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Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics
Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction
This revised and expanded edition provides a comprehensive overview of comparative Indo-European linguistics and the branches of the Indo-European language family, covering both linguistic and cultural material. Now offering even greater coverage than the first edition, it is the definitive introduction to the field. Updated, corrected, and expanded edition, containing new illustrations of selected texts and inscriptions, and text samples with translations and etymological commentaryExtensively covers individual histories of both ancient and modern languages of the Indo-European familyProvides an overview of Proto-Indo-European culture, society, and languageDesigned for use in courses, with exercises and suggestions for further reading included in each chapterIncludes maps, a glossary, a bibliography, and comprehensive word and subject indexes
568 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
August 20, 2021
REVIEW OF THE 2011 Kindle Edition
So yes, I am giving Benjamin W. Fortson IV’s Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction a full five stars as a rating (and indeed, I am reading and reviewing the 2011 Kindle edition, and I definitely do recommend this particular edition, as it is of course and naturally also the most recent, the most up to date). But my five star rating notwithstanding, I do in fact also realise and acknowledge that this book, that Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction is actually not universally loved and that some readers do seem to have found Fortson’s information, explanations and exercises on the linguistic specifics (phonology, morphology, syntax etc.) of in particular the proto languages a bit confusing and difficult. However, Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction has been specifically and very obviously conceptualised as a university linguistics textbook, and in my humble opinion, as an undergraduate level introduction to the Indo-European languages, Benjamin J. Fortson IV’s text is in my humble opinion pretty much perfect (and academically delightful).
Now first and foremost, what I absolutely adore about Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction is the general set-up of the various chapters, that each specific section of Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction has ITS OWN set of bibliographical lists with suggestions for further reading, and happily so, that one can actually and easily also skip those areas of the book that one might find either too difficult or not that personally interesting and still textually obtain a pretty solid and decently informative understanding of Indo-European language and culture (for example, if a reader finds the specific linguistic information and details on PIE and its daughter languages either too confusing or not all that engaging, the modular organisation of Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction permits skipping this but thankfully not actually ever textually feeling a sense of incompleteness), and not to mention that what Benjamin W. Fortson IV points out in his preface to Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction regarding how his presented text is organised and the reasons for this, this is also what later is always to be encountered within the narrative proper (and with no nasty surprises either, as I have actually had more than a few cases of a university textbook in fact not practicing what is being preached in the preface, and indeed, this is always a huge and major annoyance and inconvenience).
And for two, I really do celebrate that Benjamin W. Fortson IV in my humble opinion and from my own previous readings of linguistics textbooks generally always manages to maintain a very appreciated and enjoyable to read textual balance with Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction. In other words, Fortson always provides a simple enough text for most undergraduate students (and even for lay readers) but also not rendering his choice of vocabulary as so basic that Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction feels unacademic in scope and like trivial non fiction (such as for example many of the recent “biographies” of languages, books that basically often totally ignore linguistics and textually also seem to rather annoyingly for me make languages into active characters and persons, which really does for and to me get majorly silly, and I am definitely very pleased that with Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction, Benjamin W. Fortson IV consistently avoids this and always keeps his narrative, his information on the Indo-European languages and culture totally serious, totally academic in scope and feel, and also thus never veering strangely off topic).
So yes, I am giving Benjamin W. Fortson IV’s Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction a full five stars as a rating (and indeed, I am reading and reviewing the 2011 Kindle edition, and I definitely do recommend this particular edition, as it is of course and naturally also the most recent, the most up to date). But my five star rating notwithstanding, I do in fact also realise and acknowledge that this book, that Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction is actually not universally loved and that some readers do seem to have found Fortson’s information, explanations and exercises on the linguistic specifics (phonology, morphology, syntax etc.) of in particular the proto languages a bit confusing and difficult. However, Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction has been specifically and very obviously conceptualised as a university linguistics textbook, and in my humble opinion, as an undergraduate level introduction to the Indo-European languages, Benjamin J. Fortson IV’s text is in my humble opinion pretty much perfect (and academically delightful).
Now first and foremost, what I absolutely adore about Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction is the general set-up of the various chapters, that each specific section of Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction has ITS OWN set of bibliographical lists with suggestions for further reading, and happily so, that one can actually and easily also skip those areas of the book that one might find either too difficult or not that personally interesting and still textually obtain a pretty solid and decently informative understanding of Indo-European language and culture (for example, if a reader finds the specific linguistic information and details on PIE and its daughter languages either too confusing or not all that engaging, the modular organisation of Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction permits skipping this but thankfully not actually ever textually feeling a sense of incompleteness), and not to mention that what Benjamin W. Fortson IV points out in his preface to Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction regarding how his presented text is organised and the reasons for this, this is also what later is always to be encountered within the narrative proper (and with no nasty surprises either, as I have actually had more than a few cases of a university textbook in fact not practicing what is being preached in the preface, and indeed, this is always a huge and major annoyance and inconvenience).
And for two, I really do celebrate that Benjamin W. Fortson IV in my humble opinion and from my own previous readings of linguistics textbooks generally always manages to maintain a very appreciated and enjoyable to read textual balance with Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction. In other words, Fortson always provides a simple enough text for most undergraduate students (and even for lay readers) but also not rendering his choice of vocabulary as so basic that Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction feels unacademic in scope and like trivial non fiction (such as for example many of the recent “biographies” of languages, books that basically often totally ignore linguistics and textually also seem to rather annoyingly for me make languages into active characters and persons, which really does for and to me get majorly silly, and I am definitely very pleased that with Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction, Benjamin W. Fortson IV consistently avoids this and always keeps his narrative, his information on the Indo-European languages and culture totally serious, totally academic in scope and feel, and also thus never veering strangely off topic).
December 8, 2019
Almost immediately upon publication, Prof. Fortson's survey of the Proto-Indo-European language and its daughter branches was recognized as the best introduction to the study in the English language. Now something like a decade after its first print and, to wit, this gateway has not been surpassed. Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction is readily understood by the student with no background in historical linguistics and a valuable reference for those with a few notches on their belt.
Fortson is more of a Virgil than a Dante. He guides the reader through the facts and controversies of Indo-European studies, hitting all the major consensus points of the reconstructed language and providing a moderate's view when consensus cannot be found (which is often). He actively avoids inserting any of his own theories, instead providing a space for the newcomer to draw his or her own conclusions.
Historical linguistics can be a perniciously difficult field for newcomers. There are myriad publications examining only very narrow aspects of Proto-Indo-European and a paucity of big-picture looks. It doesn't help that a sizeable minority of the introductions cannot resist including the authors' pet theories of tenuous, or even outlandish, credulity. So thank goodness for Indo-European Langauge and Culture. Fortson's book was, and still is, a welcome lodestone.
Fortson is more of a Virgil than a Dante. He guides the reader through the facts and controversies of Indo-European studies, hitting all the major consensus points of the reconstructed language and providing a moderate's view when consensus cannot be found (which is often). He actively avoids inserting any of his own theories, instead providing a space for the newcomer to draw his or her own conclusions.
Historical linguistics can be a perniciously difficult field for newcomers. There are myriad publications examining only very narrow aspects of Proto-Indo-European and a paucity of big-picture looks. It doesn't help that a sizeable minority of the introductions cannot resist including the authors' pet theories of tenuous, or even outlandish, credulity. So thank goodness for Indo-European Langauge and Culture. Fortson's book was, and still is, a welcome lodestone.
December 13, 2012
A textbook of Indo-European studies; I've only read popular books on the subject previously; it is one of the textbooks used for UC Berkeley's Linguistics 234. The first 8 chapters reconstruct the proto-IE language (its phonology, verb morphology, noun morphology, syntax, the culture of the speakers etc.); the remaining 12 deal with its daughter subfamilies. Indo-Iranian is split into 2 chapters for Indic and Iranian, and Baltic and Slavic are lumped together; Greek, Albanian, Armenian etc. each merit a single chapter; the last chapter deals with ancient languages such as Phrygian and Thracian that are known to be Indo-European but are attested too poorly. For each subfamily, the chapter outlines its phonological evolution from proto-IE (Armenian changed *du into rk), and morphological and syntactic peculiarities of its member languages (Breton nouns can have a super-plural: "groups of children", "various different parks"; the Sanskrit Life of Buddha mentions a short-bed-blanket-covered-back stallion; Bulgarian has a special mood for retelling stories the speaker does not trust to be true). I was surprised that the Latin deus is related not to the Greek theos, but to Zeus; the suffix in the Czech divadlo (theater) and letadlo (airplane) also occurs in the English needle (the means of, respectively, watching plays, flying and sewing). The Latin phrase pater familias preserves the proto-IE genitive singular case ending for athematic nouns; with the regular ending it would have been pater familiae. The Latin femur (thigh) changes to femin- in oblique cases ("between thighs" is "inter femina" in Suetonius's story about Tiberius's recreational activities at Capri); in Hittite this r/n alternation is very common.
March 11, 2014
If Tocharian A excites you, wait 'til you see Tocharian B!
January 8, 2025
Very complete overview of all of the languages with some being discussed at quite a good length and others a bit less (though interestingly usually also containing a part about the modern history of the languages, something not always done)
August 25, 2015
Ik was in een ander boek aan het lezen, en daar werd gesproken over Indo-Europees, en dat het boek van Benjamin Fortson de moeite waard zou zijn.
Niét gelogen.
Dit is een machtig interessant werk. Zeer grote stukken gingen helemaal over mijn hoofd. Niet omdat het niet duidelijk was of onvolledig, maar zuiver omdat ik het boek gelezen heb als een boek, terwijl het even goed (of beter, eigenlijk) als een cursus gelezen kan worden. Ik vermoed dat mensen die dit moeten studeren op de universiteit niet enorm veel verder moeten zoeken om een uitstekende uitvalsbasis te vinden voor alles wat Indo-Europese taal en cultuur is.
Het begint met het boeiende verhaal van de reconstructie van (proto-)Indo-Europees, de taal, de cultuur, de regio van oorsprong, en gaat dan op alle takken van het Indo-Europees in. Met telkens voldoende informatie om meer dan op weg te zijn, een geannoteerde literatuurlijst, een lijst van termen zeker te onthouden en oefeningen en mogelijke examenvragen.
Ik ben er redelijk gerust in dat als ik dit als handboek had gelezen en er een paar maand over gedaan had in plaats van een paar dagen, ik ernstig veel zou geweten en onthouden hebben over de materie.
Ter illustratie: oefening één van hoofdstuk één:
Een oefening in het midden, over Latijn:
...en de laatste oefening van het laatste hoofstuk:
Serieus. Als ik gelijk vijfentwintig jaar jonger was, ik ging dit meteen studeren.
De tweede helft van het boek, waar de takken van het Indo-Europees apart besproken worden (niet alleen de vroegste vormen maar ook meer recente, trouwens), is trouwens hoofdstuk per hoofdstuk te lezen, en hoofdstuk per hoofdstuk machtig interessant. Met telkens geschiedenis en uitleg over de taal(familie), hoe ze geëvolueerd is uit het Proto-Indo-Europees (in fonologie, morfologie en syntax), met een overzicht van de verschillende talen in de familie (geschiedenis, grammatica, zwaar geannoteerde voorbeelden), en literatuurlijst.
Zeer zeer wijs. En een fijn boek om in huis te hebben qua naslagwerk.
Niét gelogen.
Dit is een machtig interessant werk. Zeer grote stukken gingen helemaal over mijn hoofd. Niet omdat het niet duidelijk was of onvolledig, maar zuiver omdat ik het boek gelezen heb als een boek, terwijl het even goed (of beter, eigenlijk) als een cursus gelezen kan worden. Ik vermoed dat mensen die dit moeten studeren op de universiteit niet enorm veel verder moeten zoeken om een uitstekende uitvalsbasis te vinden voor alles wat Indo-Europese taal en cultuur is.
Het begint met het boeiende verhaal van de reconstructie van (proto-)Indo-Europees, de taal, de cultuur, de regio van oorsprong, en gaat dan op alle takken van het Indo-Europees in. Met telkens voldoende informatie om meer dan op weg te zijn, een geannoteerde literatuurlijst, een lijst van termen zeker te onthouden en oefeningen en mogelijke examenvragen.
Ik ben er redelijk gerust in dat als ik dit als handboek had gelezen en er een paar maand over gedaan had in plaats van een paar dagen, ik ernstig veel zou geweten en onthouden hebben over de materie.
Ter illustratie: oefening één van hoofdstuk één:
Memorize the names of all the branches of the IE family, and the names and filiations of the extinct languages in figure 1.1
Een oefening in het midden, over Latijn:
Based on §13.13 and your knowledge of PIE and Latin sound changes, into which of the four conjugations would the following PIE athematic verbs have fallen?
*bleh1-ti 'weeps'
*bheh2-ti 'speaks'
*neh1-ti 'sew'
...en de laatste oefening van het laatste hoofstuk:
Imagine that you are the proud discoverer of a hitherto unknown ancient IE language belonging to a hitherto unknown branch of the family. Your task is to report your discovery to the scholarly world. Describe your language, including at least the following information:
The date of the texts) you have found and the place of discovery;
The outcomes of all the PIE sounds — consonants, vowels, and diphthongs – in your language. Include at least two sound changes that are conditioned, ie., that happened only in particular phonetic environments (some of the conditioned sound changes that weve talked about are rhotacism in Latin, umlaut in Germanic, Verners Law, and palatalization. Be sure to specify what the phonetic environments were (beginning of a word, between vowels, before a front vowel, wordfinally, etc. etc.);
The outcomes of these PIE forms: *ph2tḗr 'father', *mātēr 'mother', *bhrātēr ‘brother, *su̯esór 'sister', *pods, *ped 'foot', *mūs- 'mouse', *kwel- 'to turn', *h3erbh- 'transfer' to another sphere of ownership', *k̂léu̯os fame, *u̯lkwos 'wolf', *̑gheimōn 'winter', *sneigwh 'snow'
A brief description of the nominal system, including: what cases are preserved; what numbers; what genders; the general fate of athematic and thematic nouns;
A brief description of the verbal system, including: what tenses are preserved; what numbers; the general fate of athematic and thematic verbs, of the aorist, and of the perfect;
The paradigm in the singular and 3rd plural of the descendant of *h1es- 'be' in the present tense, *bher- 'carries' in the present tense, and *u̯oide 'knows';
A sample text in your language of a dozen words, including at least half that have an IE etymology and are different from the ones you give in (3) above;
Some brief remarks about the culture, mythology, society, etc. of the people that spoke your language.
Serieus. Als ik gelijk vijfentwintig jaar jonger was, ik ging dit meteen studeren.
De tweede helft van het boek, waar de takken van het Indo-Europees apart besproken worden (niet alleen de vroegste vormen maar ook meer recente, trouwens), is trouwens hoofdstuk per hoofdstuk te lezen, en hoofdstuk per hoofdstuk machtig interessant. Met telkens geschiedenis en uitleg over de taal(familie), hoe ze geëvolueerd is uit het Proto-Indo-Europees (in fonologie, morfologie en syntax), met een overzicht van de verschillende talen in de familie (geschiedenis, grammatica, zwaar geannoteerde voorbeelden), en literatuurlijst.
Zeer zeer wijs. En een fijn boek om in huis te hebben qua naslagwerk.
May 12, 2013
Brilliantly written; grounded solidly in current and credible theories regarding Proto-Indo-European; and incredibly useful, especially the chapters on each branch of the Indo-European language family.
November 16, 2025
i'm tired boss
June 19, 2020
This is the solid single-volume introduction to Indo-European studies I've been looking for. Mr. IV covers all the ground that you'd expect him to cover, precisely, concisely, and as uncontroversially as possible,† and including ground that other introductions really ought to have covered but mostly don't, like syntax and accent.
Though this means Indo-European Language and Culture has the most complete and useful reconstruction of PIE I've seen in a textbook written for its target audience by some distance, the thing that really sets it apart is its treatment of PIE's development in all of its daughter families, which takes up the last two thirds of the book. These chapters are necessarily cursory and some of the associated exercises are probably a bit optimistic unless you already have a prior interest in the specific language family they're about (especially since there's no answer key; the exercises for the earlier sections are all doable and useful), but they're immensely helpful in driving home the point that historical linguistics isn't just an idle intellectual exercise but actually has real explanatory and predictive power, as well as giving you a feel for what all of these languages look like. A lot of what he says about Dutch is nonsense.
Each chapter also has an associated Further Reading bibliography that's significant enough to be helpful but not so long as to be obviously bullshit, and it's gratifying that 1. I've already read many of the more recent entries, and 2. Fortson and I agree on which of them are particularly—as he diplomatically puts it—"idiosyncratic".
This will be the book I recommend to people looking to get into Indo-European historical linguistics going forward. It's not the only book you'll ever need to read, but it's an exceptionally good start.
--------
† Some controversy is unavoidable, but an introductory textbook has a duty to stay as close to consensus as possible regardless of the author's personal opinions. Where Mallory and Adams reconstruct *h₄ and Beekes and De Vaan come with all the Leiden School baggage in addition to everything else, the most out-there thing Fortson does is reconstruct *a and only two genders. And, notably, when there's significant variety of opinion he'll tell you.
Though this means Indo-European Language and Culture has the most complete and useful reconstruction of PIE I've seen in a textbook written for its target audience by some distance, the thing that really sets it apart is its treatment of PIE's development in all of its daughter families, which takes up the last two thirds of the book. These chapters are necessarily cursory and some of the associated exercises are probably a bit optimistic unless you already have a prior interest in the specific language family they're about (especially since there's no answer key; the exercises for the earlier sections are all doable and useful), but they're immensely helpful in driving home the point that historical linguistics isn't just an idle intellectual exercise but actually has real explanatory and predictive power, as well as giving you a feel for what all of these languages look like. A lot of what he says about Dutch is nonsense.
Each chapter also has an associated Further Reading bibliography that's significant enough to be helpful but not so long as to be obviously bullshit, and it's gratifying that 1. I've already read many of the more recent entries, and 2. Fortson and I agree on which of them are particularly—as he diplomatically puts it—"idiosyncratic".
This will be the book I recommend to people looking to get into Indo-European historical linguistics going forward. It's not the only book you'll ever need to read, but it's an exceptionally good start.
--------
† Some controversy is unavoidable, but an introductory textbook has a duty to stay as close to consensus as possible regardless of the author's personal opinions. Where Mallory and Adams reconstruct *h₄ and Beekes and De Vaan come with all the Leiden School baggage in addition to everything else, the most out-there thing Fortson does is reconstruct *a and only two genders. And, notably, when there's significant variety of opinion he'll tell you.
December 28, 2025
Wonderful! Learned a lot of great information! It covers a wide range of areas, and really goes into the details 🌸
Personal notes and summary:
(Had to delete the summary of chapter 1, 9, 10, 11, 14, some of chapter 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 because my review is too long 😭)
Chapter 2 - Proto-Indo-European culture and archeology
- We can reconstruct a proto-culture from the reconstructed language from the vocabulary they had.
- Ancient (cosmogonic) myths, their reconstruction and connections to one another … (Yama and Manu).
- Fame was important for the kings and for that they had poets.
- Oral formulaic poetry - much formulaic language.
- PIE had two poetic forms: 1) verse lines, fixed number of (heavy and light) syllables, quantitative rhythm. 2) Strophic style, shorter strophes whose structure is determined by grammatical and phonetic parallelism, alliterations, repetitions, no syllable count. It was once misleadingly called “rhythmic prose”.
- Syllabic r counts as a vowel.
- Behaghel’s law.
- Debate about PIE having words for wheel, axle and other tools - because Anatolian (which was one of the first to split from PIE) did not have words for that.
- Reconstruction of words for agricultural terms..
- Terms for other concepts that can be reconstructed: doors, cooking terms, mead, textile and cloth production.
- To locate the homeland of PIE, they tried to reconstruct words for the surroundings, flora and fauna.
- The reconstructed animal names, are just regular European animals, so do not limit us to a narrow geographical area.
- Together with the words for flora (tree species etc.), it is suggested that they lived in a temperate rather than a tropical or subtropical region.
- 3500-3400 BC is the earliest date of possible brake off from common PIE (and making of wheeled vehicles).
- Yamna and Botai cultures - archaeological evidence for horse riding, from wear of horse teeth 3700 BC.
Chapter 3 - Proto-Indo-European phonology
- PIE had many stop consonants (plosives). They’re made by blocking the air and then releasing it.
- Reflex - descendant from a PIE sound
- Mutatis mutandis - when some descendant sounds aren’t the same (like when it was -p in Latin and Greek, but -f in English).
- If many PIE sounds have different descendant sounds, we have to find a common ancestor, that can develop into all the possible outcomes.
- “Centum” and “satem” languages.
- Glottalic theory.
- PIE had 6 resonants (consonants with little obstruction of air flow) - liquids (= “r and *l), nasals (= *m and *n), glides/semivowels (= *i̯ (=y/j) and *u̯ (=w)).
- NB!! When a resonant stood between two non-syllabic consonants (like “crc”) or between a consonant and a word boundary (like -cr or rc), it became syllabic and functioned as a vowel. (Represented with a circle underneath).
- Prop vowels were inserted before many syllabic resonants to break up difficult consonant clusters.
- NB!! Syllabic nasals could lose their nasality and became plain vowels, like in Greek and Indo-Iranian, where *m̥ and *n̥ became -a).
- Laryngeal - class of sounds with unknown phonetic values, but most likely fricatives produced in the back of the mouth and throat. (Discovered by Ferdinand de Saussure). They are represented as *h_1 *h_2 *h_3.
- Prop vowels next to laryngeals could make then vocalised (=syllabic laryngeals). They turned into vowels, most often -a.
- In Greek the vocalised laryngeals *h_1 *h_2 *h_3 turned into -e -a -o.
- Laryngeals at the beginning of a word with a following consonant also became vocalised.
- Laryngeal colouring.
- Non syllabic laryngeals were lost when adjacent to a vowel. Sometimes this caused compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel.
Chapter 4 - Proto-Indo-European morphology: introduction
- -e was the fundamental vowel of most PIE roots.
- Sometimes the -e could be replaced with other vowels (like because of word tenses).
- Ablaut - These changes of root vowels make up the system of vocalic alternations. (Like English “sing, sang, sung, song” is ablaut).
- NB!! The different variations of a root are called grades, and are named according to the vowel that appears.
- The citation form of a root (e) is e-grade/full-grade. The others are o-grade, lengthened e-grade, lengthened o-grade, and when no ablaut occurs it’s zero-grade.
- Derivation - forming a word from a root or another word.
- Inflection - creating different grammatical forms of a word.
- Thematic - words that had an ablauting short vowel -e- or -o- before inflectional endings.
- Athematic - words inflecting without such vowel.
Chapter 5 - The verb
- Tense: present, imperfect, aorist and perfect and maybe pluperfect though debatable, and some believe PIE had a future.
- Probably no conjugational classes.
- Diathesis/voice: indicates the role of the subject in action. Usually active means that the subject is doing the action and middle means that the subject isn’t ‘internal’ to the action. In PIE this was difficult to distinguish. The middle verbs could at the same time express passive voice, which indicated that the subject is being acted upon.
- Latin deponent verbs historically come from PIE middle verbs.
- Mood (Dansk: modalitet): expresses the speaker’s attitude towards the action. Factual, wish, true/false, reporting the action second hand, contrafactual condition.
- PIE had 4 moods - indicative, imperative, subjunctive, optative.
- Aspect: wether the action is done once or repeatedly. If it’s completed, punctual or ongoing.
- Imperfective - past ongoing.
- Perfective - like aorist indicating punctual or completed action in the perfective.
- Personal endings: Three persons in three numbers (sg., dual, pl..). And in active and middle.
- The present stem: was used in PIE to form one primary tense, present, and one secondary, imperfect. They could inflict in active and middle diathesis.
- Injunctives - Augment-less past tense forms, occur especially in Homer.
- Root-, sigmatic-, thematic-, and reduplicated aorist.
- The perfect stem: formed by reduplication, doubling the root consonant and (mostly) inserting -e.
- Moods: imperative (they had both the plural and future), subjunctive (formed by a thematic vowel.
- The subjunctive in PIE was probably a future tense, and dit not express modal meanings like in the daughter languages. The subjunctives of the daughter languages stem from the optative. So the original subjunctive was different.
- But in Greek, indo-Iranian and partly in Celtic, the subjunctive is a continuation of the PIE one.
- Optative - was formed by adding the ablaut suffix *-i̯eh_1 /-ih_1 to the stem.
- Infinitives - verbal nouns. Usually frozen case forms (acc., dat., loc..) of nouns derived from verbal roots.
- Participles - verbal adjectives.
Chapter 6 - The noun
- Evidence exists for 8 cases I PIE: nom., acc., voc., gen. (possessive), abl. (source or place from which), dat. (indirect object, possession, beneficiary of action), instrumental (means, accompaniment, agent), locative (place where). There may also have been a ninth case, directive/allative (place to which).
- Besides the singular/dual/plural numbers there was also a “collective” (= collection of entities treated as a unit).
- Animate nouns - masculine and feminine.
- Inanimate nouns - neuters.
- In athematic nouns - Strong and weak cases typically differ on where the accent is and which morpheme is in the full grade.
- Strong cases - nom sg, dl, pl / voc sg, dl, pl / acc sg, dl.
- Weak cases - typically accent and full grade shift rightward.
- Acrostatic nouns - root is accented, ablaut distinction between strong and weak cases (o in strong and e in weak).
- Proterokinetic - root is full grade, accented in strong cases, and both accent and full grade shift to suffix in weak cases.
- Hysterokinetic - suffix accented in strong cases, the ending in the weak.
- Amphikinetic (/holokibetic) - root accented in strong cases, ending in weak. The suffix is often lengthened o grade.
- Internal derivation - these noun types could also be derived from each other(?).
- Thematic nouns - presence of ablaut -e/o- between root and case ending.
- Adjectives had the same declension as nouns. They could be made into a noun by substantivization, but this could involve morphological changes.
- Reconstructed PIE adjective suffix *-i̯o and *-ii̯o.
- PIE comparative (adjectival) suffix 1) *-i̯os- / *-is-.
- PIE comparative (adjectival) suffix 2) *-tero- (but not originally comparative, originally to contrast a member of a pair).
- PIE superlative - expressed not necessarily by suffix, because it could be expressed by a positive adj. and a genitive pl. noun. (E.g. “Divine of goddesses = most divine goddess”).
- But two superlative suffixes are still reconstructable *-m̥mo- and *-isto-.
- Endocentric nouns - compound nouns that sums up what it is, like a summary of itself (e.g. “blackbird”).
- Bahuvrihi / Exocentric nouns - compound nouns that refer to something outside of themselves.
- Caland’s law.
Chapter 7 - Pronouns and other parts of speech
- Suppletion stems in personal pronouns.
- Indefinite and interrogative pronouns - both came from PIE *k^wo-.
- Reflexive pronouns - PIE *su̯e-.
- Relative pronouns - PIE *(H)i̯o-.
- Demonstrative pronouns - PIE *so-, *to-, *ei-.
- Numerals - technically adjectives or quantifiers.
- Adverbs - PIE had case forms of nouns and adjectives in adverbial function, and not suffixes.
- Privative prefix - negation, *ne- is reconstructed.
- NB!! Greek negation ου/ουκ etymology. This came from a pre-Greek phrase “*ne oiu k^wid” meaning “not in your life”. *ne is historically the real negator and *oiu (PIE *h_2oiu) was adverbial and meant “life/age” and worked as an emphasis, and the indefinite pronoun. Ultimately *ne was dropped, and *oiu k^wid became *oiukid (boukolos rule) then by regular sound change ουκι, ουκ and ου.
- Conjunctions - unstable and easily created from other words.
- NB!! (Cool alert) originally Latin -que and Greek τε, were postpositive particles in PIE placed at the end of words that were being conjoined or disjoined *k^we ‘and’.
- Interjection - only one reconstructed PIE interjection *u̯ai —> Latin uae, English woe, Gothic wai (My comment: so this must also be the German verb “weh”!).
Chapter 8 - Proto-Indo-European syntax
- Diachronic syntax - the change of syntax rules over time.
- Generative grammar and generative syntax theory - says that the production of sentences is not done simply by stringing words together, rather that sentences are organised into units called “constituents” that have a particular structure and way of combination.
- Pre- and postpositions were most likely independent adverbs in PIE.
- NB!! Preverbs - adverbs that are used to modify the content of a verb - and later they became prefixes attached to the verb —> the separable prefixes in German and Dutch are either a direct continuation of the PIE situation or at least comparable to it (e.g. “auf-tragen —> er trägt auf”).
- Tmesis - The separation where the two usually would only form a singe word.
- Usually the verb has to align with the subject in number and person, but in Greek, Anatolian and old Avestan, in neuter plural subjects, the verb is singular - likely due to the ancient status of the neuter plural as a collective!
- Fronting - typically words are moved leftward in a sentence.
- Topicalisation - fronting of a syntactic element to make emphasis.
- Clitics - unstressed words that cannot occur alone and must stand next to a stressed host word.
- Wackernagel’s law - clitics usually appear second in their clause after the first stressed element.
- Three types of postpositive clitics - word-level clitics, sentence-connective clitics, sentential clitics.
Chapter 12 - Greek
- The earliest preserved Greek is written in Mycenaean. The were on clay tablets and ceramics. The oldest are about 1400 bc.
- Linear B - Mycenaean script. It was developed from the earlier Linear A script. Linear A was the language of the Minoan civilisation, but it remains undeciphered.
- Greek dark ages - 1100 - 800 BC, the period between the end of Mycenaean until the first appearance of alphabetic Greek script.
- Greece had illiteracy and stagnation here.
- According to this book, Homer was not a distinct person, but the Iliad and odyssey were made by generations of poets (rhapsodes).
- Iliad and odyssey have some phrases and poetic formulae from PIE!
- Epic language also in Homeric hymns.
- The Greek alphabet is an adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet (800 bc). But it only had consonant letters at first, so the Greeks invented the vowels.
- Digamma (F) is not part of the alphabet since it was lost even earlier from the standard dialect Attic-Ionic. But in other dialects digamma still occurs.
- Psilosis phenomenon - *s was preserved word finally and next to stop consonants. Elsewhere it became *h. This *h started disappearing between vowels.
- Liquids and nasals are preserved in Greek but final *m became -n.
- Syllabic nasals lost their nasality and became -a.
- Syllabic liquids developed an extra (epenthetic) vowel -a, either before or after it. Sometimes -o.
- In Homer there is also evidence for syllabic r̥ because of metrics.
- The glide *u̯ was lost in standard Attic-Ionic, but in many other dialects preserved as digamma.
- Greek preserves PIE vowels and diphthongs more that other IE languages. Therefore ablaut is very visible.
- Greek had a pitch accent. Modern Greek has a stress accent now.
Chapter 13 - Italic
- The italic people’s were not indigenous to Italy, but came from the north about 1000 BC.
- 800 BC Greek colonists from Euboea came to Pithekoussai (Ischia) Cumae, and Sicily, and brought the Greek alphabet with them.
- Then the Greek alphabet spread in Italy.
- The Greeks came into contact with Etruscans (northwest Italy), and the Etruscans picked up the Greek alphabet too.
- The Etruscan culture disappeared about 100 BC, because the romans gained power.
- The Etruscan language was not IE.
- Some claim the Etruscans came from Asia Minor and some that they were indigenous Italian pre-IE people.
- Herodotus claimed they came from Anatolia.
- Genetic studies and more today support that they were from Asia Minor.
- But no archaeological evidence of migration..
- 700 BC came the first inscriptions in Latin, and then the new alphabet spread through Italy.
- Italic is a “centum” PIE branch —> palatial stops and plain velars fall together as plain velars.
- Mostly resonants and sibilants preserved, but rhotacism occurred.
- Rhotacism - s —> z —> r. Especially in consonant clusters s became unstable.
- Laryngeals were lost in the non-vocalised form, but preserved as -a. (E.g. datus “given” *dh_3-to-).
- The rise of Latin conjugational system was likely due to sound change.
- Latin ā stem came from - contraction of *-ā-i̯e-.
- Latin ē stem came from - contraction of causative suffix *-ei̯e-.
- Latin e stem came from - old thematic presents, and athematic ones that became thematised.
- Latin ī stem came from - consonant clusters, log vowel/diphthong, two syllables.
- Italic tense system - imperfective and perfective. 1) Imperfective present and imperfect. + ordinary future. 2) perfect and pluperfect. + future perfect. Each of all tenses could have a subjunctive, besides the futures.
- All PIE nominal stems are preserved in italic.
- Archaic Latin - until c. 250 BC.
- Livius Andronicus was credited as being the first to set Latin to Greek meters (born 284 BC).
- Comic playwright Plautus (c. 254 - 18 BC). Followed by Terence (c. 195 - 159 BC).
- Period of classical Latin is divided into golden and silver ages.
- Late Latin - after 180 AD.
- Sextus Pompeius Festus - made a dictionary of Archaic Latin words.
- Vulgar Latin - the colloquial dialects that later would become different Romance languages.
- Latin is differentiated from Faliscan by the PIE word initial voiced aspirate outcomes. They become f word initially and a voiced stop word internally.
- Loss of word final d after long vowels.
Chapter 15 - Germanic
- The speakers of Common Germanic lived around first half of first millennium BC around southern Scandinavia, north and Baltic Sea, from Netherlands to Poland.
- East-, north-, and west Germanic languages.
- Letter thorn Þ as in “thin”. Voiceless fricative.
- Letter edh ð as in “this”. Voiced fricative.
- “Centum” branch of PIE.
- Grimm’s law - 1) PIE voiceless stops turned to voiceless fricatives, 2) voiced stops into voiceless stops, 3) voiced aspirates to plain voiced stops.
- Pitch accent went to word initial stress accent.
- Germanic had strong and weak adjectives - in the strong declension the adjectives had the same endings as the demonstrative pronouns. In the weak they get a suffix that stems from PIE *-on-.
- Verbs: present and perfect stems have remained and some aorist got incorporated into the perfect. The perfect became simple preterite. The PIE optative became Germanic subjunctive. Present ptc. marker *-nt- is kept.
- Germanic had strong and weak verbs - according to how they made their past tense, either preterite or past ptc.
- Strong verbs - Verbs that could form perfects used the perfect as the past tense. Show ablaut and often irregular.
- Weak verbs - Verbs that did not form perfect and developed a new past tense with *-d- (the dental preterite). Typically do not ablaut and are the regular verbs. Denominatives and causatives.
- The origin of the dental preterite is maybe from the verb “do”.
- Verner’s law.
- Preterito-presents - In English they survive as modal verbs.
- Present ptc. marker -nt- develops to -nd-.
- V2 (verb second) phenomenon.
- The homeland of the Goths was Scandinavia but then they migrated.
- The Goths who migrated to the Black Sea are called Ostrogoths.
- The Goths who settled in Romania are called West Goths / Visigoths. They got attacked by Huns and migrated to southern Gaul and Spain.
- Most of our knowledge about Gothic stems from the translation of the bible by Wulfila in c. 311.
- Verschärfung - Hardening of glides.
- In old high German, when a vowel preceded the glide i/j it caused fronting of f the vowels, which became the i-umlauts ä, ö, ü.
- In 4-5-600 AD tribes from Denmark and north Germany began migrating to the England.
- Breaking - The new vowel æ sometimes underwent diphthongisation with other vowels. In English the pronunciation reverted to single vowels, but spellings remained like “learn” and “earth”.
- Plurals (like “oxen”) ending in -en are remnants of old -n stems.
- Middle English c. 1000 - 1500 AD.
- Modern English c. 1500 AD until now.
- Great vowel shift: long high vowels [i:] [u:] became diphthongs [aj] [aw]. Mid long vowels [o:] [e:] were raised to [i:] [u:]. The low vowel was fronted and raised to [e:]. Even though the pronunciation was changed l, the spelling is still late Middle English.
- Zweite Lautverschiebung - “The second sound shift” - consonant shift in High German. *p *t *k were affricated to pf ts kx in initial position and became fricatives f s x everywhere else.
- Yiddish - During the Roman Empire some Jews settled in German and brought Hebrew with them. The languages got mixed, so 3/4 of the vocabulary is German and it’s written with Hebrew script. The first documents date from 1200 AD.
- North Germanic is Old Norse, which became the Scandinavian languages.
Personal notes and summary:
(Had to delete the summary of chapter 1, 9, 10, 11, 14, some of chapter 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 because my review is too long 😭)
Chapter 2 - Proto-Indo-European culture and archeology
- We can reconstruct a proto-culture from the reconstructed language from the vocabulary they had.
- Ancient (cosmogonic) myths, their reconstruction and connections to one another … (Yama and Manu).
- Fame was important for the kings and for that they had poets.
- Oral formulaic poetry - much formulaic language.
- PIE had two poetic forms: 1) verse lines, fixed number of (heavy and light) syllables, quantitative rhythm. 2) Strophic style, shorter strophes whose structure is determined by grammatical and phonetic parallelism, alliterations, repetitions, no syllable count. It was once misleadingly called “rhythmic prose”.
- Syllabic r counts as a vowel.
- Behaghel’s law.
- Debate about PIE having words for wheel, axle and other tools - because Anatolian (which was one of the first to split from PIE) did not have words for that.
- Reconstruction of words for agricultural terms..
- Terms for other concepts that can be reconstructed: doors, cooking terms, mead, textile and cloth production.
- To locate the homeland of PIE, they tried to reconstruct words for the surroundings, flora and fauna.
- The reconstructed animal names, are just regular European animals, so do not limit us to a narrow geographical area.
- Together with the words for flora (tree species etc.), it is suggested that they lived in a temperate rather than a tropical or subtropical region.
- 3500-3400 BC is the earliest date of possible brake off from common PIE (and making of wheeled vehicles).
- Yamna and Botai cultures - archaeological evidence for horse riding, from wear of horse teeth 3700 BC.
Chapter 3 - Proto-Indo-European phonology
- PIE had many stop consonants (plosives). They’re made by blocking the air and then releasing it.
- Reflex - descendant from a PIE sound
- Mutatis mutandis - when some descendant sounds aren’t the same (like when it was -p in Latin and Greek, but -f in English).
- If many PIE sounds have different descendant sounds, we have to find a common ancestor, that can develop into all the possible outcomes.
- “Centum” and “satem” languages.
- Glottalic theory.
- PIE had 6 resonants (consonants with little obstruction of air flow) - liquids (= “r and *l), nasals (= *m and *n), glides/semivowels (= *i̯ (=y/j) and *u̯ (=w)).
- NB!! When a resonant stood between two non-syllabic consonants (like “crc”) or between a consonant and a word boundary (like -cr or rc), it became syllabic and functioned as a vowel. (Represented with a circle underneath).
- Prop vowels were inserted before many syllabic resonants to break up difficult consonant clusters.
- NB!! Syllabic nasals could lose their nasality and became plain vowels, like in Greek and Indo-Iranian, where *m̥ and *n̥ became -a).
- Laryngeal - class of sounds with unknown phonetic values, but most likely fricatives produced in the back of the mouth and throat. (Discovered by Ferdinand de Saussure). They are represented as *h_1 *h_2 *h_3.
- Prop vowels next to laryngeals could make then vocalised (=syllabic laryngeals). They turned into vowels, most often -a.
- In Greek the vocalised laryngeals *h_1 *h_2 *h_3 turned into -e -a -o.
- Laryngeals at the beginning of a word with a following consonant also became vocalised.
- Laryngeal colouring.
- Non syllabic laryngeals were lost when adjacent to a vowel. Sometimes this caused compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel.
Chapter 4 - Proto-Indo-European morphology: introduction
- -e was the fundamental vowel of most PIE roots.
- Sometimes the -e could be replaced with other vowels (like because of word tenses).
- Ablaut - These changes of root vowels make up the system of vocalic alternations. (Like English “sing, sang, sung, song” is ablaut).
- NB!! The different variations of a root are called grades, and are named according to the vowel that appears.
- The citation form of a root (e) is e-grade/full-grade. The others are o-grade, lengthened e-grade, lengthened o-grade, and when no ablaut occurs it’s zero-grade.
- Derivation - forming a word from a root or another word.
- Inflection - creating different grammatical forms of a word.
- Thematic - words that had an ablauting short vowel -e- or -o- before inflectional endings.
- Athematic - words inflecting without such vowel.
Chapter 5 - The verb
- Tense: present, imperfect, aorist and perfect and maybe pluperfect though debatable, and some believe PIE had a future.
- Probably no conjugational classes.
- Diathesis/voice: indicates the role of the subject in action. Usually active means that the subject is doing the action and middle means that the subject isn’t ‘internal’ to the action. In PIE this was difficult to distinguish. The middle verbs could at the same time express passive voice, which indicated that the subject is being acted upon.
- Latin deponent verbs historically come from PIE middle verbs.
- Mood (Dansk: modalitet): expresses the speaker’s attitude towards the action. Factual, wish, true/false, reporting the action second hand, contrafactual condition.
- PIE had 4 moods - indicative, imperative, subjunctive, optative.
- Aspect: wether the action is done once or repeatedly. If it’s completed, punctual or ongoing.
- Imperfective - past ongoing.
- Perfective - like aorist indicating punctual or completed action in the perfective.
- Personal endings: Three persons in three numbers (sg., dual, pl..). And in active and middle.
- The present stem: was used in PIE to form one primary tense, present, and one secondary, imperfect. They could inflict in active and middle diathesis.
- Injunctives - Augment-less past tense forms, occur especially in Homer.
- Root-, sigmatic-, thematic-, and reduplicated aorist.
- The perfect stem: formed by reduplication, doubling the root consonant and (mostly) inserting -e.
- Moods: imperative (they had both the plural and future), subjunctive (formed by a thematic vowel.
- The subjunctive in PIE was probably a future tense, and dit not express modal meanings like in the daughter languages. The subjunctives of the daughter languages stem from the optative. So the original subjunctive was different.
- But in Greek, indo-Iranian and partly in Celtic, the subjunctive is a continuation of the PIE one.
- Optative - was formed by adding the ablaut suffix *-i̯eh_1 /-ih_1 to the stem.
- Infinitives - verbal nouns. Usually frozen case forms (acc., dat., loc..) of nouns derived from verbal roots.
- Participles - verbal adjectives.
Chapter 6 - The noun
- Evidence exists for 8 cases I PIE: nom., acc., voc., gen. (possessive), abl. (source or place from which), dat. (indirect object, possession, beneficiary of action), instrumental (means, accompaniment, agent), locative (place where). There may also have been a ninth case, directive/allative (place to which).
- Besides the singular/dual/plural numbers there was also a “collective” (= collection of entities treated as a unit).
- Animate nouns - masculine and feminine.
- Inanimate nouns - neuters.
- In athematic nouns - Strong and weak cases typically differ on where the accent is and which morpheme is in the full grade.
- Strong cases - nom sg, dl, pl / voc sg, dl, pl / acc sg, dl.
- Weak cases - typically accent and full grade shift rightward.
- Acrostatic nouns - root is accented, ablaut distinction between strong and weak cases (o in strong and e in weak).
- Proterokinetic - root is full grade, accented in strong cases, and both accent and full grade shift to suffix in weak cases.
- Hysterokinetic - suffix accented in strong cases, the ending in the weak.
- Amphikinetic (/holokibetic) - root accented in strong cases, ending in weak. The suffix is often lengthened o grade.
- Internal derivation - these noun types could also be derived from each other(?).
- Thematic nouns - presence of ablaut -e/o- between root and case ending.
- Adjectives had the same declension as nouns. They could be made into a noun by substantivization, but this could involve morphological changes.
- Reconstructed PIE adjective suffix *-i̯o and *-ii̯o.
- PIE comparative (adjectival) suffix 1) *-i̯os- / *-is-.
- PIE comparative (adjectival) suffix 2) *-tero- (but not originally comparative, originally to contrast a member of a pair).
- PIE superlative - expressed not necessarily by suffix, because it could be expressed by a positive adj. and a genitive pl. noun. (E.g. “Divine of goddesses = most divine goddess”).
- But two superlative suffixes are still reconstructable *-m̥mo- and *-isto-.
- Endocentric nouns - compound nouns that sums up what it is, like a summary of itself (e.g. “blackbird”).
- Bahuvrihi / Exocentric nouns - compound nouns that refer to something outside of themselves.
- Caland’s law.
Chapter 7 - Pronouns and other parts of speech
- Suppletion stems in personal pronouns.
- Indefinite and interrogative pronouns - both came from PIE *k^wo-.
- Reflexive pronouns - PIE *su̯e-.
- Relative pronouns - PIE *(H)i̯o-.
- Demonstrative pronouns - PIE *so-, *to-, *ei-.
- Numerals - technically adjectives or quantifiers.
- Adverbs - PIE had case forms of nouns and adjectives in adverbial function, and not suffixes.
- Privative prefix - negation, *ne- is reconstructed.
- NB!! Greek negation ου/ουκ etymology. This came from a pre-Greek phrase “*ne oiu k^wid” meaning “not in your life”. *ne is historically the real negator and *oiu (PIE *h_2oiu) was adverbial and meant “life/age” and worked as an emphasis, and the indefinite pronoun. Ultimately *ne was dropped, and *oiu k^wid became *oiukid (boukolos rule) then by regular sound change ουκι, ουκ and ου.
- Conjunctions - unstable and easily created from other words.
- NB!! (Cool alert) originally Latin -que and Greek τε, were postpositive particles in PIE placed at the end of words that were being conjoined or disjoined *k^we ‘and’.
- Interjection - only one reconstructed PIE interjection *u̯ai —> Latin uae, English woe, Gothic wai (My comment: so this must also be the German verb “weh”!).
Chapter 8 - Proto-Indo-European syntax
- Diachronic syntax - the change of syntax rules over time.
- Generative grammar and generative syntax theory - says that the production of sentences is not done simply by stringing words together, rather that sentences are organised into units called “constituents” that have a particular structure and way of combination.
- Pre- and postpositions were most likely independent adverbs in PIE.
- NB!! Preverbs - adverbs that are used to modify the content of a verb - and later they became prefixes attached to the verb —> the separable prefixes in German and Dutch are either a direct continuation of the PIE situation or at least comparable to it (e.g. “auf-tragen —> er trägt auf”).
- Tmesis - The separation where the two usually would only form a singe word.
- Usually the verb has to align with the subject in number and person, but in Greek, Anatolian and old Avestan, in neuter plural subjects, the verb is singular - likely due to the ancient status of the neuter plural as a collective!
- Fronting - typically words are moved leftward in a sentence.
- Topicalisation - fronting of a syntactic element to make emphasis.
- Clitics - unstressed words that cannot occur alone and must stand next to a stressed host word.
- Wackernagel’s law - clitics usually appear second in their clause after the first stressed element.
- Three types of postpositive clitics - word-level clitics, sentence-connective clitics, sentential clitics.
Chapter 12 - Greek
- The earliest preserved Greek is written in Mycenaean. The were on clay tablets and ceramics. The oldest are about 1400 bc.
- Linear B - Mycenaean script. It was developed from the earlier Linear A script. Linear A was the language of the Minoan civilisation, but it remains undeciphered.
- Greek dark ages - 1100 - 800 BC, the period between the end of Mycenaean until the first appearance of alphabetic Greek script.
- Greece had illiteracy and stagnation here.
- According to this book, Homer was not a distinct person, but the Iliad and odyssey were made by generations of poets (rhapsodes).
- Iliad and odyssey have some phrases and poetic formulae from PIE!
- Epic language also in Homeric hymns.
- The Greek alphabet is an adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet (800 bc). But it only had consonant letters at first, so the Greeks invented the vowels.
- Digamma (F) is not part of the alphabet since it was lost even earlier from the standard dialect Attic-Ionic. But in other dialects digamma still occurs.
- Psilosis phenomenon - *s was preserved word finally and next to stop consonants. Elsewhere it became *h. This *h started disappearing between vowels.
- Liquids and nasals are preserved in Greek but final *m became -n.
- Syllabic nasals lost their nasality and became -a.
- Syllabic liquids developed an extra (epenthetic) vowel -a, either before or after it. Sometimes -o.
- In Homer there is also evidence for syllabic r̥ because of metrics.
- The glide *u̯ was lost in standard Attic-Ionic, but in many other dialects preserved as digamma.
- Greek preserves PIE vowels and diphthongs more that other IE languages. Therefore ablaut is very visible.
- Greek had a pitch accent. Modern Greek has a stress accent now.
Chapter 13 - Italic
- The italic people’s were not indigenous to Italy, but came from the north about 1000 BC.
- 800 BC Greek colonists from Euboea came to Pithekoussai (Ischia) Cumae, and Sicily, and brought the Greek alphabet with them.
- Then the Greek alphabet spread in Italy.
- The Greeks came into contact with Etruscans (northwest Italy), and the Etruscans picked up the Greek alphabet too.
- The Etruscan culture disappeared about 100 BC, because the romans gained power.
- The Etruscan language was not IE.
- Some claim the Etruscans came from Asia Minor and some that they were indigenous Italian pre-IE people.
- Herodotus claimed they came from Anatolia.
- Genetic studies and more today support that they were from Asia Minor.
- But no archaeological evidence of migration..
- 700 BC came the first inscriptions in Latin, and then the new alphabet spread through Italy.
- Italic is a “centum” PIE branch —> palatial stops and plain velars fall together as plain velars.
- Mostly resonants and sibilants preserved, but rhotacism occurred.
- Rhotacism - s —> z —> r. Especially in consonant clusters s became unstable.
- Laryngeals were lost in the non-vocalised form, but preserved as -a. (E.g. datus “given” *dh_3-to-).
- The rise of Latin conjugational system was likely due to sound change.
- Latin ā stem came from - contraction of *-ā-i̯e-.
- Latin ē stem came from - contraction of causative suffix *-ei̯e-.
- Latin e stem came from - old thematic presents, and athematic ones that became thematised.
- Latin ī stem came from - consonant clusters, log vowel/diphthong, two syllables.
- Italic tense system - imperfective and perfective. 1) Imperfective present and imperfect. + ordinary future. 2) perfect and pluperfect. + future perfect. Each of all tenses could have a subjunctive, besides the futures.
- All PIE nominal stems are preserved in italic.
- Archaic Latin - until c. 250 BC.
- Livius Andronicus was credited as being the first to set Latin to Greek meters (born 284 BC).
- Comic playwright Plautus (c. 254 - 18 BC). Followed by Terence (c. 195 - 159 BC).
- Period of classical Latin is divided into golden and silver ages.
- Late Latin - after 180 AD.
- Sextus Pompeius Festus - made a dictionary of Archaic Latin words.
- Vulgar Latin - the colloquial dialects that later would become different Romance languages.
- Latin is differentiated from Faliscan by the PIE word initial voiced aspirate outcomes. They become f word initially and a voiced stop word internally.
- Loss of word final d after long vowels.
Chapter 15 - Germanic
- The speakers of Common Germanic lived around first half of first millennium BC around southern Scandinavia, north and Baltic Sea, from Netherlands to Poland.
- East-, north-, and west Germanic languages.
- Letter thorn Þ as in “thin”. Voiceless fricative.
- Letter edh ð as in “this”. Voiced fricative.
- “Centum” branch of PIE.
- Grimm’s law - 1) PIE voiceless stops turned to voiceless fricatives, 2) voiced stops into voiceless stops, 3) voiced aspirates to plain voiced stops.
- Pitch accent went to word initial stress accent.
- Germanic had strong and weak adjectives - in the strong declension the adjectives had the same endings as the demonstrative pronouns. In the weak they get a suffix that stems from PIE *-on-.
- Verbs: present and perfect stems have remained and some aorist got incorporated into the perfect. The perfect became simple preterite. The PIE optative became Germanic subjunctive. Present ptc. marker *-nt- is kept.
- Germanic had strong and weak verbs - according to how they made their past tense, either preterite or past ptc.
- Strong verbs - Verbs that could form perfects used the perfect as the past tense. Show ablaut and often irregular.
- Weak verbs - Verbs that did not form perfect and developed a new past tense with *-d- (the dental preterite). Typically do not ablaut and are the regular verbs. Denominatives and causatives.
- The origin of the dental preterite is maybe from the verb “do”.
- Verner’s law.
- Preterito-presents - In English they survive as modal verbs.
- Present ptc. marker -nt- develops to -nd-.
- V2 (verb second) phenomenon.
- The homeland of the Goths was Scandinavia but then they migrated.
- The Goths who migrated to the Black Sea are called Ostrogoths.
- The Goths who settled in Romania are called West Goths / Visigoths. They got attacked by Huns and migrated to southern Gaul and Spain.
- Most of our knowledge about Gothic stems from the translation of the bible by Wulfila in c. 311.
- Verschärfung - Hardening of glides.
- In old high German, when a vowel preceded the glide i/j it caused fronting of f the vowels, which became the i-umlauts ä, ö, ü.
- In 4-5-600 AD tribes from Denmark and north Germany began migrating to the England.
- Breaking - The new vowel æ sometimes underwent diphthongisation with other vowels. In English the pronunciation reverted to single vowels, but spellings remained like “learn” and “earth”.
- Plurals (like “oxen”) ending in -en are remnants of old -n stems.
- Middle English c. 1000 - 1500 AD.
- Modern English c. 1500 AD until now.
- Great vowel shift: long high vowels [i:] [u:] became diphthongs [aj] [aw]. Mid long vowels [o:] [e:] were raised to [i:] [u:]. The low vowel was fronted and raised to [e:]. Even though the pronunciation was changed l, the spelling is still late Middle English.
- Zweite Lautverschiebung - “The second sound shift” - consonant shift in High German. *p *t *k were affricated to pf ts kx in initial position and became fricatives f s x everywhere else.
- Yiddish - During the Roman Empire some Jews settled in German and brought Hebrew with them. The languages got mixed, so 3/4 of the vocabulary is German and it’s written with Hebrew script. The first documents date from 1200 AD.
- North Germanic is Old Norse, which became the Scandinavian languages.
November 1, 2023
I believe this book one of best in its genre, especially for students.
January 11, 2013
This is a textbook, and while that is fine for Historical Indo-European 101, it is not what I was expecting. Now, if you are in the market for such a book (glossary terms in bold with definitions, etc.) as an intro to IE, this is a solid book. I should have known that by the title, but I found the description and reviews misleading in that regard.
If I had picked this up to use in teaching Indo-European, I might give it 4 or 5 stars!
If I had picked this up to use in teaching Indo-European, I might give it 4 or 5 stars!
July 4, 2011
Please see my review at Celtic Scholar
November 5, 2021
On the back, it says "Students and interested laypersons will find it indispensable". As an interested layperson, I can only confirm this. As a language geek, I have no idea how I've managed to muddle through life so far without this book! As someone who enjoys reading about languages, and particularly language history, it was pure enjoyment.
The book starts with the basics, so as long as you're motivated to learn, you really don't need that much previous knowledge. And it's modular - if you find some topics more interesting than others, it's easy to just skim or skip the bits that don't interest you. (I skipped the exercises.) Highly recommended for serious language geeks!
The book starts with the basics, so as long as you're motivated to learn, you really don't need that much previous knowledge. And it's modular - if you find some topics more interesting than others, it's easy to just skim or skip the bits that don't interest you. (I skipped the exercises.) Highly recommended for serious language geeks!
December 29, 2017
Una gran introducción. Destaca por su gran y detallada bibliografía.
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December 8, 2021I am brain dead.
April 3, 2022
Amazing introduction on all areas of this field.
May 25, 2023
Perfetto per iniziare ad approcciarsi a questa disciplina.
January 29, 2022
I started this book after finding the linguistic chapters in 'The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Indo-European Culture' too terse to follow. I found this book a lot better in this respect and was able to follow the reconstructed Protocol-Indo-European phonology quite easily.
The most interesting part of this reconstruction was the theorization, and then later discovery, of the laryngeals. Sounds which didn't exist in any of the known (at the time) Indo-European languages, but whose existence would allow for regular sound changes to explain the observed cognates in the various daughter languages. Some years after this theory was proposed, records of Hittite were uncovered and it was found that not only was Hittite Indo-European but it had retained the hypothesized laryngeals. This resembles the process of science in many ways and serves as pretty strong Bayesian evidence that the comparative method indeed works as it claims it does.
The rest of the book included: a brief chapter on Proto-Indo-European culture (which while presented more compactly, doesn't compare to the 400+ pages devoted to this topic in the Oxford Introduction), detailed chapters on the grammar and syntax of Porto-Indo-European (which unfortunately went over my head) and a massive section devoted to tracing the exact route down the phylogenetic tree that all the important daughter languages followed.
The most interesting part of this reconstruction was the theorization, and then later discovery, of the laryngeals. Sounds which didn't exist in any of the known (at the time) Indo-European languages, but whose existence would allow for regular sound changes to explain the observed cognates in the various daughter languages. Some years after this theory was proposed, records of Hittite were uncovered and it was found that not only was Hittite Indo-European but it had retained the hypothesized laryngeals. This resembles the process of science in many ways and serves as pretty strong Bayesian evidence that the comparative method indeed works as it claims it does.
The rest of the book included: a brief chapter on Proto-Indo-European culture (which while presented more compactly, doesn't compare to the 400+ pages devoted to this topic in the Oxford Introduction), detailed chapters on the grammar and syntax of Porto-Indo-European (which unfortunately went over my head) and a massive section devoted to tracing the exact route down the phylogenetic tree that all the important daughter languages followed.
February 26, 2007
Ties together grammatical similarities between Persian, Hindi, Latin, Greek, German, Slavic, and English from the vantage point of the Indo-European hypothesis. While good, it is a textbook and is difficult to get past the whole 3-star thing.
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November 10, 2008Didn't finish.
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