Re: Beekes.

On Fri, 25 Jul 2008 20:30:56 -0400, Eric Christopherson
<rakko@...> wrote:

> 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 never read Szemerényi, but Beekes is pretty good, as long as you
don't expect the IPA, and can tolerate typos.

Beekes uses his own weird phone*ic notation system that partially
intersects the IPA, but is far from the same as it. AFAICT it seems to be
some kind of compromise between the romanization and/or traditional
notation systems for the languages involved. I think it's useful to stress
the distinction between symbolic and phonetic representation of
reconstructed languages, but I'm not sure Beekes' way is the most helpful.

He also gives very little coverage of notation systems other than the
traditional "plain / voiced / voiced-aspirate" consonants, and the
numbered 3-laryngeal system (i.e. "h_1, h_2, h_3") -- I personally happen
to like the glottalic notation and "h^e, h^a, h^o". I also prefer "c" and
"q" over "k-actute" and "k^w", so I may not be entirely mainstream on this.

These are all personal aesthetic / cosmetic gripes.

Linguistically, he seems to be right on the money, as far as this layman
can tell, describing a slightly earlier form of PIE than is found in the
AHD appendix.



Paul



--
Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/