Re: Beekes.

On Jul 25, 2008, at 3:12 PM, Lars Finsen wrote:

> Hi,
> I made the mistake of buying the English version of the
> Introduction to comparative IE linguistics by Beekes. I didn't even
> know it was translated from Dutch. The English translation of
> course is what you find when you search for Beekes in the internet,
> unless you search in Dutch pages.
>
> But now it turns out it contains a lot of silly little mistakes,
> like calling active and middle genders instead of voices, and
> translating IE presents with English infinitives. I bought to book
> in order to understand the IE verb better than I did after reading
> Szemerenyi. Now I wonder if the book is any use at all. But are all
> the mistakes translation errors, or do they occur in the Dutch
> version as well? Has anyone read the original version here?
Are Beekes and Szemerényi both to be recommended? I've been meaning
for a long time to ask people about recommendations for PIE books on
here. I have Sihler's book and it's quite good and detailed. I would
like to read more about possible internal reconstruction and
conjectures as to how the vowel system and ablaut came about and
whether the PIE case system descended from something active or ergative.

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