A Comparative Germanic Grammar

by Eduard Prokosch

A Comparative Germanic Grammar, Prokosch's acknowledged masterpiece, offers the student a comprehensive introduction to the phonology and morphology of the Germanic languages. It is accessible yet thorough. Eduard Prokosch (1876-1938) was the Sterling Professor of Germanic Languages at Yale University. He had previously taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Texas, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Bryn Mawr College and New York University. Professor Prokosch died in an automobile accident while this book was in galley proof.

Genres: Linguistics, Language, Reference

356 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 2009

Reviews

[Koen Crolla · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was recommended to me as the definitive resource on Proto-Germanic, and while that definitely hasn't been true for multiple decades now, it's easy to see why my recommendor believed that: it covers a tremendous amount of material at great depth in its 300 or so pages. It's also surprising accessible, presupposing only moderate fluency in German and a modal familiarity with Greek and, perhaps, Latin—you don't even need to have heard of Proto-Indo-European. And though it's bad form to be seen to care about this, it's also extremely affordable, which is a rarity in a field where definitive works routinely cost multiple hundreds of dollars despite being publicly funded—prices frequently justified by the existence of academic libraries, which are, of course, not trivially accessible to most people.
Unfortunately, the reason it's so cheap is because it's in the public domain, and therefore very old—it was first published in 1939. The Germanic languages have been under more scrutiny from historical linguists than any others since the days of Jacob Grimm over a century before Prokosch, so I'm sure a lot of the information here is still good, but even as a non-expert who just spends a lot of time looking up etymologies on Wiktionary I recognised occasional reconstructions as obsolete; the biggest problem with the book's age, though, is that it was written before academics really figured out how chapters and paragraphs are supposed to work (which wouldn't fully happen until the US decided to give truckloads of meathead GIs college educations in the wake of WW2), and a lot of it ends up being walls of text that jump from topic to topic with very little sense or structure. For every section that's a delight to browse (the phonology Part in particular has a lot of those), there are five that are a tedious slog.

Still, in its day A Comparative Germanic Grammar must have been genuinely amazing. Prokosch could have benefited greatly from a better understanding of Dutch, but that's true of almost anyone.


(Another caveat I want to mention is that Prokosch usually uses ɦ and ʒ to represent voiceless and voiced velar fricatives, respectively (that is, IPA /x/ and /ɣ/). At least, I think it's ɦ; it may just be the typeface but it actually has a hook like ɧ except reversed, and consequently care must be taken not to confuse it with ƕ, which obviously also features. The ʒ is the one that's a clear error, down to a crappy choice of typeface, which uses it as just the italic version of ɣ. It's not the consequence of some weird old-timey IPA, at least: as far as the Germanic languages are concerned IPA in 1939 was exactly the same as IPA today, and /ʒ/ was a voiced postalveolar fricative and /ɦ/ a voiced glottal fricative then too.)

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this a delight to read cover-to-cover, not just as a reference. The book expends considerable effort bridging Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic, referencing Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit frequently, before moving on to cover the early diversification of the Germanic langugages.

I'd recommend having some familiarity with undergraduate-level linguistics before tackling this book. Proficiency in a Germanic language other than English is also helpful but not essential. (In particular, a few lengthy quotes from German-language sources are presented untranslated.)

This is a reprinting of a decades-old volume. Given Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic are both unattested/reconstructed, one may wish to check assertions about these proto-languages against later publications such as Don Ringe's 2006 book A Linguistic History of English: Volume I: From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. For those seeking a newer survey of early Germanic peoples and languages, Orrin W. Robinson's 1993 book Old English and Its Closest Relatives: A Survey of the Earliest Germanic Languages is a great read.

[Salvatore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Molto Utile!