Customer Reviews

The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots : Second Edition

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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

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.

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.

A bought this book in a very unpretentious manner, thinking it would a mere aditional item in my library, mainly focused on dictionaries and languages. I was totally mistaken.
This is in fact a book that lets you deep-dive in the ocean of the English words and everyone can use it many ways. You can read it all the way to the end, flipping ramdomly all the pages, or you can utilize it whenever you want to search for the very early origin of some English word you just read about.
It is amazing! To go beyond Latin or Greek in the search of the meaning of a word, and almost never be let down by the dictionary, which even includes a English word index to facilitate your search? Yes, and a lot more.
This is one that I truly recommend for everyone interested in learning a little more on the origins of English.

It's a great book for fans of Indo-European, of course. The other reviewers have commented on that. I must comment on one aspect of the book which is disapointing: the binding. It is the most poorly-bound hardback I have seen recently. Parts of the binding are falling apart. Also, some of the ink transfered from one page to the opposite page. These kinds of flaws should never happen with modern bookbinding technologies. It is a shame that such a wonderful book was let down by the printers. Don't let this stop you from buying it, though.

Watkins has created a fine book. This is not a dictionary as much as it is a word hoard. An easy to use list of Aryan root words and examples of how they appear in Latin, Hindi, German, Norse, Greek, Russian, English, etc. A great aid for anyone studying Western tongues.
Wyatt Kaldenberg

Besides being well-organized, clear, and academically sound, this book serves as an excellent introduction for English speakers to learn about the ancient roots that connect English to a number and diversity of languages that surprise most people unfamiliar with the study of Indo-European language and culture. Better still are the vignettes and cultural sidenotes that Watkins manages to include in this book without distracting from its function as a reference. If there's any chance you might have an undiscovered passion for observing the modern relics of the ancient Indo-European people, this book will almost surely kindle it. And if you just want to have it around for academic reference, it serves that purpose just fine too.

In this book, Calvert Watkins seeks to make the Indo-European linguistic hypothesis accessible to interested English readers who are not trained on the subject. In this regard he succeeds quite well.

The target audience for this book is the interested English reader who has had no training on the subject. For this reason he sticks with words which are understandable to his target audience. Note that if you want comprehensive analysis of vocabulary, this is not the book for you.

The book is arranged in four sections. The introduction is a brief summary of what is known about the Indo-Europeans coupled with a brief overview of comparative linguistics. The second section is the dictionary of Indo-European roots with an emphasis on English-language words. The section is an index of English words and their corresponding Indo-European roots.

In general, I find this book to be quite interesting and useful, but perhaps the book should be renamed to avoid the confusion some of the more critical reviewers seem to have.

Because English and most of the languages of Europe are Indo-European, this book is quite useful in providing the origin of many words in the ancient tongue from which they have sprung. In my work as a scientist I feel that my first job is to look into the origin of the words the name each new field that becomes the subject of my research. Books such as this one help provide such insights.

The only other thing that I might wish for would be the equivalent dictionary in other Indo-European languages such as German, French, Russian, and Icelandic.

When choosing the "right" word, I find this dictionary very helpful. Of course, the definition of a word and a discussion of usage in a standard dictionary should rationally provide background to alternate word options---assuming you believe in a dictionary-guided approach in the first place. Once you have determined the subset of words from which to select the "right" word, then the Indo-European root can help decide which one best fits the context.