Product Description

This introduction to Comparative Indo-European linguistics starts with a presentation of the languages of the family and a discussion of the culture and origin of the Indo-Europeans. It covers the nature of language change and the methods of reconstruction of older language stages, with many examples provided from the Indo-European languages. A full description is given of the sound changes, which makes it possible to follow the origins of the different Indo-European languages step by step. This is followed by a discussion of the development of all the morphological categories of proto-Indo-European linguistics.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1042807 in Books
• Published on: 1995-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 376 pages

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Dutch

Customer Reviews

An outstanding manual for both novices and experts
This book is one of the most practical and useful manual I have ever read. It provides a sufficient variety of historical comparative linguistic topics with useful tables and references. The writing style is crystal-clear. It provides also useful archeological information. More than hundred pages of appendix is excellently indexed for readers' convenience, with useful terminologies, well classified bibliography, list of linguistic laws, maps, archeologic illustrations, word indexes, and so on. It has also a neat and pleasing visual appearance. I would positively like to recommend this book especially for the beginners.

An excellent overview!
Two minor gripes:

Beekes uses his own (slightly) wierd transcription system, which appears to be partly based on the orthography (or romanisations) of the languages in question and partly an invented non-IPA phonetic system. This makes it harder to read than it needs to be.

The book has a fair number of typographic errors. Sometimes, these are nice and obvious, so the reader can see the error and automatically determine what was meant. Other times, however, the errors aren't immediately apparent, again making the book harder to read than it needs to be.

However: The quality and density of information, coupled with the way the information is generally presented make this an outstanding "second step" into the field of Indo-european linguistics for a student, and a top-class reference work for the enthusiast.

The subtitle "An Introduction" is perhaps a little over-optimistic, as a knowledge of basic linguistic terms is a definate pre-requisite. If you know your Dative from your Medio-passive, and you want a good, broad base of Indo-european, this is the book for you.

Very useful but disorganized and rather biased
This book is subtitled "An Introduction"; much better would be "Beekes' Pet Theories". This is *definitely* not suitable as an introduction to PIE and Indo-European linguistics. Even for advanced readers, it does not stand on its own. It assumes that you know all the old handbooks, and so its presentation of information is overcondensed and missing some very important explanations -- e.g. his discussion of accent and ablaut in nouns. Furthermore, the info is often presented in a disorganized manner; it feels like he threw together a bunch of interesting facts and ideas with little sense of how to properly structure such a book. Furthermore, there is NO INDEX of the conventional sort, making it nearly impossible to find the gems scattered throughout this book. (Under "Index" there is a table of contents, an index of English words whose derivations are discussed, and an index of foreign words. No concept index of any sort. No index of PIE words, for that matter.)

In addition, most of the first 100 pages is basically irrelevant and should not be there -- it consists of general discussions of the comparative method and of sound change, analogy, the various language families of the world, and other stuff that belongs in a general book on historical linguistics. This appears to be Beekes' attempt at making this an "introduction", but in fact it just robs him of space he needs in order to better explain stuff in the rest of the book. He throws in other random stuff too, such as a detailed 10-page appendix "From Proto-Indo-European to Albanian", which seems present for no other reason than Beekes wanting to show off some personal work of his. Now if he had bothered to also include other, extremely necessary, stuff such as "From Proto-Indo-European to Greek" (and also Sanskrit, and Latin), I wouldn't begrudge him so much, but he doesn't.

On top of all this, the actual content is quite biased towards his own particular views, which are in many cases not the majority opinion. He seems extremely inclined to take speculative leaps in his reconstructions, which often result in fringe ideas that he asserts to be received wisdom, making no distinction between his own ideas and what is generally accepted. For an "introduction", this is absolutely fatal. Often he will simply make assertions regarding controversial topics without any discussion, e.g. when talking about Grimm's Law, he writes "... and the aspirated sounds have lots their aspiration (the idea that these latter sounds originally were spirants is incorrect)." So in one parenthetical remark he dismisses one of the most controversial issues in Indo-European studies by expressing his opinion as if it were the word of God, no explanation necessary (and none is provided).

Also, often his reasoning is wrong. Much of it is circular (e.g. this `a' cannot be an `a' in PIE because PIE had no a's -- and PIE "had no a's" purely by assumption); much of it is ludicrously speculative, often of the silly kind where "well, pronouns A and B have form 1 in one language and form 2 in another, so it must have been that pronoun A originally had form 1 and B form 2, and each language generalized." [well, this is one possibility, but there are a zillion others that involve different mechanisms as well ...] Furthermore, he seems to simply not understand the fundamental idea that languages change, in that his reconstructions are a random mix of forms quite obviously from different time periods, and he makes no attempt to separate later from earlier forms or to present any coherent picture at all of early vs. later PIE.

One particular flaw in the "Beekes' pet theory" business is the "glottalic theory". This is *not* in any way, shape or form the conventional wisdom of PIE scholars; it's still a fairly fringy theory, although it's gotten a lot of press. Beekes takes it as gospel. He also falls into the sin of most of today's Chomskyan linguists in adopting certain methods and ideas but using them only when they serve their purposes, and ignoring them when they would cause problems. For example, as part of the glottalic theory he asserts that a voiced (= "pre-glottal") stop behaves exactly like a glottal stop (his h1, first laryngeal) in all its effects -- but only when it helps his derivations, e.g. p. 213. Now, by the same logic, Greek should have `edeka' not `deka' -- but no fear, Beekes invokes the "rule applies only when i want it to" axiom and all is fixed.

[nb it makes little sense to take h1 as a glottal stop, as his theory requires, since all laryngeals pattern alike, including in the sonority hierarchy, and the other two are clearly fricatives, not stops -- hence h1 must be some kind of fricative as well, probably a simple /h/.]

Summary: This book *could* be a great book if the author
[a] would strip out the irrelevant stuff; [b] would put in detailed and complete explanations of many of the tricky issues regarding accent, ablaut and other such things; [c] would take out the derivation of Albanian from PIE and put in *ALL-COMPLETELY-100%-REQUIRED* derivations from PIE to Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, and Proto-Germanic, and from Proto-Germanic to Gothic and English. Once again, he needs to do them in an *organized* and comprehensive fashion -- explain all the rules clearly, don't just mix the rules in with the examples; but do keep lots of examples, yes yes yes! [d] would distinguish between his own pet theories and established practice. Since this is an overview, Beekes should concentrate on established practice, and list IT as gospel, not his own views. He should go ahead and give his views as well, but indicate that they are his views. [e] would fix the numerous typos noticed by previous others, and use IPA whenever possible to show the actual pronunciation of words quoted in Old Armenian, Old Irish, Avestan, etc.[f] would watch his argumentation, trying to reduce as much as possible the amount of random speculation and distinguish clearly between newer and older PIE. Maybe some of his speculations are true, but they should clearly be placed in the "earlier Indo-European" stage with question marks and "author's own opinion" marks by them, so the reader can clearly see the situation and the derivation.

All told, there *are* indeed a large number of nuggets you can get out of this book. In particular, he is scrupulous in his use of larnygealized forms for *all* PIE forms that he lists in his book, which really helps to understand this difficult area of PIE linguistics. There's also lots of other goodies about how words are derived, about the system of demonstratives and deictic adverbs and relative pronouns in PIE, the numerals, the various types of substantives, etc. etc. If you have advanced knowledge of this stuff already, this book can help you round out your knowledge and give you lots of goodies to impress your colleagues with; but if you don't already know the stuff well, this book is bad bad.