26.2328, Review: Historical Ling; Morphology; Phonology: Beekes (2014)

Mon May 4 18:45:37 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-2328. Mon May 04 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.2328, Review: Historical Ling; Morphology; Phonology: Beekes (2014)

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Anthony Aristar, Helen Aristar-Dry, Sara Couture)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

*************    LINGUIST List 2015 Fund Drive    *************
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:

              http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/

Editor for this issue: Sara  Couture <sara at linguistlist.org>
================================================================

Date: Mon, 04 May 2015 14:45:10
From: Eleonora Sausa [eleonorasausa at gmail.com]
Subject: Pre-Greek

Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=35997517

Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-3304.html

AUTHOR: Robert S. Beekes
TITLE: Pre-Greek
SUBTITLE: Phonology, Morphology, Lexicon
SERIES TITLE: Brill Introductions to Indo-European Languages
PUBLISHER: Brill
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Eleonora Sausa, Università degli Studi di Pavia

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

INTRODUCTION

The book ‘Pre-Greek - Phonology, morphology, lexicon’ by Robert S. P. Beekes
belongs to the prestigious Brill collection ‘Brill Introductions to
Indo-European Languages’ edited by Michiel de Vaan and Alexander Lubotsky.
This concise lexicon constitutes a further development of the recent
‘Etymological Dictionary of Greek’ by the same author published by Brill
(2010), in which all non-Indo-European forms in the Greek lexicon are
discussed. In this volume, the substrate language of Greek, called Pre-Greek,
finds a separate treatment and a balanced space. The Pre-Greek material is,
here, systematically collected and analyzed, with specific sections on
phonology, morphology and an accurate lexicon of Pre-Greek etyma. 

The book is based on the study by Furnée (1972), and is the result of personal
research carried out over almost 40 years, with the collaboration of other
specialists, namely Alexander Lubotsky and Wouter Henkelman. The part of the
work devoted to the lexicon was partially compiled by Michael Peyrot and then
brought to completion by Stefan Norbruis, who is the editor of the entire
book.  

SUMMARY

After the preface of the editor and a short introduction of the author, the
book develops in five chapters. Chapter 2, ‘Phonology’, and Chapter 3,
‘Morphology’, give a general overview of the phonological and morphological
features of Pre-Greek. Chapter 4, ‘The unity of Pre-Greek’, and Chapter 5,
‘Pre-Greek is Non-Indo-European’, provide together a synthetic explanation of
the linguistic unity and affiliation of Pre-Greek. Finally, Chapter 6, ‘The
Pre-Greek Lexicon’, presents a detailed lexicon of all etyma considered
Pre-Greek, internally organized per semantic areas. After that, an index of
the lemmas collected in Chapter 6 is provided. 

The introduction contains some basic concepts and a brief state of the art on
Pre-Greek studies. The ‘Pelasgian’ theory, i.e. the theory which states that
the substrate language of Greek, ‘Pelasgian’, was an Indo-European dialect and
traceable in few Greek etyma, is briefly mentioned and totally rejected. The
author ideally accomplishes the work of Kuiper and Furnée (1972), who
explicitly rejected the Pelasgian theory and theorized a Non-Indo-European
Pre-Greek substrate, reconstructable from the Greek lexicon. Furnée’s book
provides a wide collection of all Pre-Greek forms, analyzing 4,400 words and
discussing approximately 1000 Pre-Greek etyma. 

Chapter 2 provides a phonemic system of Pre-Greek, reconstructed on the basis
of all Greek words considered as Pre-Greek. At paragraph 2b, the author gives
some important indications concerning how to recognize a word as Pre-Greek: if
a given word has no Indo-European etymology or shows some typical Pre-Greek
suffix, or the meaning concerns names of plants or animals, we are most likely
dealing with a Pre-Greek word. Concerning the phonemic system, three series of
consonants are hypothesized, without any distinction for either voice or
aspiration, which are not considered distinctive features within this system,
but rather distinguished for palatalization and labialization: the system
comprises consonants, palatalized consonants and labialized consonants. The
author assumes a five vowel system (a, e, i, o, u), where the vowels ‘e’ and
‘o’ were originally variants of the phoneme ‘a’, resulting from the influence
of coarticulation with palatalized and labialized consonants, respectively.

Characteristic phonemes and phoneme clusters of Pre-Greek words, rare in
Proto-Indo-European (PIE), are  also shown and explained in this chapter, such
as the diphthongs ‘au’, ‘ou’, the phoneme ‘b’, the clusters ‘bd’, ‘gd’, ‘gn’,
‘dn’, ‘kt’, ‘kch’, ‘mn’, ‘pph’, ‘rd’, ‘rkn’, ‘rn’. Some other phonetic
features considered typical of the Pre-Greek are geminated consonants, the
prothetic vowel, the s-mobile, labial stops.  

In Chapter 3, the author takes into account some relevant morphological
phenomena of Pre-Greek, focusing in particular on reduplication, suffixation
and word end. A partial reduplication is attested in the Pre-Greek forms.
Large space is devoted to suffixation, because the author believes that the
presence of some suffixes is a signal of a Pre-Greek origin, and, for this
reason, a wide survey of the suffixes is provided, followed by examples,
mostly taken from Furnée (1972) and Fick (1905). Most suffixes have the same
structure: a vowel (mostly a, i, u), a consonant (stops can be prenasalized)
and the usual variant of the consonant. Another type of suffix contains -n-
directly following the root, and yet another a -s- followed by a dental. Then
some word end structures, considered original Pre-Greek finals, are discussed.

Chapter 4 contains arguments in support of the unity of Pre-Greek, considered
as a single language. According to the author, the fact that all material
illustrated in the preceding chapters concerns one language is self-evident.
Even though other languages have existed in the same area, and other
non-Indo-European loanwords have entered into Greek, the position of the
author is that non-Greek words are Pre-Greek, unless there is a reason to
assume another origin.

Chapter 5 argues that Pre-Greek is certainly a Non-Indo-European language. The
evidence proposed by the author is that, as our knowledge of PIE has greatly
improved in the last 30 years, in particular thanks to the laryngeal theory,
if for some words a PIE reconstruction is impossible, their origin is surely
Non-Indo-European.

Chapter 6 opens the richest part of the book: a Pre-Greek lexicon, with 1106
words organized into semantic areas. Each lexical entry starts with the lemma,
followed by the gender of the word and its English translation. For each word
a short explanation why the word is considered Pre-Greek is given, along with
the main literary sources of attestations. 

The words collected mainly belong to the semantic category of natural
entities, such as Flora, Fauna, Landscape and Minerals. Many terms refer to
the cultural world and are connected to agriculture, viniculture, utensils and
art. Adjectives, verbs and adverbs are separated from nouns and appear in
dedicated sections. Very interesting is the section on theonyms, divine
epithets and mythical characters, which shows that many terms universally
associated to the Ancient Greek world are, actually, Pre-Greek.  

EVALUATION

The book, certainly, constitutes a precious resource for Indo-Europeanists,
Greek scholars, and historical linguists, and fills an important gap in the
history of the Greek language and in the studies on Pre-Indo-European
languages spoken in the Mediterranean. The last work completely devoted to
this topic before this edition was ‘Die wichtigsten konsonantischen
Erscheinungen des Vorgriechischen’ by Furnée (1972), on which Robert Beekes
bases many considerations and examples, but the need for a new, updated
edition in English was shared by linguists of different fields.     

The work ideally completes the comprehensive work carried out in the
‘Etymological Dictionary of Greek language’, providing deserved attention to a
minor but fascinating topic, the unattested substrate language of Greek,
reconstructable thanks to its traces left in the written Ancient Greek texts.

The consistent and detailed reconstruction of Pre-Greek phonology is
particularly valuable, and the evidence the author provides for the
non-Indo-European origin of a number of Ancient Greek etyma is especially
compelling. 

The richest part of the book is, nonetheless, the Pre-Greek lexicon, which is
a significant improvement on  that by Furnée (1972), and appears for the first
time in English, in a concise but accurate version. Each lexical entry is
reduced to the essential for basic consultation, without lacking in rigor and
completeness. The importance of semantics in such study is highlighted by the
systematization of the lexicon in semantic areas. Meaning is, indeed, one of
the indicators that a word is Pre-Greek. This classification, thus, is
particularly helpful both for specialists, who can appreciate the semantic
homogeneity of the Pre-Greek words used by Greeks, but also for
non-specialists, such as historians and anthropologists of the ancient world,
who can, in this way, approach easily the obscure Pre-Greek era.      

The relationship between Pre-Greek and other substrate languages spoken in the
same area, which most likely left loanwords in Ancient Greek, is not ignored
but remains outside the aims of the book. This seems to be, in my opinion, the
only limit of the book, which could have provided more updates on the puzzling
Mediterranean contact situation. 

Furthermore, one of the biggest merits of the volume, an extraordinary
conciseness combined with a detailed completeness, shows sometimes, in my
opinion, some weakness. Chapters 4 and 5, for example, devoted to the unity
and affiliation of the language, are surprisingly clear but extremely reduced
and, probably, such a controversial topic deserved more space. 

Nevertheless, conciseness and brevity are, globally, an appreciated choice and
are also understandable, as the author could not accomplish the final draft of
the book for health reasons and the editor only completed the work, without
making substantial changes.

These minor issues, however, do not detract from the overall quality of the
volume, which represents as a fundamental resource in the studies on substrate
Pre-Indo-European languages and, at the same time, opens new horizons in this
field, towards language contact between Indo-European and Non-Indo-European
languages in a pre-historical era.

REFERENCES

Beekes, Robert S.P. 2010. Etymological dictionary of Greek. Leiden: Brill. 

Fick, Arnold. 1905. Vorgriechische Ortsnamen als Quelle fur die Vorgeschichte
Griechenlands. Göttingen.

Furnée, E.J. 1972. Die wichtigsten konsonantischen Erscheinungen des
Vorgriechischen. Mit einem Appendix über den Vokalismus. The Hague.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Eleonora Sausa is finishing her PhD in Linguistics at University of Pavia,
Italy. She works on Ancient Greek in a constructionist approach, and her
thesis focuses on verb argument structure constructions in Homer. She is also
interested in computational methods and digital resources for ancient
languages, and in teaching Italian as second language.

----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-26-2328	
----------------------------------------------------------
Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated
from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:
          http://multitree.org/