The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (Oxford Linguistics) by J.P. Mallory

The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (Oxford Linguistics) Reviews

• 
  Manybooks

  REVIEW OF THE KINDLE EDITION (will be reviewing the content of the text itself when I have actually managed to finish)
  
  Well if truth is to be told, I have in fact thus far only skimmed over the Kindle edition of J.P. Mallory's 2006 The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World as a general and quick prior to intensive reading check (as it is rather a mega-tome of more more than seven-hundred pages and thoroughly perusing The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World will more than likely take me many months to complete and to accomplish).
  
  However, after even my very cursory glance and general skimming of The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World has already revealed a really quite majorly large amount of annoying and frustrating typos in the Kindle edition and indeed often misspellings and the like that do tend to not only rather regularly occur but that also often seem to render the incorrectly penned words rather incomprehensible and sometimes even in need of readers actually having to guess and to make morphological and syntactic assumptions, I do indeed feel that I must categorically claim and state that from judging The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World structurally, from analysing how the transfer of the original hardcover text has been rendered into an e-book format, in The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, this process has indeed and in my opinion absolutely NOT AT ALL been handled sufficiently and in any manner even remotely acceptably.
  
  Therefore I simply cannot and will not consider more than one star for the Kindle edition of The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World and yes indeed, for interested readers to absolutely and ONLY consider the hardcover or paperback editions even though they do in fact cost quite a pretty penny. But really, even the Kindle edition of The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World is rather expensive at over twenty-five dollars and paying that much money should at least be giving potential readers a presented text that is not rife with typos, bad formatting and the like (and certainly, considering that The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World is also an academically dense and intellectually heavy tome, for readers in the Kindle edition to also have to now be worrying about problematic formatting issues and a large amount of misspelled words, this state of affairs is in my opinion pretty well and totally frustrating and infuriating). And yes, I will due to my academic interest in the subject continue ploughing through my Kindle edition of The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World although I am still hoping to find a cheaply priced paperback version online.
• 
  Victor Sonkin

  It's not by J.P. Mallory, it's by J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams. Here's how this book is structured.
  
  After Introduction, follows
  1 Discovery
  1.1 Language relations
  1.2 Indo-European
  The discovery of IE is a fascinating subject, but it's well known, and this book doesn't add much to it. The ensuing discussion of how the linguistic perspectives changed is informative, though
  
  2 The Elements
  2.1 The Indo-European languages
  2.2 Celtic -- 2.13 Tocharian - 2.14 Minor languages
  
  3 Reconstructing Proto-Indo-European
  3.1 The Comparative Method
  3.2 Schleicher's Tale (it's a nice touch to devote a whole subchapter to the history of Schleicher's tale and its various incarnations).
  3.3 Laryngeal Theory (don't remember what it was)
  3.4 Reconstruction and Reality
  
  4 The System
  4.0 The System
  4.1 Phonology
  4.2 The Noun -- 4.9 Derivation
  
  5 Relationships
  5.0 Linguistic Relationships
  5.1 Internal Relationships
  5.2 External Relations
  5.3 Genetic Models
  
  6 A Place In Time
  This is a fascinating chapter: when did the Proto-Indo-Europeans actually live? Did they at all? How sound our judgment can be? As usual, approximations vary widely.
  
  7 Reconstructing the Proto-Indo-Europeans
  7.1 Approaches to the Past
  7.2 How Many Cognats? (the fewer, the more reliable)
  7.3 Reconstructed Meaning
  7.4 Semantic Field
  7.5 Folk Taxonomies
  7.6 Level of Reconstruction
  7.7 Root Homonyms
  7.8 How Long a Text? (we cannot recreate a PIE text longer than two or three words, and even those attempts are extremely tenuous)
  7.9 Vocabulary - What's Missing?
  
  After that, the longest part of the book, which constitutes its bulk, begins. It is essentially what the book is about. It's a thesaurus of PIE language divided into thematic fields and studied at length across the whole IE continuum. Basically it looks like a list of words and cognates with some comments, sometimes very brief, sometimes a bit more flowery. Perfect reading for an autistic teenager, I guess. I kind of liked it.
  
  8 The Physical World
  9 Indo-European Fauna (fascinating: the elk/moose story to compare, the salmon controversy)
  10 Indo-European Flora (and the beech controversy)
  11 Anatomy
  12 Family and Kinship
  13 Hearth and Home
  14 Clothing and Textile
  15 Material Culture
  16 Food and Drink
  17 Proto-Indo-European Society
  18 Space and Time
  19 Number and Quantity
  20 Mind, Emotions, and Sense Perception
  21 Speech and Sound
  22 Activities
  23 Religion
  24 Grammatical Elements
  25 Comparative Mythology
  
  This concludes the section. Phew.
  
  26 Origins: The Never-Ending Story (a brief retelling of the eternal quest for the PIE homeland).
  
  Appendix I Basic sound correspondences between PIE and major IE languages
  Appendix II PIE to English wordlist
  Appendix III English to PIE wordlist (as the authors note, for the Klingon-minded freaks).
  
  References, index, etc.
  
  The authors wrote the book with wry humor, which is excellent to find in an academic book. They don't have much space to exercise it, but when they do, the results are great. One of the best features of the books is its laid-back skepticism towards any megalomaniac 'solutions' and concepts; they know only too well the limitations of any research into a language whose very existence is only surmised.
  
  I have noticed numerous strange examples and outright mistakes in OCS and Russian cognates, and I'm sure other languages do not fare any better. It's not very good - certainly not if you want to use this book as a jumping-board for your own research; but if you want to have a general overview, you can skim over such mistakes; they do not significantly distort the picture. It is an amazing adventure (for bookworms at least) to find correspondences and PIE roots in words from languages as distant as, say, English and Russian; and potentially a sobering (and humbling) exercise for any nationalistic goon (if they only knew how to read). Almost all so-called mat words in Russian (the taboo swear words) are ultimately PIE (in spite of folk etymology which ascribes them to Tartar influence).
  
  So: not perfect; not for everyone; in its niche, a splendid accomplishment.
• 
  Christopher

  When I heard that Oxford University Press would be publishing The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, I was excited. I envisioned an update of Oswald Szemerenyi's old Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics that, because of the specific research interests of authors J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, would not only reflect contemporary developments in IE linguistics, but would seamlessly show what we can reconstruct for the culture of PIE speakers. Well, the book is something like that, but it turns out not to be much of a useful introduction to the field.
  
  The book is over 700 pages long, but the introduction to Proto-Indo-European itself is quite small, less than 100 pages really. It's certainly no substitute for a real handbook like Szemerenyi's, Beekes', Fortson's, or (my favourite) Lehmann's. The branches of Indo-European, its phonology and the basics of its morphology, and the debate over the relationship between the disparate languages that are first attested are set out. The authors nicely use Schleier's tale in its progressive versions to show how reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European have been consistently refined. While the view of Proto-Indo-European is generally the same as in introductions from the 1990s, the authors do reconstruct four laryngeals instead of the usual three, and prefer the transcription *h-subscript-x for an unknown laryngeal instead of *H.
  
  The bulk of the book's content concerns the reconstruction of PIE lexicon, with chapters divided along such themes as "Food and Drink", "Speech and Sound", and "Material Culture". This portion is exciting, especially when the authors link reconstruction to archaeological evidence to make even more detailed ventures about the nature of PIE society. Nonetheless, the material can be tiresome to read straight through; it works best in pieces or in consultation for specific topics.
  
  A final chapter discusses the debate over the IE homeland, where the authors remain very non-committal about the whole deal. There are two appendices. The first sets out basic sound correspondences between PIE and the major IE groups in tabular form. The second a PIE-English and English-PIE wordlist, nearly a hundred pages long. The bibliography and general index together are nearly 200 pages long. So, one can understand that the book contains quite a bit that might seem "fluff".
  
  If you are a student of Indo-European linguistics with previous knowledge gained through one of the great handbooks like Lehmann's Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics, then the reconstruction of the lexicon in this work of Mallory and Adams is sure to offer some entertainment. However, this is the sort of the thing that is best consulted in a university library, and I found the book not worth obtaining for a home collection.
• 
  saïd

  Originally read for university. Not enough discussion of how the PIE reconstruction has taken place, in my opinion.
• 
  André

  Very interesting read and a good introduction to Proto-Indo-European, which concentrates especially on the reconstructable lexicon and what it can probably tell us about how and where the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived. Unfortunately it wasn't quite what I expected or hoped for. The biggest part of the book consists of reconstructed words and the attested words in the daughter languages, and explanations of them, ordered semantically. The book hardly speaks about how these words were reconstructed, so it cannot be taken as a guide for various sound changes, semantic shifts, the possible grammatical structure of Proto-Indo-European, or an introduction to evaluate or create one's own reconstructions. I also felt like the authors did not explain enough their choice of 4 instead of 4 laryngeals. What I liked and found educational, though, was their critical view on theories about the PIE homeland, and the (mostly lexical) arguments they gave that can help us to narrow down the places PIE might have been spoken.
• 
  Koen Crolla

  Messy and inadequate. The first part of the book consists of an abridged version of the usual introduction to Indo-European studies: a list of languages, a frustratingly vague impression of the comparative method, an attempt to situate PIE in time and linguistic space that gives far too much weight to fringe theories even as it dismisses them, and an overview of the authors' view of reconstructed PIE† that feels like a temporary first draft that was typed up in one sitting‡ to get it out of the way so the authors could work on what they consider the meat of the book: the reconstructed vocabulary.
  This vocabulary takes up 320 pages of the 460-page book (not counting appendices, which include over a hundred pages of commentaryless PIE-English and English-PIE glossary), and almost all of that space is wasted in an introductory textbook: because the comparative method was covered so cursorily (and to the exclusion of other methods of reconstruction), readers aren't equipped to judge the quality of the reconstructions or to let those reconstructions improve their own ability to reconstruct, and the vocabulary itself reveals far less about "the Proto-Indo-European world" than the time it is given implies it does, not least because the vast majority of what it attests can hardly be used to distinguish the Proto-Indo-Europeans from any other people.
  The final chapters deal with comparative mythology, which I just find exhausting now, and the location of the PIE homeland, which is shockingly and pleasingly timid for having been co-written by Mallory. (It is good to see them lump population genetics in with Nazi phenotype analysis and craniometry and, particularly, to see them (almost) unequivocally condemn craniometry as a technique altogether; looks like that part of
  The Tarim Mummies probably was down to Mair after all.)
  
  I think it's meaningful to separate out two things: The Oxford Introduction's value as an introduction to Indo-European studies, and the value this kind of overview of the entire reconstructed vocabulary has at all. Such an overview does probably have value, I think (not on its own, but as a basis for comparison to other language groups, perhaps), and Mallory and Adams' effort could be worse than it is. It doesn't add any of that value to an introduction to the field, though, and its length squeezes out content that is much more important to students—like a meaningful guide to arriving at that reconstructed vocabulary in the first place.
  If you're truly new to the field, this book will definitely teach you things, and you'll only need to unlearn some of them at a later point; as an introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European world, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World is kind of a dud.
  A wasted opportunity.
  
  
  --------
  
  † Which is mostly uncontroversial (to the extent that any reconstruction can be uncontroversial): the biggest deviation from consensus is that they reconstruct an *h₄, a second a-colouring laryngeal, on ambiguous Hittite and spurious Albanian evidence.
  
  ‡ This chapter also includes a table of phonemes that mistypes the palatals as plain velars and, due to poor formatting, implies *h₁ is unvoiced, *h₂ is voiced, and *h₃ and *h₄ are voiced aspirates.
• 
  Maya

  The first thing I want to say about this book is if you don't want a detailed discussion of Language as opposed to history then this book is not for you. However, since this was one of the things I was looking to study it was perfect for me.
  
  The book covers the following main ideas:
  
  (1) Concise introductions to the discovery and composition of the Indo-European language family.
  (2) The way the proto-language has been reconstructed.
  (3) Its most basic grammar
  (4) The interrelationships between the different language groups
  (5) The temporal position of the Indo-European languages
  (6) Some of the difficulties in reconstructing a proto-language.
  (7) Semantic field of the Proto-Indo-European lexicon.
  (8) An examination of mythology and possible homelands of the Proto-Indo-Europeans.
  
  For me the most interesting chapters were the last two, as they talked about the mythology and religion and how they can be reconstructed, and the possible homelands of the Proto-Indo Europeans. Its amazing what you can get from the words of a language!
  
  
• 
  Peter Faul

  This book can be divided into two parts. The first concerns linguistic features of Proto-Indo-European: the different language families, the comparative method, phonology, morphology, syntax etc etc. Overall I was very disappointed as I found most of it not very introductory at all, at least to a lay person like myself. I was not really able to follow most of the more technical aspects of the Proto-Indo-European language and would have preferred if it was not covered so quickly. In fact I was so disappointed that I put the book down completely and found another, Indo-European Language and Culture.
  
  After reading most of this new book, I felt ready to return to this one and I am glad I did. The second part (which comprises most of the book in fact) concerns Indo-European culture, which is my primary interest in the first place. It tackles it by comprehensively going through the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European roots in a variety of areas. For example: Indo-European fauna and flora (from which you get a nice picture of the environment they inhabited), family and kinship (from which you can infer much about the social structures and hierarchies present in their culture) and many more (in fact there are 18 chapters of this form).
  
  The chapter on comparative mythology is especially excellent, summarizing the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo European pantheon and related myths. This is not done linguistically (as there are very few roots that can be reconstructed), but instead by applying comparative methods to the mythology of the various known Indo-European successor cultures (Indian, Norse, Greek, Roman among others). One particularly interesting observation is that in Roman culture the Indo-European myths transformed into the Roman 'history'. For instance the creation myth, in which one twin is sacrificed so that the world can be created from his parts, corresponds to the story of Romulus and Remus. (The abduction of the Sabine women corresponds to another myth incidentally).
  
  Overall I enjoyed this book a lot and recommend it to anyone curious about how we can reconstruct a society and culture that left no written records, and who cannot even be precisely pinned down in time or space.
  
  
• 
  Johan

  OK, it's at some level incredibly boring..but also very satisfying and exhaustive on the subject. I was a "put me to sleep after two pages book" I kept reading for months.