including Glosář praindoevropštiny and O rekonstrukci praindoevropštiny (see
the review by. Harald Bichlmeier in Kratylos 54, 174f.). Vavroušek has recently ...
Book Review
Bičovský, Jan; Stručná mluvnice praindoevropštiny [A Short Grammar of Proto-IndoEuropean]. Prague: Filozofická Fakulta Univerzity Karlovy, 2012. 8º, 186 S. Brosch. 210 Kč. Since its revival in the 1990s, the Institute for Comparative Linguistics of Charles University has played a steadily increasing role in promoting Indo-European studies in the Czech Republic and in Central Europe as a whole. One important component of this activity has been the publication of a series of introductory works by the recently retired Petr Vavroušek, including Glosář praindoevropštiny and O rekonstrukci praindoevropštiny (see the review by Harald Bichlmeier in Kratylos 54, 174f.). Vavroušek has recently been joined in this enterprise by his former student Jan Bičovský, who now follows up his Vademecum starými indoevropskými jazyky (see Kratylos 57, 195ff.) with a new introduction to Proto-IndoEuropean. In lively and often amusing prose, B provides a synchronic overview of all aspects of the reconstructed grammar of PIE. After a foreword (11-13), list of abbreviations (14-18), and introduction (19-21), successive sections treat phonology (22-48); morphophonology, including ablaut (48-61); nominal morphology (62-93) and composition (94-6); pronouns (97-101) and numerals (102-4); verbal morphology (104-46); and finally particles, syntax, and the lexicon (146-51). The volume closes with a useful list of PIE roots in the modern Czech vocabulary (152-75), directly inspired by the late Calvert Watkins’s famed American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots; suggestions for further reading in linguistic change and reconstruction as well as Indo-European (176-82); and a summary in English (183-4). B assumes familiarity with the basic principles of historical linguistics, which allows him to enter at once into the description of PIE as a real, actually spoken language, arrived at through the methods of comparative reconstruction. In line with this emphasis, he does not always include detailed discussions of the evidence from the individual IE languages for particular categories or paradigms, e.g. in the sections on nominal and verbal morphology. The beginning reader may thus not be aware that some of the paradigms given are idealized and/or properly speaking “pre-PIE”, e.g. those of *nókwt- ~ *nékwt- ‘night’ (76) or *hwés-jōs ‘better’ (82), since
all scholars today agree that significant leveling of root ablaut and accent alternations had taken place by the breakup of the protolanguage. Nevertheless — or perhaps because of this selective coverage — B has succeeded in covering an enormous range of facts in just 130 pages of main text, including all the well-known sound laws of PIE and the older IE languages, accent and ablaut paradigms, and inflectional classes of the noun and verb. Phonological problems such as the laryngeals, thorn clusters, or syllabification are treated in greater (but not overwhelming) detail, while the sections on nominal morphology offer numerous examples of each stem type and discussion of all major PIE suffixes, and the treatment of the verb takes an evenhanded approach to the many points of contention in the scholarly literature. A further strength of B’s presentation is the prominent role given to typological parallels, not only from Czech, English, and other modern IE languages, but also from non-IE languages such as Hungarian. The book adopts the standard model of PIE phonology and morphology shared by most Indo-Europeanists working in Central Europe and North America, featuring inter alia the traditional voiceless, voiced, and voiced aspirate stops, phonemic *a, accent and ablaut paradigms according to the Erlangen school, and the expected case and person-number endings.1 The writing of the laryngeals as *h, *x, *χ will seem unusual for those used to *h1, *h2, *h3, but should cause no problems for comprehension and in any case represents a laudable attempt to approximate their PIE phonetics. B does however present certain idiosyncratic or minority views, which are not always clearly marked as such and may mislead the uninitiated reader. Chief among these is the reconstruction of only two series of dorsal stops for PIE, rather than a three-way contrast of what are traditionally labeled palatal, (plain) velar, and labiovelar stops (24-7; see also Bičovský 2012). Most scholars today would agree that this goes back to a binary contrast in pre-PIE, with plain velars originally a conditioned allophone of the palatals and labiovelars, but enough leveling and other changes must have taken place that all three were surely contrastive in the
1Among
the few exceptions are the demonstrative pronouns Gsg. m. *(t)osjo, f. *tesex, Npl. m. *soi, f. *sexi ~ *texi, Gpl. *tesom (100-1), where most Indo-Europeanists would reconstruct respectively *tosjo, *tesjexs, *toi, *texes, *toisōm (in B’s notation); and imperative 2pl. *péuk-te, 3 *péuk-ntu (119), *punék-te, *punék-ntu (121) to the made-up root *peuk-, where the evidence points rather to ending-accented *puk-té, *puk-éntu and *punk-té, *punkéntu. 2
protolanguage, as e.g. in *k̂red-dheh1- (> Ved. śraddhā́- ‘trust’, Lat. crēdō ‘believe’) vs. *kréwh2s (> Ved. kravíḥ, Gr. κρέας ‘(raw) flesh’) vs. *kwrih2- (> Ved. pres. krīṇā́ti ‘buys’, Gr. aor. πρίατο ‘bought’; cf. Kümmel 2007:312, Melchert 2012:206). One also misses any explicit mention of the h2e-conjugation theory of the PIE verb (Jasanoff 2003), which would be welcome in the discussion of the mediopassive endings (109-11) as well as the perfect (134-8). Finally, there is a noticeable tendency to glottogonic speculation regarding the origins of e.g. syllable constraints (43-4), the case system (69-70), tense and aspect categories of the verb (104-5, 1135), or thematic verbal inflection (122-3), which are certainly important questions in and of themselves, but do not necessarily add to one’s understanding of reconstructible PIE and run the risk of confusing the reader. The book is well produced in attractive, readable typeset and contains relatively few misprints, mostly self-correcting: among the few exceptions are “*o” for “*a” (40, l. 9 from bottom), “předchozí” for “následující” (41, l. 9), “ekvativ” for “elativ” (64, l. 25), “tuk „ty“” for “ammuk „mene“, tuk „tebe“” (99, l. 2). Most errors involve omitted or misplaced macrons and accent marks in cited forms, especially from Greek;2 these may easily be corrected in a new printing. The above criticisms should not detract from B’s remarkable achievement in distilling the essentials of PIE into an accessible, even entertaining text, which may take its place alongside other recently published introductions in German or English. With the appearance of this volume, one may state without exaggeration that Czech-speaking students of Indo-European are now better served by pedagogical materials than any of their counterparts in Eastern or Southern Europe. The stage is set for a new generation of Indo-Europeanists in Prague to carry on the tradition established almost a century ago by Bedřich Hrozný, and one may have confidence that B’s grammar will contribute to that end.
2B’s
decision to transcribe all ει and ου as /ẹ̄/ viz. /ū/ is certainly defensible for (post)classical Attic Greek, but for an Indo-European-oriented work it would be preferable to observe the distinction between true and spurious diphthongs and retain the inherited values /ei/, /ou/ for the former. 3
Faculty of English Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań al. Niepodległości 4 61-874 Poznań
Ronald I. Kim
Poland
References Bičovský, Jan. 2012. Satemization as a conditioned push-chain-shift. In Sukač and Šefčík (eds.) 2012, 29-39. Jasanoff, Jay H. 2003. Hittite and the Indo-European Verb. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kümmel, Martin Joachim. 2007. Konsonantenwandel. Bausteine zu einer Typologie des Lautwandels und ihre Konsequenzen für die vergleichende Rekonstruktion. Wiesbaden: Reichert. Melchert, H. Craig. 2012. Luvo-Lycian dorsal stops revisited. In Sukač and Šefčík (eds.) 2012, 206-18. Sukač, Roman and Ondřej Šefčík, eds. 2012. The Sound of Indo-European 2: Papers on IndoEuropean Phonetics, Phonemics and Mophophonemics. (LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 41.) Munich: LINCOM.
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