30.1138, Review: Indo-European; Historical Linguistics; Typology: Klein, Joseph, Fritz, Wenthe (2018)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-1138. Wed Mar 13 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.1138, Review: Indo-European; Historical Linguistics; Typology: Klein, Joseph, Fritz, Wenthe (2018)

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Student Moderator: Jeremy Coburn
Managing Editor: Becca Morris
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Everett Green, Sarah Robinson, Peace Han, Nils Hjortnaes, Yiwen Zhang, Julian Dietrich
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Jeremy Coburn <jecoburn at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2019 22:18:09
From: Jean-François Mondon [jfmondon at gmail.com]
Subject: Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36470817


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-2706.html

EDITOR: Jared  Klein
EDITOR: Brian  Joseph
EDITOR: Matthias  Fritz
EDITOR: Mark  Wenthe
TITLE: Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics
SUBTITLE: Volume 3
SERIES TITLE: Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science (HSK)
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Jean-François R. Mondon, Minot State University

The third and final volume of the “Handbook of Comparative and Historical
Indo-European Linguistics”, edited by Jared Klein, Brian Joseph, and Matthias
Fritz, has finally been released, completing the long-awaited series.  The
mammoth volume of slightly more than a thousand pages has much to recommend
it.  Due to the sheer physical size and the breadth of material, however, it
is naturally impossible to delve too thoroughly into the particulars of each
of the volume’s 45 articles.  Instead, I will focus on offering a general
summary of various sections, occasionally pinpointing something which I view
as a particular strength to specialists or more generally, to
researchers/students wishing to familiarize themselves with a specific topic.

SUMMARY

The book consists of 45 chapters which, following the numeration of Volume 2,
are numbered 80-125.  Each chapter is by one or two authors, with only a
handful of authors penning more than one chapter.  The 45 chapters are divided
into nine thematic sections (numbered XIII – XXI, again following the
numeration of Volume 2), which will be dealt with each in turn. 

The first three sections (XIII, XIV, XV) deal with Slavic, Baltic, and
Albanian respectively, and they all follow the same pattern.  Each begins with
a chapter on the earliest documentation of the language family under
discussion, followed by chapters devoted to each of the following: the
phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, dialectology, and evolution of the
branch.  The chapters on the documentation of the respective languages
(Chapters 80, 87, 94) are quite thorough with extensive bibliographies that go
well beyond the standard fare of sources written in Western European
languages.  Each of the three are readily accessible to non-specialists with
minimal to no prior background knowledge. 

The phonology chapters (Chapters 81, 88, 95) lay out the development of the
reconstructed Proto-Indo-European (PIE) sound system into the various
descendent languages.  The article on Slavic phonology (by Daniel Collins) is
by far the most pedagogically friendly of the three with an abundance of
charts which very clearly illustrate the various sound changes under
consideration and the reflexes of the Proto-Slavic forms into an array of
modern Slavic languages.  The chapter on Baltic phonology (Daniel Petit) is
also very accessible and does a welcome job of pointing out where data are
still awaiting a solution.  For instance, the existence of words such as
“káimas” ‘village’ and “maĩšas” ‘bag’ whose root vocalisms inexplicably
avoided becoming *ē1 (p. 1644).  The chapter on Albanian phonology (Michiel de
Vaan) is curiously organized.  It starts first with Modern Albanian and moves
through the various layers of Proto-Albanian and Pre-Proto-Albanian before
ending up at PIE.  This layout greatly reduces its accessibility to anyone
without some prior knowledge of Albanian historical phonology, as one is left
to flip back and forth trying to deduce how the modern Albanian forms, listed
alongside Pre-Proto-Albanian to PIE sound changes, actually illustrate the
changes under discussion.  It would have been far better to either follow the
normal tack and go from PIE to Albanian or to have given the full derivation
of each word through the various reconstructed stages every time it is given
(much as in Ringe 1996 for Tocharian).  All three chapters do presuppose a
basic knowledge of PIE phonology which can be easily established after reading
the chapter on PIE phonology (Chapter 121) later in the volume.  Before
delving into the Albanian chapter, however, an absolute neophyte would benefit
from consulting the appendix to Beekes (1995).

The morphology chapters (82, 89, 96) of these three highly inflected language
families are naturally more cramped than the phonology chapters.  Nonetheless,
they each do a respectable job at briskly walking through every corner of the
respective morphological systems, even if they tease us with interesting
claims which – understandably due to space considerations – cannot be delved
into at any substantial depth.  One such instance is the intriguing claim in
the Albanian morphology chapter (Joachim Matzinger and Stefan Schumacher) that
the preverbal pronominal clitics, which are a part of nearly every Albanian
sentence, are best thought of not as clitics but as verbal affixes of a
“polypersonal verb which optionally marks direct and indirect object” (p.
1756).

The syntax chapters (83, 90, 97) categorically reflect the pre-generative
notion of syntax.  They eschew trying to establish the underlying
configurational grammars in favor of focusing on description (e.g. the uses of
the various cases and the surface word orders) and occasionally offering
hypotheses about the genesis of various constructions.  While all three
chapters are informative and highly accessible, it is unfortunate that theory
was ignored, not least because there is ample literature especially on the
syntax of the Slavic languages, but because it only reinforces the chasm
between traditional Indo-Europeanists and Syntacticians.  

The fourth section (XVI) of the book focuses on the “Restsprachen,” or those
Indo-European languages which are only fragmentarily attested.  Each
summarizes the documentation, phonology, morphology, lexicon, and – where
enough data is attested – the syntax.  This section was particularly welcome
since, while some of these languages have extensive chapters in Woodard
(2004), several do not, such as Illyrian and Thracian.  As such, they have
often remained wholly inaccessible to non-specialists or at least to linguists
without a reading knowledge of at the very least German.

The fifth and sixth sections (XVII and XVIII) target larger language families;
namely, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic.  Each section consists of a separate
chapter on phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon.  The quality of each is
high but especial mention must be made of Mark Hale’s chapter (112) on the
syntax of Indo-Iranian.  As opposed to the syntax chapters described above,
Hale makes the very welcome decision to assume basic modern syntactic theory. 
The result is an informative chapter which shows the kind of results which
adopting a configurational theory can yield, such as the rejection of the
century’s old existence of Wackernagel’s Law.  Hale does a masterful job at
showing why the law is epiphenomenal (p. 1936) and how a deeper understanding
of the structure of Vedic Sanskrit can be attained by dispensing with it.  

Section seven (XIX) offers two chapters on languages whose relation to each
other has long been open to debate.  In the first (chapter 119) Nicholas Zair
seems to favor coming down against positing an Italo-Celtic node on the PIE
family tree.  Aside from the superlative in *-is-mmo- and potentially both the
genitive singular of o-stems and the 1st pl. passive *-mor, Zair concludes by
echoing the words of Cowgill (1970: 114), that if such a family existed, it
was for “a rather short period of common development followed by a long period
of divergence.”  With respect to Greco-Anatolian Bronze Age interaction, Ivo
Hajnal (Chapter 120) reviews claims of changes which directly reflect contact
ranging from psilosis (i.e. loss of #[h] in Aeolic dialects) to the borrowing
of the Cuneiform Luwian particle –tar to conclude that contra Watkins (2000),
“there is no evidence for the existence of a virtual Sprachbund” (p. 2049).  

Section XX presents four chapters (121 – 124) dealing with PIE itself.  The
chapter on phonology (Andrew Byrd) is a very clear and organized presentation
of the PIE sound system along with the assortment of phonological rules which
have been posited for PIE as it neared the precipice of splintering.  The
morphology chapter (Jesse Lindquist and Anthony Yates) is a tour de force 100+
page article offering a very non-superficial overview of PIE morphology.  It
deals with all aspects of PIE nominal and verbal derivation and inflection,
not only outlining the communis opinio of reconstructed forms, but succinctly
indicating which forms from the daughter languages are used to justify each
such reconstruction.  They judiciously lay bare where the problem areas lie
and do not shy away from indicating their preference for whichever
alternative.  Their acceptance of and seeming respect for work with a
theoretical bent (e.g. Kiparsky & Halle 1977) is particularly welcome. 
Finally, the chapter on the lexicon (Daniel Kölligan) is a surprisingly
thorough article in the vein of Benveniste (1969) which should serve as a
welcome introduction to anyone wishing to glean a sense of what the PIE
lexicon can tell us about the culture of its speakers.

The final section of the book (XXI) consists of one chapter dealing with long
range language comparison.  Petri Kallio and Jorma Koivulehto come down hard
against proposals linking Indo-European to any other language family such as
Uralic and Afro-Asiatic.  It would be ideal if this chapter could be expanded
into a book intended for the general reader since notions of Nostratic and
Eurasiatic sadly pervade the linguistics sections of many general bookstores. 

The book ends with a detailed general index as well as a language and dialect
index for all three volumes of the series.

EVALUATION

Aside from the comments sprinkled in the summary above, it is necessary to add
that one of the greatest strengths of this volume is its rich bibliographies. 
I think it was a very wise decision on the part of the editors to have a full
bibliography with each chapter rather than a single bibliography for the
entire volume.  It makes it far easier to pinpoint citations while reading a
chapter and to browse thematically related sources.  It should be mentioned
that the length of the chapters are consistently capped around 25 pages with
two exceptions: the chapter on Slavic phonology and on PIE morphology both
exceed 100 pages.  This inconsistency is odd but such is the difficulty in
editing volumes.  

Naturally enough in any edited volume, there is repetition across chapters. 
This is especially true in the chapters on evolution which understandably
repeat contents of the phonology and morphology chapters.  While some may find
this bothersome, I can find no fault with this and at times found it welcome
since I was not forced to jump back to another chapter to brush up on sound
changes for instance.   Finally, the editors must be commended for the near
non-existence of errors found in the book.  While this volume does not contain
anything much beyond overview chapters, it is nonetheless a very welcome
volume, not because it will be changing the field per se, but because it will
make the field far more accessible to aspiring Balticists or
Indo-Europeanists, or just any linguist interested in getting a reliable
summary of a topic outside of his/her comfort zone.  
 
REFERENCES

Beekes, Robert S. P.  1995.  Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An
Introduction. 
 Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Benveniste, Emile.  1969.  Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes. 2
vols. Paris:
 Minuit.

Cowgill, Warren.  1970.  “Italic and Celtic superlatives and the dialects of
Indo-European,” in 
 (eds. G. Cardona et al.) Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans.  Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 113-153.

Kiparsky, Paul and Morris Halle.  1977.  “Towards a reconstruction of the
Indo-European 
 accent,” (ed. Larry Hyman) Studies in Stress and Accent.  Los Angeles: USC
Press,
 209-238.

Ringe, Donald.  1996.  On the Chronology of Sound Changes in Tocharian, vol.
1: From Proto-
 Indo-European to Proto-Tocharian.  New Haven: American Oriental Society.

Watkins, Calvert.  2000.  “L’Anatolie et la Grèce: Résonances culturelles,
linguistiques et 
 poétiques,” Comptes Rendus des Séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et
Belles-
 Lettres: 1143-1158. 

Woodard, Roger.  2004.  The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient
Languages. 
 Cambridge University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Associate Professor of Foreign Languages at Minot State University. Primarily
focus on theoretical morphology (Distributed Morphology), Indo-European
Linguistics (Armenian, Celtic) and language pedagogy.





------------------------------------------------------------------------------

***************************    LINGUIST List Support    ***************************
 The 2019 Fund Drive is under way! Please visit https://funddrive.linguistlist.org
  to find out how to donate and check how your university, country or discipline
     ranks in the fund drive challenges. Or go directly to the donation site:
               https://iufoundation.fundly.com/the-linguist-list-2019

                        Let's make this a short fund drive!
                Please feel free to share the link to our campaign:
                    https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-30-1138	
----------------------------------------------------------