Title: William H. Baxter, Laurent Sagart. Old Chinese. A New Reconstruction
Abstract: The past decade has seen several publications on the history of the Chinese language that have already become, or are bound to become not merely "milestones" in research history, but something more important: scholarly "companions" -reference tools that are not just destined to be read, formally honoured, and put away, but will have serious scholars returning to them over and over again in the course of daily work activities.The first such publication was Axel Schuessler's etymological dictionary of Old Chinese (Schuessler 2007), which was then rapidly succeeded by an updated and "modernized" edition of Bernhard Karlgren's Grammata Serica Recensa (Schuessler 2009).The first of these was already discussed by the author of this review for a previous issue of this Journal (G.Starostin 2009), where the dictionary was judged to be an extremely valuable tool for etymologists and philologists alike, but it was also pointed out that its usefulness was somewhat limited inasmuch as "strong" etymologies (supported by reliable OC reconstructions and systematic external parallels) were not always differentiated from more "speculative" etymologies.Now along comes Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction, a monograph written jointly by William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart, two of the most authoritative, innovative, and simply hard-working specialists on the history of Chinese phonology.Both of the authors had previously offered their own individual models of the phonology of Old Chinese (OC) -Baxter 1992 is a classic, comprehensive, and elaborate reconstruction that has, for more than 20 years, arguably served in the Western academic world as the most common reference point on the subject since the much earlier (and clearly obsolete in many respects) works of Karlgren; and Sagart 1999 presented a radical rethinking of the structure of the OC syllable and even the OC language in general, which specifically emphasized the importance of recognizing and reconstructing productive