Studies in Baltic and Indo-European Linguistics: In Honor of William R. Schmalstieg

by Philip Baldi (Editor), Pietro U. Dini (Editor)

This collection of twenty-nine research papers is dedicated to the eminent Balticist, Slavicist and Indo-Europeanist, William R. Schmalstieg in commemoration of his seventy-fifth birthday. It contains contributions by specialists of mainly Baltic and Indo-European linguistics which are reflective of Schmalstieg's own scholarly interests over the decades of his career, including technical aspects of Baltic and Indo-European phonology, morphology and syntax, etymology, language universals, the history of linguistics and the Baltic text tradition. Contributors include prominent scholars from the United States and Europe, both east and west. All papers are in English, and all linguistic material in less commonly known languages is provided with an English translation, making the contents accessible to a wider audience of readers.

302 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This 2004 collection of papers is a Festscrift compiled for the 75th birthday of William Schmalstieg, an expert on the Slavic and Baltic languages who also made major contributions to Indo-European linguistics. Consequently, there are papers that cover various aspects of Latvian, Lithuanian and Old Prussian as well as papers that deal with more distant IE languages or the family as a whole. However, the Slavic theme had to be left out for reasons of space.

The collection starts with a celebration of Schmalstieg’s life and work, with the editor Philip Baldi contributing a biographical/bibliographical overview and then a list of publications from 1954–2004.

The general IE papers are contributed by Eric Hamp (on the root *peik and a seemingly identical root with a palatal velar instead), Xaverio Ballester (‘to be’ and ‘not to be’ in IE), Allan R. Bomhard (Indo-European *men and *tel), Henry M. Hoenigswald (proclisis in Greek), Winfred Lehmann (derivational morphology of the Indo-European verb), Witold Manczak (irregular sound change due to frequency and the work of Szemerényi), Kenneth Shields Jr. (on the IE origins of the Greek 3rd pl. act. imp. -nton), Pierre Swiggers (Hittite -za and reflexivity marking), and Francisco Villar (the Celtic language of Iberia).

The Baltic papers come from Vytautas Ambrazas (the genitive with neuter participles and verbal nouns in Lithuanian), Grasilda Blažiene (Old Prussian estate names), Pietro U. Dini (Baltic paleocomparison and the pre-modern idea that Prussian derives from Greek), Rainer Eckert (aspects of Bretke's Old Lithuanian Bible), Axel Holvoet (marking of predicate nominals in Baltic), Vyacheslav Ivanov (three tidbits on Old Prussian), Simas Karaliunas (Finnish terve, Slavonic sŭdurovŭ and Lithunian tervetis), Vytautas Maziulis (declension in the Old Prussian Catechism), Guido Michelini (problems in the Lithuanian optative), Algirdas Sabaliauskas (the forgotten Balticist Schmidt-Wartenberg), Lea Sawicki (the neuter passive participle in modern Lithuanian), Wolfgang P. Schmid (the paradigms of Lith. deti ‘set, place’ and dúoti ‘give’, Giedrius Subačius (double orthography in early 20th-century American Lithuanian newspapers), Wojciech Smoczyński (Old Prussian dinkausegisnan), V.N. Toporov (North Russian litva), Peteris Vanags (etymology of Latvian brangs), Stephen Young ("Old Prussian" in Prätorius' Deliciae Prussicae) and Zigmas Zinkevičius (the Wolfenbüttel postilla)

I mainly read this for the general IE papers. Lehmann’s paper is part of his case for Pre-Indo-European as an active language, and he brings in some examples from other language families to do so. Hamp's contribution is a convincing explanation of why we have two different roots that nonetheless seem very much alive.

Of the Baltic papers, Karaliunas brings new data to light on an old Baltic/Slavic loan in Finnic. Nepokupnyj’s article is a tour de force in employing semantic shift for historical reconstruction.