New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin [Hardcover]

Andrew L. Sihler (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195083458 | ISBN-13: 978-0195083453 | Publication Date: January 5, 1995

Like Carl Darling Buck's Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (1933), this book is an explanation of the similarities and differences between Greek and Latin morphology and lexicon through an account of their prehistory. It also aims to discuss the principal features of Indo-European linguistics. Greek and Latin are studied as a pair for cultural reasons only; as languages, they have little in common apart from their Indo-European heritage. Thus the only way to treat the historical bases for their development is to begin with Proto-Indo-European. The only way to make a reconstructed language like Proto-Indo-European intelligible and intellectually defensible is to present at least some of the basis for reconstructing its features and, in the process, to discuss reasoning and methodology of reconstruction (including a weighing of alternative reconstructions). The result is a compendious handbook of Indo-European phonology and morphology, and a vade mecum of Indo-European linguistics--the focus always remaining on Greek and Latin. The non-classical sources for historical discussion are mainly Vedic Sanskrit, Hittite, and Germanic, with occasional but crucial contributions from Old Irish, Avestan, Baltic, and Slavic.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...classicists, but especially linguists and Indo-Europeanists, will be grateful to Sihler for undertaking and completing successfully the enormous task of providing them with a modern comparative grammar of Greek and Latin."--Classical World

"...a clear exhaustive presentation of the facts....We have to be thankful to the author for offering us a reliable guide for further study in the historical linguistics of the classical languages."--The Journal of Indo-European Studies

"Teachers of Greek and Latin grammar will do well to consult this work..."--Religious Studies Review

"...the author's erudition is evident on every page, and the discussion includes many persuasive insights into the countless phenomena it ranges over....a book which no Indo-Europeanist can afford to ignore..."--The Classical Journal

"...the [New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin] ...applies wide learning and prodigious labor toward filling many of the serious gaps that the present century had opened, or widened, in Buck's essentially nineteenth-century work."--lassical Views

Language Notes

Text: English, Greek, Latin

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 720 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (January 5, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195083458
• ISBN-13: 978-0195083453
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,411,082 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Strong on etymology and morphology., January 3, 2001

By 

S. Gustafson "Holy Roman Emperor" (New Albany, IN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (Hardcover)

This one will take you some time to chew through. What you are getting here is an extensive treatment of the derivational processes that generate Greek and Latin words. You will be wasting your time unless you bring some familiarity with current Indo-European comparative linguistics with you.

For those who have the needed background and interest, this will be a fascinating read. Especially welcome is the extensive discussion of the various changes that went into the making of Latin, where seeing the Indo-European roots behind the several words is a much more complex process, usually, than with Greek.

But for a work of such monumental learning, a bibliography would have been helpful --- even if it would have doubled the book's size, as it probably would. It would have also been nice to have at least some discussion of the comparative syntax of the two languages; while most Indo-European scholars have focused mostly on the origins of words, some of the more interesting recent work involves reconstructing the larger structures of the proto-language.

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A detailed reference for the serious student, May 1, 2000

By 

John L. Velonis (Dobbs Ferry, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (Hardcover)

First of all, don't expect this to be a "teach yourself Greek and Latin"-type book. It assumes you already know at least the fundamentals of Greek and Latin grammar (and can read the Greek alphabet).

The value of this book is in its analysis of how Greek and Latin developed from the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language -- and its insights into how PIE is reconstructed. It is not for the faint of heart -- much of the discussion is quite technical, and you'd better know your fricatives from your vocatives. There is a certain amount of more-accessible material to introduce each chapter, including an entertaining discussion of form vs. function and why the so-called "present" tense in English in fact has four functions, none of which have anything to do with the here and now.

A few quibbles: it includes indexes (by language) of words in all the languages mentioned, but no index of PIE roots. And I would have liked to have seen more detail on prepositions and suffixes. Still, for a serious student of historical linguistics, this is a must-have. For a broader and more accessible treatment, consider Robert Beekes's "Comparative Indo-European Linguistics".

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some unbelievable defficiencies, May 8, 2009

By 

Jean de l'Oussière "Jean" (Cambridge, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (Paperback)

Coming from OUP, being the "big book" on the topic after several decades, i.e. coming into the market as the reference of choice for students and teachers alike, it is hard to believe this enormous book does not include any bibliographical information. Not at all! That is a weird author and publisher choice indeed. The other problem is the indexing, which for this kind of book should be as thorough as possible, with detailed topics, names, loci citati indexes, but instead of that we only get word lists per language, and even those in most simplistic alphabetical order, without any indexing organisation proper. It gives the impression that the book was finished in a rush, or that the publisher and the author could not agree on some details! Bad for us readers. For the errata, there are excellent reviews by Clackson and Weiss available, very detailed and helpful.

In spite of the flaws, I agree with the above reviewers in that the book is still highly informative, containing a wealth of recent (if unsourced) data to be much profitted from. I for one would buy it again, if somewhat grumpily. Let us hope for a second edition where these regrettable defficiencies are corrected.