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40 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A useful introduction to IE applications, with some failings, September 24, 2004
IN SEARCH OF THE INDO-EUROPEANS is essential reading for those interested in the people who spoke the ancestor of most tongues of Europe and western Asia. While scholars have carefully reconstructed a proto-language, the identity of its speakers and their geographical origin remain a mystery, and J.P. Mallory shows what is currently thought in the field.
Mallory begins by tracing the historical development of European comparative linguistics, and then examines the various branches of the Indo-European language family first in Asia, then in Europe. However, the most useful portion of the book begins when Mallory attempts to reconstruct as well as one can the actual cultural and social traits of the Indo-Europeans based on the proto-language they spoke. He shows how horses must have been very important within such a culture, asserts that the people must have lived within certain geographical boundaries based on their common vocabulary, and even postulates Proto-Indo-European religious rituals. Unlike Watkin's HOW TO KILL A DRAGON, Mallory does not give much space to concepts of comparative Indo-European poetics.
The last third of Mallory's work is concerned with the Indo-European homeland problem, the eternal conundrum for those who would apply comparative linguistics to actual archaeology. Mallory favours the Russian steppes or Ukraine, as do most scholars, and argues quite well against the usual alternative theory of an Anatolian origin. I felt, however, that his placement of the Indo-Europeans could have been more substantial than it was if he had worked in more evidence of contact with speakers of the Uralic languages.
A downside of the book is that, while Mallory's entire topic is based on linguistic reconstruction, there is no passion for linguistics in this book. I was unhappy to see, for example, that while Mallory is well aware of laryngeal discoveries, he has chosen to give the older reconstructions of PIE roots in the interest of pronouncability. I don't think the benefits outweight the appearance of datedness and quaintness.
While introductions to comparative Indo-European linguistics abound, there are few volumes like IN SEARCH OF THE INDO-EUROPEANS which apply reconstruction to substantial archeological exploration. Mallory's work should certainly be read by anyone interested in larger applications of Indo-European philology. I should note that this book should not be approached by the layman unfamiliar with comparative linguistics, and that a work like Szeremenyi's INTRODUCTION TO INDO-EUROPEAN LINGUISTICS is a necessary prequisite.
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59 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Indo-Europeans, not Aryans...., August 14, 2004
Who were the INDO-EUROPEANS? According to British linguist J.P. Mallory, their language was the proto-type of the languages spoken by over 2 billion people today. He also says the Indo-Europeans should not be confused with the `Aryans' claimed to be the progenitors of the Third Reich. Mallory suggests the Indo-Europeans appear to have been a pastoral nomadic group who lived in the Pontic-Caspian region (Steppes of Mother Russia) sometime between the second and fifth millenium BC from whence they diffused.
Mallory employs paleolinguistics to show how several dozen modern languages are descended from a `Proto Indo-European' mother tongue that came to dominate many other languages (not all) of the European-Asian land mass. He uses the work of archeologists to support of his theory. In a nutshell, he mostly disagrees with Colin Renfrew, while mostly agreeing with Marija Gimbutas. Renfrew apparently has posited the idea that the changes archeologists see in the successive layers of excavated sites are the result of internal innovation and successive technological change (folks keep reinventing the wheel), where Gimbutas seems to subscribe to the notion that hostile horse-riding kurgan-building invaders from the steppes mowed down the peaceful matriarchial civilizations of their neighbors. Mallory suggests paleolinguistics supports the idea that the languages of Europe and Asia which resemble each other did not spring up independently of one another and it is not likely that the civilizations that sustained them did either.
Mallory theorizes the diffusion of the proto Indo-Euopean language from a Pontic-Caspian homeland took three paths, one through Anatolia and the Balkans, one through Northern Europe, and one East toward Iran and India ( the case for Anatolia, Greece and parts of Southern Europe appears to be very strong). He also suggests that the diffusion may have in part been the result of internal changes such as excessive population growth and climatic change that made agriculture a losing proposition. The social change resulting from the adaptation of more successful strategies for survival, such as pastoral nomadism may have led to a greater acceptance of the people who brought it about and their language. Whatever brought about the change, Indo-European languages exist from Ireland to India today.
Readers of Rian Eisler's CHALICE AND THE BLADE, and Merlin Stone's WHEN GOD WAS A WOMAN, will find their ideas are fairly well supported by Mallory's work.
Mallory's arguments on behalf of his thesis are clear and compelling. He methodically builds his case using the work of many scholars from both the East and the West. Perhaps one of the wonderful outcomes from the `fall of the wall' in 1989, is the reunification of scholars from the old Soviet block with those of the West.
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34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
minor masterpiece, November 25, 1999
j p mallory follows the linguistic, archeological and historical trails in a stringently analytical, yet very readable fashion. The evidence is scattered over many languages, but Mallory appears to be very familiar with the Russian, German, French, English, and other monographs and scholarly articles. His erudition wears well, sprinkled with wit and insight over several hundred pages of close reasoning and informed speculation. Although he agrees essentially with the Gimbutas thesis that the kurgan steppe zone was the PIE homeland, he gives other theses a proper hearing. A book to read and re-read. It is on my night-table and very well-thumbed.
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