, followed by such useful appendices as the Swadesh list in Namzi khato, charts of Namzi khato consonants and vowels, pronouns and numerals. Finally a table of resemblant words in Namzi khato and Nuosu Yi is given, although no attempt is made to distinguish borrowings from genuine cognates. Complementing this volume are a number of audiovisual materials available for free download, including 'photo albums' (http://picasaweb.google.com/libulakhi) with nearly 250 images of Namzi people, landscapes, crops, artifacts and crafts, as well as audio files of all eleven texts http://www.archive.org/details/NamyiFolktales--audioFiles1-10OfElevenFolkloreAccounts http://www.archive.org/details/NamyiFolktales--audioFiles11OfElevenFolkloreAccounts http://www.digitalhimalaya.com/collections/music/namyi/. Given the phonetic complexity of Namzi khato, the clear voice of the speaker in the audio files is a great help, particularly in the realm of intonation. Video materials on various aspects of Namzi culture (a ritual for calling the soul back, sacrificing to the ancestors and sacrificing to the deities) may also be viewed at http://e-asia.uoregon.edu/easia/nufound.cfm. The number of speakers of Namzi khato has been estimated at about 5,000, which places it firmly in the category of endangered languages. The sociolinguistic situation in Namzi khato villages is rapidly changing, with code-switching and macaronic mixtures with Chinese now rampant among the younger generation. Traditional customs are in rapid decline. When Libu Lakhi returned to his home in January 2006 to celebrate New Year's with his family, he found his eldest brother sprawled in front of the TV watching sitcoms instead of supervising the complex ritual preparations for the holiday. The death of a language is an immeasurable loss, much worse than the loss of an animal species. It is a loss, first and foremost, to the culture of its former speakers, but also, from the more selfish point of view of the linguist, language death puts the ultimate quietus on intellectual curiosity. Many languages with relatively tiny numbers of speakers have furnished precious evidence for the reconstruction of ancient phonological and grammatical features. Any dying language might take the answers to many questions with it to the grave. Yet we may well ask whether it is even advisable or beneficent to try to maintain non-viable languages artificially, such as by trying to educate a new generation of children in a minority language that their elders are already abandoning. Is that really more kind or humane than trying to keep a mortally ill patient alive by heroic surgical interventions or multiple organ transplants? From a practical economic point of view, it is much more advantageous for a young person who comes from an endangered speech community to acquire mastery of a more robust language as early as possible, preferably the language of the majority culture (Matisoff 1991). Part of the answer might lie in the multilingual capacity of human beings, nowhere more in evidence than in Southeast Asia. Perhaps the decline of certain minority languages can be slowed by 'language revitalization' projects, involving the preparation of better learning materials, the creation of practical orthographies and the coining of technical neologisms needed to keep pace with the modern world. Under favorable circumstances such projects might result in the coexistence of minority and dominant languages for the foreseeable future, each operating in its own sociolinguistic sphere, e.g., Namzi khato for use in the home and village, and Chinese, Tibetan or Yi in the wider world. Namzi khato seems definitely to be a Qiangic language, though its genetic affiliation is complicated by a fair amount of contact with Yi (Nuosu). The authors of this book are to be congratulated for putting Namzi khato culture 'on the map' in such a clear and respectful fashion. ---James A Matisoff