16.2204, Review: Historical Ling/Indo-European: Fortson (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2204. Mon Jul 18 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2204, Review: Historical Ling/Indo-European: Fortson (2004)

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1)
Date: 18-Jul-2005
From: Donald Reindl < dreindl at guest.arnes.si >
Subject: Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2005 13:21:40
From: Donald Reindl < dreindl at guest.arnes.si >
Subject: Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction 
 

AUTHOR: Fortson, Benjamin W., IV
TITLE: Indo-European Language and Culture
SUBTITLE: An Introduction
PUBLISHER: Blackwell Publising
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-207.html


Donald F. Reindl, Department of Translation, Faculty of Arts, 
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

SUMMARY

"Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction" is one of those very 
few books that occasionally appear in Indo-European (IE) studies that 
manage to be instructive, erudite, intriguing, and entertaining all at the 
same time. In a field that is all too often viewed as the purview of 
recondite 19th-century graybeards, readers ranging from beginning students 
to professional linguists will enjoy (re)discovering the breadth and depth 
of IE languages and culture through the wealth of details that the author, 
Benjamin W. Fortson IV, presents in an engaging manner. One of the stated 
goals of the book is to make IE studies accessible to the "intelligent 
layperson with linguistic interests but without specialized training" 
(xii), and in this regard the author has succeeded admirably.

The book is organized in two sections: a general overview of IE studies, 
followed by a set of chapters focusing on each branch of the IE language 
family. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the comparative method, which 
indeed is essential to any understanding of historical linguistics. 
General knowledge of the basic material laid out on pages 1-5 would have 
saved linguistics from any number of half-baked theories on linguistic 
affiliation that nonetheless continue to exert a powerful attraction for 
amateurs -- ranging from the well-known Basque-Caucasian hypothesis to the 
relatively obscure Venetic-Slovenian theory. Chapter 2 examines the 
general aspects of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) culture: the hierarchical and 
patriarchal structure of society, religion, poetics, names, archeological 
evidence, and hypotheses regarding the location of the original IE 
homeland. Chapters 3 through 8 address linguistic aspects of PIE: 
phonology, morphology, the verb, the noun, pronouns and other parts of 
speech, and syntax. Part two of the book (chapters 9 through 20) examines 
the individual branches of IE: Anatolian, Indic, Iranian, Greek, Italic, 
Celtic, Germanic, Armenian, Tocharian, Balto-Slavic, and Albanian, as well 
as a final chapter on fragmentary languages (Phrygian, Thracian, etc.) for 
which no definitive classification has yet been established.

A number of special features mark the presentation. True to its nature as 
a textbook, each chapter concludes with a review of 20 or so key terms 
from the chapter and exercises. The exercises ranging from relatively 
simple tasks (e.g., "Memorize the names of all the branches of the IE 
family...," 15) to more challenging ones (e.g., "...explain why the 's' in 
the Old Irish compound 'rigsuide' ... is lenited", 299). The branch-
specific chapters also end with thematic vocabulary lists, each containing 
about a dozen IE roots and selected cognates (e.g., *sal-, Gk. hals, Lat. 
sal, OCS soli, Eng. salt) intended for memorization. The themes selected 
include kinship, animals, food, agriculture, the body, and so on.

The chapters themselves are distinguished by the inclusion of selected 
representative paradigms -- for example, Old Irish nominal and verbal 
inflection for Celtic (288), Old English nominal and verbal inflection for 
Germanic (319), Lithuanian nominal inflection for Balto-Slavic (382), and 
so on. In a proper diachronic orientation, these representative paradigms 
represent the most archaic information available for each branch. Sample 
texts are also included in the chapters, ranging from the Old 
Hittite "Ritual for the Royal Couple" (166-167) to the Old Norse "Lay of 
Thrym" from the "Poetic Edda" (332-333). These texts are accompanied by 
translations and copious notes and, with some effort, enable beginners to 
try their hands at "reading" languages from Avestan (209) to Venetic (407).

The entire volume is rounded out by a glossary of special terminology, a 
chapter-by-chapter bibliography that also serves as a reference list for 
further reading, and comprehensive word and subject indexes.

EVALUATION

The popular accessibility of the volume is one of its most attractive 
features. Fortson achieves this goal not by simplifying his presentation, 
but by constantly tying the material presented to facts that are likely to 
be familiar to almost any reader, interjecting a good measure of humor, 
and sprinkling the text with intriguing details. For example, "taboo 
deformation" is exemplified by English "God" > "gosh" (28), IE poetic 
innovation is compared to modern jazz innovation (30), hyperbaton is 
exemplified with the familiar "magna cum laude" among other examples 
(139), the Armenian patronymic suffix -ean is clarified by reference to 
the name "Khachaturian" (347), the Slavic adjectival -ov is compared 
to "Molotov" and "Chekhov" (374), and the narrative mood of Balkan Slavic 
is characterized as a "the hell you say" mood (378). One cannot help but 
smile when reading observations such as how, in a caveat to the discussion 
on the IE homeland, the PIE word for 'louse' was generalized to become the 
Tocharian word for 'animal' (40), that the certainty of the reconstruction 
of the interjection for woe or agony is "perhaps indicative of some of the 
less pleasant aspects of life in the older IE societies" (135), or how a 
supposed Illyrian inscription unearthed a century ago in Albania turned 
out to be Byzantine Greek mistakenly read backwards (401). Finally, what 
reader will not be engrossed by the details such as the ritual copulation 
of Celtic royalty with horses (25) or the famous child language experiment 
by the Phrygian King Psammetichus (401)?

The author acknowledges that the breadth of IE is such that it is 
impossible to cover the subject comprehensively, even in an introductory 
manner. The volume is therefore "tailored to what is interesting and 
important for each branch or language" (xiii). In this regard, especially 
characteristic features are emphasized, such as the striking absence of 
the aorist, perfect, and dual in Anatolian (155), the triple reflex of the 
laryngeals in Greek (229), the extremely unusual sound changes of Armenian 
(340 ff.), the definite adjectives of Slavic (367), and the admirative 
mood of Albanian (396). At the same time, language-specific conventions 
that a linguist must understand to deal with any given language are 
explained. Thus the reader learns, for example, that an initial 
parenthetical "s" marks an IE s-mobile root (71), boldface is used in 
Oscan when transliterating the Oscan alphabet (115), Anatolian "=" marks 
clitic boundaries (157), Lithuanian e-overdot indicates length (365), and 
interpuncts reveal syllable structure in Venetic (409-410). With the 
exception of a few Greek characters (228, 230) in a discussion of 
orthography, all material is transliterated into the Roman alphabet. At 
the same time, great effort was made to preserve the diacritics and other 
characteristics of the various Roman-alphabet material to reflect 
the "inviting mystery and beauty" (xiv) of these characters for beginners.

One of the key messages that a careful reader will receive from the book 
is that there is a great uniformity in language phenomena despite 
diversity across time and space, although this is generally not made 
explicit. For example, the merger of the 3rd person singular/plural in 
Lydian (175) is paralleled by the merger of the 3rd singular/dual/plural 
in Baltic (381), and the loss of initial s- known as "psilosis" in Ionic 
and other Greek dialects (227-228) is paralleled by a similar loss in 
Armenian (342). On page 343 an explicit parallel is drawn between the 
development of word-final accent in Armenian and French through the loss 
of final syllables in an accentual system with penultimate stress.

The shortcomings of the book are few, but occasionally certain parallels 
to living or other languages could have been made. For example, the 
separation of nouns and modifiers by intervening elements is characterized 
as "common to all the older languages," with examples from Luvian, Greek, 
Latin, Armenian, and Old Irish (139). Nonetheless, this syntactic pattern 
is very much alive in modern Croatian. The same page states that vestiges 
of postpositions are found in certain "older IE languages" -- but 
postpositions also appear with considerable frequency in Germanic and 
Slavic today (e.g., Reindl 2001). A three-fold distinction in the deictic 
system is said to exist in "Armenian, like Latin and certain other ancient 
IE languages" (344). Yet, the same system exists in modern Spanish and 
Macedonian. It is stated that Albanian has occasional clause-initial 
enclitic pronouns, and that "[n]one of the enclitic pronouns in other IE 
language can be so placed" (397). However, within Slavic studies modern 
Slovenian is well known for allowing clause-initial enclitic pronouns 
(e.g., Franks 2000).

Occasionally it seems that certain details should have been squeezed in, 
regardless of the limited scope of the volume. For example, in the chapter 
on Balto-Slavic it would have been useful to note the dispute over the 
chronological sequence of the velar palatalizations (370), the existence 
of the supine in the catalog of verbal forms (372), virility as a relevant 
semantic category in West Slavic alongside animacy (372-373), and -- most 
noticeably lacking -- the distinctive phonemic palatalization in the 
consonant inventory of a number of Slavic languages. Very rarely a thought 
or observation seems incomplete -- on page 37, for example, we are told 
that separate IE words for 'piglet' and 'grown pig' is evidence of their 
domestication, because "the two are treated differently in animal 
husbandry." Having grown up on a farm with pigs, I am at a loss to 
understand how young and adult pigs are treated any differently from any 
other young and adult livestock.

These quibbles aside, Fortson has succeeded in creating a book that will 
serve not only as a solid textbook for an introduction to Indo-European, 
but also as a handy general reference book on the topic (thanks largely to 
its indexes) and an enjoyable read for professionals in the field. "Indo-
European Language and Culture: An Introduction" is destined to become a 
standard text on reading lists in historical linguistics, and deserves a 
place on the bookshelf of anyone that has more than a passing interest in 
the history of this language family.

REFERENCES

Franks, Steven. (2000). "Clitics at the interface." In: Clitic Phenomena 
in European Languages, ed. Marcel den Dikken & Frits Beukema. Amsterdam: 
John Benjamins, 1-46.

Reindl, Donald F. (2001). "Areal effects on the preservation and genesis 
of Slavic postpositions." In: On Prepositions. Studia Slavica 
Oldenburgensia 8, ed. Ljiljana Saric and Donald F. Reindl. Oldenburg: Carl-
von-Ossietzky-Universität Oldenburg, 85-99. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Donald F. Reindl has a Ph.D. in Slavic linguistics from Indiana 
University. His research focuses on the history of the South Slavic 
languages. As an instructor at the University of Ljubljana, he teaches 
courses in translation and English grammar. He also contributes political 
analyses to Radio Free Europe and the Economist Intelligence Unit.





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