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Languages and Cultures: Studies in Honor of Edgar C. Polome
791 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1988
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July 24, 2007
Like most of the entries in Mouton de Gruyter's "Trends in Linguistics" series, this festschrift in honour of Polome is chock-full of papers on (mainly Indo-European) linguistics.
Several were especially interesting to me, a student concentrating on the Indo-European language. Francisco Adrados contributes "On the origins of the Indo-European dative-locative singular endings", a potentially helpful piece undone by its thoroughly opaque prose. "Gothic saihw and sai, with some notes on imperative interjections in Germanic" by Rene Derolez and Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen takes as its basis the translation of Greek "idou" and "ide" in the Gothic bible. Eric Hamp's "The Indo-European terms for 'marriage'" is a bit of cultural reconstruction based on the various terms that have survived in the daughter language, and presents a believable picture of what the Indo-European's matrimony would have entailed. Jay Jasanoff's "Old Irish boi 'was'" tries to find the origin of a form that cannot come from a type *bat like most of the forms of the copula in Irish. "The Horn of Galleus and the subgrouping of the Germanic language" by Herbert Penzl begins with a fascinating account of the methods for reconstructing Proto-Germanic and eventually concludes that Germanic had only two divisions after the proto-language: Gothic, and "Nordic-West Germanic". Finally, William R. Schmalstieg contributes, as always, a paper a little different from mainstream scholarship with his "Comments on some of the Indo-European medio-passive endings", which assume early Proto-Indo-European was an ergative language.
The volume not entirely Indo-European. There are also papers on Swahili (Walter Schicho), Gbeya (William J. Samarin, with the colourful title of "Damned in-laws and other problems") and the languages of the peoples of the USSR (E.G. Tumanjan), and a few other more exotic languages. Most of the papers here are in English, though five are in German and six in French.
Several were especially interesting to me, a student concentrating on the Indo-European language. Francisco Adrados contributes "On the origins of the Indo-European dative-locative singular endings", a potentially helpful piece undone by its thoroughly opaque prose. "Gothic saihw and sai, with some notes on imperative interjections in Germanic" by Rene Derolez and Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen takes as its basis the translation of Greek "idou" and "ide" in the Gothic bible. Eric Hamp's "The Indo-European terms for 'marriage'" is a bit of cultural reconstruction based on the various terms that have survived in the daughter language, and presents a believable picture of what the Indo-European's matrimony would have entailed. Jay Jasanoff's "Old Irish boi 'was'" tries to find the origin of a form that cannot come from a type *bat like most of the forms of the copula in Irish. "The Horn of Galleus and the subgrouping of the Germanic language" by Herbert Penzl begins with a fascinating account of the methods for reconstructing Proto-Germanic and eventually concludes that Germanic had only two divisions after the proto-language: Gothic, and "Nordic-West Germanic". Finally, William R. Schmalstieg contributes, as always, a paper a little different from mainstream scholarship with his "Comments on some of the Indo-European medio-passive endings", which assume early Proto-Indo-European was an ergative language.
The volume not entirely Indo-European. There are also papers on Swahili (Walter Schicho), Gbeya (William J. Samarin, with the colourful title of "Damned in-laws and other problems") and the languages of the peoples of the USSR (E.G. Tumanjan), and a few other more exotic languages. Most of the papers here are in English, though five are in German and six in French.
Displaying 1 of 1 review