Re: Beekes.

Den 27. jul. 2008 kl. 20.17 skreiv Jörg Rhiemeier:

> Yes.  I don't judge books by their covers, but by their contents.
> I wrote "looks good to me" because I am careful with judging
> things for which I am not really an expert.
Sorry, I wasn't sure what you meant.

> But it is well
> written, and my impression of its contents is that it sums up
> the facts very well and accurately.  Fortson concentrates on
> presenting the consensus opinion on Proto-Indo-European rather
> than trying to interpret the facts in some idiosyncratic way.
> The book does not only introduce the reader to PIE, but also
> discusses Proto-Indo-European culture (taking a modernized
> "Kurganist" stance) and all the branches of Indo-European,
> including summaries of the sound changes.
Thanks for the review. Seems a nice thing to have indeed. I already
have so many books begging to get bought, but what can you do?

Concentrating on consensus opinion of course is a good thing. It
gives you a trustworthy basis for your own speculation or whatever
you do. Still I think interpretativeness can be useful, too,
especially if they are laid out so that you can follow the train of
interpretations yourself and judge their quality. Originality in idea
and approach is always inspiring, I think. Have you read "How to Kill
a Dragon" by Calvert Watkins, for example? I think it's a little far-
fetched sometimes, but very thrilling, and so relevant for what I am
doing.

(I get some déjà vu here - it wasn't you who recommended it to me,
was it?)

Damn it, I even find Robert Graves thrilling, that says a bit about
the value of my opinion, doesn't it?

> Yes, most books on PIE are introductory in nature, or they
> present alternative, not commonly accepted views on the matter.
> An example of the latter is _Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans_
> by T. Gamkrelidze and V. Ivanov.  A very interesting read, but
> the alternative model of PIE (the most famous aspect of which is
> the "glottalic theory", but that's not all) they present is highly
> controversial, and in my opinion, some of its features must be
> assigned to an earlier stage of PIE than the time of breakup, and
> others seem very doubtful to me.
I have heard about it, but don't have any opinion yet. Maybe I should
read the book first...

There are so many things is IE history that I find hard making any
sense of, so I'm welcoming any alternative explanation. For example,
I think it's weird that the Satem languages simply ignore the k/kw
distinction while the Centum ones simply ignore the k/k^ distinction.
I should like to see some alternative theory dealing with that.

Of other matters, I found to my delight from Beekes that the
Albanians palatalise their labiovelars without affecting their plain
ones, just like I have been supposing for Urianian. Now I have to
look further into that as well.

> These are things that can drive someone mad.  Indo-European is
> the best known language family, and still, what is written about
> it leaves so much to desire.  There isn't even an up-to-date
> etymological dictionary!  Everybody still has to work with
> Pokorny, but that is almost half a century old, uses a totally
> obsolete phonology and includes many items with very limited
> distribution in the family that are likely to be borrowed from
> substratum languages.
That makes it an interesting source for substrate words, though, as
long as the distribution is known. You don't happen to have a list,
do you?

For my other family, NE Caucasian, the situation is even worse, of
course. Starostin's database is very useful for roots (though he too
includes many words with narrow distribution), but very limited as to
grammatical morphemes. I have bought some grammars of Caucasian
languages (Chechen and Ingusetic) as well as a couple of proposed
relations (Basque and Hurrian) to see if I can work out something
myself.

LEF