The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots [Paperback]

Calvert Watkins (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0618082506 | ISBN-13: 978-0618082506 | Publication Date: September 14, 2000 | Edition: Second Edition

Fully revised and updated, THE AMERICAN HERITAGE® DICTIONARY OF INDO-EUROPEAN ROOTS remains an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the history of English and its place in the Indo-European language family. More than 13,000 words are traced to their origins in Proto-Indo-European, the prehistoric ancestor of English that was spoken before the advent of writing. In Calvert Watkins’s skilled hands, Proto-Indo-European language and society are rendered as alive and compelling as they must have been six thousand years ago. His introductory essay shows how words in an unrecorded ancient language can be reconstructed and offers a wealth of fascinating information about Proto-Indo-European culture. The dictionary that follows contains nearly 1,350 reconstructed roots, plus two dozen new “Language and Culture” notes that explore interesting sidelights to the etymologies presented in many entries.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

CALVERT WATKINS is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Linguistics and the Classics at Harvard University and a leading expert in Indo-European studies. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, he is the author of several books, including the critically acclaimed How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. He resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Second Edition edition (September 14, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618082506
• ISBN-13: 978-0618082506
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #346,904 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As Near Perfection As One Could Ask, December 22, 2005

By 

Theodore Keer (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (Paperback)

This beautiful and scholarly tome has more facts per inch in its 149pp than in almost any other work in my library. The second paperback edition is easily worth three times its cover price, and except for one flaw, (minor, and noted by other reviewers) this work is as near perfection as one could ask in a work of linguistic reference.

First, in praise:

To the scholar (or layman) studying the Indo-European roots of the English lexicon, there is no other work (in the English language) of comparable value to this book.

(View the index pages available above to see the English words referenced in the work.)

Each word is derived from its putative IE root, and each root is exemplified by its various reflexes in English, whether native or borrowed. For example, if we look up "deal" in the index, it gives two roots, *dail- (from which we get the meaning "portion out") and *tel- meaning plank or flat stone:

"*tel- Ground, floor, board. 1) DEAL from Middle Low German and Middle Dutch dele, "plank," from Germanic *thil-jo. 2)Suffixed form *tel-n-, TELLURIAN ...[also tile, title].... From Latin tellus "earth, the earth.....[Pokorny 2. *tel- 1061.]"

Hence, Watkins gives us the modern English exemplars of the root, whether they come through Germanic directly or indirectly, or through another PIE sister language such as Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, etc.,. For each root Watkins refers to the proto-form as it is given and numbered (i.e., here 1061) in Pokorny's authoritative "Indogermanisches Etymologisches Woerterbuch" or notes its absence therein.

Watkins also inserts a "language and culture note" on about every other page, giving philological/ethnological insight into the implications of the existence of certain forms and their connotations in the IE proto-language.

Regarding the PIE nominal root *Rtko-s "bear," which is absent as an inherited form in English, Watkins explains that the root (which is found in the Hittite "Hartaggas," Latin "ursus" Greek "arktos" and so forth) is replaced by "taboo" avoiding forms meaning "the brown one: "bruin" or "the honey-eater" as in Slavonic "medv-ed." The significance of such avoidance for hunter-gatherers such as the putative PIE speakers is obvious to anyone who knows the meaning of the word "jinx."

Yet, in criticism:

The book as it is currently titled (second edition, paperback) implies a completeness that the work lacks. When we find that certain English words such as "basket, boy, dwarf, dog" and "girl" are not listed in the lexicon, what are we to assume?

Are they neologisms as are perhaps "boy, dog" & "girl?"

Are they Germanicisms such as "dwarf" (although it apparently has a canonical PIE root structure)?

Or are they just inexplicable - as it would seem is "basket" which looks an awful lot like a cognate of the Latin "fasces"?

Also, PIE roots not native to or not borrowed into English are ignored, as are most non-PIE-derived yet acceptably 'English' words such as "alcohol."

Nevertheless, even Tolkien had his criticisms of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) and that work was some 1000 times the length of Watkins' achievement. Anyone who finds these caveats discouraging will know where to seek for further enlightenment.

This work is worth well more than its dime a page asking price

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars authoritative English word origins, June 17, 2003

By 

Dean Easton (Wallingford, CT United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (Paperback)

The original and revised editions of this text bring to a wider public the results of over two centuries of work in historical linguistics. For many decades the typical books on Indo-European were dense tomes of closely-argued etymological debate and learned controversy over the finer points about how the original language may have sounded. Of greater interest to most readers with an interest in word origins and the history of English are the reconstructed words themselves and the progress of a word or word-root through 60 centuries of use and transformation to the present day. As Watkins notes in his introduction, this dictionary "is designed and written for the general English speaking public and not for specialists in the field of Indo-European linguistics." The author, a Harvard professor of Classics and Linguistics, popularizes without diluting. By restricting his focus to English and its close Germanic relatives and forbears, Watkins can include a comprehensive catalog of 1300+ word roots and their development without causing the book to run to thousands of pages. Some of the most interesting entries are the "language and culture" notes for particularly significant words. Especially in the slim paperback edition, this is a welcome book for anyone in love with words and curious about their origins.

27 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous, but why so English-oriented?, June 20, 2002

By 

Stavros Macrakis (Cambridge, MA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots : Second Edition (Hardcover)

This excellent and concise dictionary is wonderful and affordable. The only criticism I have is that it is too English-oriented. Only IE roots and their reflexes which appear in English (even if in weird and wonderful ways) show up in this dictionary. Worse, there is no way to look up the IE root of words in other languages. This would be OK if there were good alternatives, but Pokorny is extremely expensive and partly superceded, and bilingual dictionaries don't include etymologies. Not even most student-edition monolingual dictionaries include etymologies, especially not tracing back to IE.

My guess is that the marketing department at Houghton Mifflin believes that these features have limited appeal, but imagine the book being recommended in foreign-language classes.... True, most commonalities with Romance languages come from post-IE borrowings, and English is a Germanic language, but as far as I know, there is not even a good reference source for these. If the Italian word 'fretta' (haste) appears on your vocabulary list, how are you going to know to look under English 'friction' for its relationship? Similarly: German 'loeffel' (spoon) <> English 'lap (up)'; French 'aube' (dawn) <> English 'albino' <> IE *albho-; Irish 'dubh' (black) <> English 'deaf' <> IE *dheu-bh-; German 'hals' (neck) <> English 'collar' <> IE *kwel-; Spanish 'ladrillo' (brick) <> English 'lateral'; etc.