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Indo-European Language and Society
Indo-European Language and Society (Miami Linguistics Series No. 12) by Emile Benveniste. University of Miami Press.
579 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1973
About the author
Émile Benveniste
63 books24 followersÉmile Benveniste (French: [bɛ̃venist]; 27 March 1902 – 3 October 1976) was a French structural linguist and semiotician. He is best known for his work on Indo-European languages and his critical reformulation of the linguistic paradigm established by Ferdinand de Saussure.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 29, 2018
This book is an attempt to reconstruct the culture and conceptual system of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, based on their vocabulary. Each chapter focuses on a different domain of life (e.g. livestock, kinship, religion, etc.), and infers what life must have been like back in PIE society, based on the vocabulary in that domain. Benveniste doesn't simply list the material facts of the culture (like "oh, they had a word for 'horse', so they must have had horses"); he actually tries to get inside the mindset of the PIE people, and provide insight into the way they thought.
For instance, he observes that the PIEs did not have a single verb for "to marry" that applied to both a man and a woman. In English, you can say "John married Mary", and also "Mary married John", and both are valid. But in PIE, only the man can be the subject of the verb. The PIE word for "to marry" is *wedh-, and it means "to lead (a woman) home". This indicates that the PIEs viewed marriage as something the man does to the woman; the woman has no agency in it. There was no verb for a woman that meant "to get married"; instead, in order to express this, the PIEs would have had to say something like "she entered into a state of wifehood".
This book sits at the intersection of two of my biggest interests: ancient civilizations, and the human conceptual system. The book is dense and complicated, but absolutely worth reading, because every page is a revelation about how the conceptual system could be. I consider it worth reading even if everything in it is false, simply because it presents possibilities for the human conceptual system that I never would have thought of on my own. But it's probably not all false, and it probably does provide a lot of insight into what the PIE world was like. (Alas, we can never test this.)
I haven't read the whole book yet; I've owned it for a couple years now, and am reading it slowly in order to savor it. I don't want to learn everything it has to say all at once! But every time I read it I am in awe.
Hard copies of the book are very expensive (Amazon is listing the cheapest price as $300!) but thankfully, the entire thing is available for free online here: https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/d...
For instance, he observes that the PIEs did not have a single verb for "to marry" that applied to both a man and a woman. In English, you can say "John married Mary", and also "Mary married John", and both are valid. But in PIE, only the man can be the subject of the verb. The PIE word for "to marry" is *wedh-, and it means "to lead (a woman) home". This indicates that the PIEs viewed marriage as something the man does to the woman; the woman has no agency in it. There was no verb for a woman that meant "to get married"; instead, in order to express this, the PIEs would have had to say something like "she entered into a state of wifehood".
This book sits at the intersection of two of my biggest interests: ancient civilizations, and the human conceptual system. The book is dense and complicated, but absolutely worth reading, because every page is a revelation about how the conceptual system could be. I consider it worth reading even if everything in it is false, simply because it presents possibilities for the human conceptual system that I never would have thought of on my own. But it's probably not all false, and it probably does provide a lot of insight into what the PIE world was like. (Alas, we can never test this.)
I haven't read the whole book yet; I've owned it for a couple years now, and am reading it slowly in order to savor it. I don't want to learn everything it has to say all at once! But every time I read it I am in awe.
Hard copies of the book are very expensive (Amazon is listing the cheapest price as $300!) but thankfully, the entire thing is available for free online here: https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/d...
February 11, 2019
masterpiece. no need to say more....
July 24, 2016
Absolutely fascinating. I wish I could find something similar, but modern, in English.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews