Customer Reviews

Indo-European Linguistics

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Michael Meier-Brugger's INDO-EUROPEAN LINGUISTICS is a textbook published by Walter De Gruyter that has already gone through eight editions in the original German. New information on phonology was contributed by Manfred Mayrhofer, a section on Proto-Indo-European syntax by M. Fritz, and then the entire enterprise was translated into English by Charles Gertmenian.

This is not an introduction to comparative Indo-European linguistics, for it assumes some prior knowledge of the basics of the field. Many terms, such as ablaut, as used extensively long before they are even defined. If you have no experience with IE linguistics, try a basic introduction such as Lehmann's THEORETICAL BASES or Fortson's INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. What Meier-Brugger does is get the student to a higher level of understanding through a more rigorous presentation of concepts and encouragement to seek out papers and monographs. The basic format of the book is an outline: concepts are concisely described, and then followed by a long list of bibliographic citations.

The format doesn't usually permit much in the way of explanation--information in the section on PIE verbal morphology is especially meagre--but the book does shine in several areas. Its description of the very complicated world of nominal morphology, with its varying accentuations and ablaut, is admirable. The last portion of the book, a treatment of the PIE lexicon, has some very entertaining insights into onomastics.

One major complaint I have is that this is a very poorly edited translation. Gertmenian seems to have very hastily translated the German original, judging from the enormous amount of German words left untouched (and Germanisms like "KVK(K)" for "CVC(C)"), and De Gruyter evidently gave the text no significant proofreading because all these would have been spotted and corrected immediately. Another issue I have with the book is that its authors couldn't decide whether to neutrally reflect all schools of scholarship, as in many sections, or take sides, as when they dismiss glottalic theory and the existence of three genders in PIE. Nonetheless, in spite of its problems this is a text worth seeking out for students of Indo-European linguistics, if only for its rich bibliography.