Languages and Cultures: Studies in Honor of Edgar C. Polome (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs) [Hardcover]

Mohammed Ali Jazayery (Author), Werner Winter (Editor)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 791 pages
• Publisher: Mouton De Gruyter (September 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 089925442X
• ISBN-13: 978-0899254425
• Shipping Information: View shipping rates and policies
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,493,848 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4.0 out of 5 stars Another Mouton festschrift worth seeking for Indo-Europeanists, October 26, 2005

By 

Christopher Culver - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Languages and Cultures: Studies in Honor of Edgar C. Polome (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs) (Hardcover)

Like most of the entries in Mouton de Gruyter's "Trends in Linguistics" series, this festschrift in honour of Polome is chock-full of papers on (mainly Indo-European) linguistics.

Several were especially interesting to me, a student concentrating on the Indo-European language. Francisco Adrados contributes "On the origins of the Indo-European dative-locative singular endings", a potentially helpful piece undone by its thoroughly opaque prose. "Gothic saihw and sai, with some notes on imperative interjections in Germanic" by Rene Derolez and Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen takes as its basis the translation of Greek "idou" and "ide" in the Gothic bible. Eric Hamp's "The Indo-European terms for 'marriage'" is a bit of cultural reconstruction based on the various terms that have survived in the daughter language, and presents a believable picture of what the Indo-European's matrimony would have entailed. Jay Jasanoff's "Old Irish boi 'was'" tries to find the origin of a form that cannot come from a type *bat like most of the forms of the copula in Irish. "The Horn of Galleus and the subgrouping of the Germanic language" by Herbert Penzl begins with a fascinating account of the methods for reconstructing Proto-Germanic and eventually concludes that Germanic had only two divisions after the proto-language: Gothic, and "Nordic-West Germanic". Finally, William R. Schmalstieg contributes, as always, a paper a little different from mainstream scholarship with his "Comments on some of the Indo-European medio-passive endings", which assume early Proto-Indo-European was an ergative language.

The volume not entirely Indo-European. There are also papers on Swahili (Walter Schicho), Gbeya (William J. Samarin, with the colourful title of "Damned in-laws and other problems") and the languages of the peoples of the USSR (E.G. Tumanjan), and a few other more exotic languages. Most of the papers here are in English, though five are in German and six in French.