Bernard Bloch on Japanese

The book reviewed includes all of Bernard Bloch's major publications in the area of Japanese language: "Inflection" & "Derivation of Inflected Words" from the Journal of the American Oriental Society (1946), & "Syntax" (1946) & "Phonemics" (1950) from Language are grouped under the title "Studies in Colloquial Japanese." Another article, "Syntactic Formulas for Japanese," originally appeared in Studies in Linguistics (1947). The high point of American descriptivist phonemic theory & practice is represented in these studies. The history of Japanese language studies as well as the history of linguistics generally are also covered. There has been much interchange between Japanese linguists working on other languages & linguists from other countries, but little corresponding interchange between Japanese scholars of the Japanese language & Japanese scholars outside Japan. The recent withdrawal of US funds for programs in Japanese & Chinese will no doubt perpetuate this situation. D. Leffler