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Linguistic Change and Reconstruction Methodology (Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs)

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This volume in Mouton de Gruyter's "Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs" series, edited by Philip Baldi, contains the revised versions of twenty-nine papers presented at the Workshop on Linguistic Change and Reconstruction Methodology held at Stanford University in the summer of 1997. The papers deal with six language families: American Indian languages, Austronesian, Indo-European, Australian, "Altaic" (in its broadest sense, including Japanese), and Afro-Asiatic language. Unfortunately, no material on the Uralic languages is present, which is quite a shame.

As one interested in comparative Indo-European linguistics, it was the papers on this theme that I was most interested in. Alfred Bammesberger's "Phonology and morphology at the crossroads" shows how knowledge of sound laws can inform odd morphological shifts, using Greek isthi "be (imp.)" as an example. William Schmalstieg, being something of a revolutionary as always, contributes an interesting paper "A few issues of contemporary Indo-European linguistics" which explores some ramifications of glottalic theory, and asserts his theory that after Hittite broke off from the family, the remaining Indo-European language mass underwent a series of monophthongizations. Robert Beekes' "The historical grammar of Greek" is a case study in the results of comparative linguistics. In order to "evaluate the methods and principles of comparative Indo-European philology", Beekes wanted to use an Indo-European handbook, but at the time only Meillet's dated INTRODUCTION and Szemerenyi's notoriously personal primer were available--luckily in the time since we have the handbooks of Lehmann, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, and Sihler--so Beekes decided to use Rix's HISTORICHE GRAMMATIK DES GRIESCHEN. The most fascinating papers for me, however, were those of Calvert Watkins and Idisore Dyen. Watkins' "Etymologies, equations, and comparanda: Types and values, and criteria for judgement", betrays a little of the stagnation of the field in its assessment that most easy etymological discoveries have been made already, and shows that the remaining etymological uncoverings now fall into five types. Dyen's "The homomeric argument for a Slavo-Germanic subgroup of Indo-European" seems an unassailable case for close affinity between Germanic, Baltic, and Slavonic based on unique etymologies.