Re: Book on Indo-European

On Dec 11, 1:23 am, Yusuf B Gursey <y...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 9, 1:52 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:





On Sep 9, 1:52 pm, Yusuf B Gursey <y...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

could any one recommend a good introduction to Indo-European
linguistics?

What level? The most basic facts are found in Philip Baldi,
Introduction to Indo-European (SIU Press, 1983).

An elementary textbook is R. S. P. Beekes, Comparative IE Linguistics
(Benjamins, 1995).

Extremely dense is Oswald Szemerenyi, Intro to IE Ling (OUP, 1996) --
but he was the last holdout against laryngeal theory.

Perhaps ideal is Benjamin Fortson, IE Language and Culture (Blackwell;
an improved 2nd edition just appeared).

Clackson' IE Ling in the Cambridge Red series is about unsolved
problems rather than being a textbook.

Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans (1989), surveys both language
and archeology and served as a counterweight to Renfrew's Archaeology
and Language (1987). The recent volume from Oxford by Mallory and
Adams was greatly criticized for its carelessness about linguistic
matters but was said to be very good on archeology and culture.

The first 100 or so pages of Baldi, Foundations of Latin (2002), are a
clear and concise introduction to IE phonology and morphology.

how about:

The Indo-European Languages (Routledge Language Family Series) by
Ramat/Giacalone (Paperback - Dec 31, 2006)



I found this, please clarify:

From: John Atkinson <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Book on Indo-European
Message-ID: <gQMqm.40208$ze1.23312@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

On Sep 12, 7:52 am, John Atkinson <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:




Ringe has now published THREE "volume 1"s of "from PIE to ..." --
Tocharian was the first, curiously in the same series as Adams's
almost simultaneous historical grammar of Tocharian. I forget what the
second one was. But he still seems to think that you can establish
historical relations by pure lexicostatistics as turned into computer
input and seems to remain completely unaware of interaction between
languages (as seen in Anttila's bizarrely complex diagram of IE in his
textbook, or Eric Hamp's trees and arrows in the Encyc. of Lang. &
Ling. 1st ed. s.v. IE).

I agree with you about Ringe's computed family trees -- not that I've
chased up the actual stuff he wrote on this, only seen other people's
comments on them -- but they seemed pretty iffy to me! One gets the
impression (could easily be wrong) that he's moved on a bit since then
though.

In particular, his "From PIE to PGerm" (Vol 1 of his Linguistic History
of English) doesn't involve any of that stuff (except for one figure),
but is real classical hard histling, with lots and lots of data. I
don't think I'd recommend Yusuf buy the book though, unless he aims to
get as expert in the minutiae of early Germanic as he is in Turkic and
Arabic -- though like I said Chapter 2 on (late) PIE is a nice summary
of current orthodoxy re its phonology and morphology, the later chapters
get pretty dense!

Did you see Don R's posts on PIE etc a month or two ago on Language Log?
Nice!

Another ref I could mention is the relevant chapter (by Calvert Watkins)

which relevant (to what?) chapter?


in the Routledge "The Indo-European Languages". Some of the other
chapters (on particular sub-families) are less convincing -- and/or
idiosyncratically Italian.


how so?


Anyway, all in all, if Yusuf (or anyone) wants to learn IE linguistics
and doesn't want to go too much over $100, I'd recommend he get both
Fortson, and Mallory and Adams -- they both have their weak points, but
(together) they're well ahead of anything else that I know of for the
purpose.

yes, that's about the limit of the price range. but the one's you
recommend are also "culture" oriented, and I am no that interested in
that aspect now.


John
.

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