Le lingue indoeuropee

by Anna Giacalone Ramat (Editor), Paolo Ramat (Editor)

Nell'attuale diversificazione dei campi di interesse della linguistica si avverte il bisogno di strumenti rapidi, e allo stesso tempo scientificamente attendibili, per un orientamento di base: l'estrema specializzazione, presente anche all'interno dell'indoeuropeistica, ha consigliato di utilizzare specialisti di ciascun settore, coordinati in un progetto unitario, per fornire un manuale moderno che tenga conto delle acquisizioni scientifiche più recenti. Questo volume presenta un quadro completo della famiglia linguistica indoeuropea, e descrive ogni sottogruppo dal punto di vista fonologico, morfologico, sintattico e lessicale. In questo senso si propone come un testo di riferimento essenziale per quanti, studiosi e studenti, sono interessati ai problemi della linguistica storica e del mutamento linguistico e, in generale, ai procedimenti di comparazione e ricostruzione linguistica.

Genres: Linguistics, Language, History

522 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1993

Reviews

[Ilary]

No rating perché non ho capito una parola, se mai decifrerò cosa c’è scritto elaborerò un parere critico

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Routledge's THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES differs from the other installments in its Language Family Descriptions series in dealing exclusively with ancient languages, which are more useful for reconstructing the ancestor of so many of the tongues of Europe and western Asia. It also differs from, for example, the volume on the Uralic languages by not imposing one transcription scheme on all authors, and as a result, the range of opinion here varies between those who have embraced laryngeal theory and those who stick to a postulated schwa.

The work was originally published in Italian in 1993 before appearing in English in 1998. Many of the contributors are obscure Italian linguists, there are only a couple of big names here. Though this is to be a survey of languages, the very first chapter, by one Enrico Campanile, deals with the reconstructed culture of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European and the probable location of their urheimat. I don't trust it much, especially as he thinks there's a reconstructible word for "king" in PIE--and therefore the Indo-Europeans had a monarchy--when many now believe that the word in Indic is a secondary development and the similarity between the Latin and Celtic words can be mere borrowing. The second chapter actually gets into some solid historical linguistics, as it is a presentation of the comparative method and its fruits by Calvert Watkins. Following this are musings by Bernard Comrie on the typological and genetic aspects of Proto-Indo-European. Though he mentions that this or that nearby family has some similarity to IE, I got frustrated by his ultimate failure to say that we should suppose that family X is the closest relative to IE.

There are thirteen chapters on specific languages or branches. Romano Lazzeroni writes on Sanskrit and Nicholas Sims-Williams on the Iranian languages. Werner Winter contributes an article about Tocharian, which is very skimpy but still one of the few places to turn in English literature for neophytes curious about that obscure IE language. Silvia Luraghi gives an overview of the Anatolian languages, Roberto Ajello on Armenian, Henry M. Hoeniswald on Greek, Edoard Vineis on Latin, Domenico Silvestri on the other Italic languages, Patrick Sims-Williams on the Celtic languages, and Paolo Ramat on the Germanic languages. Henning Andersen's article on the Slavonic language is refreshing in its explanation first of the earliest internally reconstructible Proto-Slavonic before considering Common Slavonic. William R. Schmalstieg fails to even mention laryngeals in his contribution on the Baltic languages, hardly a surprise for one who as late as 1985 was proposing the weird alternative theory of monophthongizations. His assurance that the inventory of Proto-Baltic was pretty much the same as that of PIE reminds me of the oft-heard saying that every Indo-Europeanist believes the proto-language was closest to the branch that he has spent the most time in. The last chapter of the book, by Shaban Demiraj concerns the frustratingly late-attested Albanian. Happily, there are plenty of maps throughout.

If you want a quick overview of the Indo-European languages in one source, this book may prove helpful. It certainly has a wider range of opinion than many of the handbooks written by single authors. A downside is the ridiculous price, a result of the publishers providing the book only in library binding and not in accessible paperback like some other installments in this series. Another weak spot of the book is that it is difficult to cover much in so little space, so if you have especial interest in one of the branches, then you may want to get Routledge's volume specifically on that language group, such as THE GERMANIC LANGUAGES, THE CELTIC LANGUAGES, or THE SLAVONIC LANGUAGES.