The volume presented here is one of the richest and best-informed introductions to the study of Indo-European linguistics and culture currently available to individuals interested in the field of comparative linguistics. In its over 450 pages, it leaves almost no topic uncovered among the dozens that have been investigated for many decades. Thus, in terms of its range, this is an excellent book. In addition, as a textbook that introduces students to the field of Indo-European, it turns out to be absolutely user-friendly and easy to read, with exercises (but without answer keys) for every chapter. At the end of the book, as well as at the end of every chapter under the heading “For further reading,” there is an essential bibliography. Furthermore, the book contains a glossary of the most frequent or basic grammatical terms, a word index from all the languages described, and a subject index. In the preface, the author lists the basic requirements that a textbook must have, and the reader finds in reading the book that these desiderata are upheld. In this sense, too, the book will surely be a successful tool in courses devoted to Indo-European comparative linguistics, and will be used with great profit by students at all levels, as observed by Jay Jasanoff and Douglas Adams on the back cover.
The book has the following structure: chapters 1–8 serve as a general framework within which all other chapters, which are devoted to the specific Indo-European branches or languages, are to be located. Chapter 1, “Introduction: The comparative method and the Indo-European family,” provides the basics of the comparative method applied to the Indo-European languages. Chapter 2, “Proto-Indo-European culture and archaeology,” gives an essential report on our knowledge of the material culture of Indo-Europeans, their homeland, and their subsequent migrations. Chapters 3–8 deal with the different linguistic domains of Indo-European, as follows: chapter 3, “Proto-Indo-European phonology;” chapter 4, “Proto-Indo-European morphology: Introduction;” chapter 5, “The verb;” chapter 6, “The noun;” chapter 7, “Pronouns and other parts of speech;” and chapter 8, “Proto-Indo-European syntax.” Chapter 9 begins a series of chapters devoted to the various attested languages or branches of the Indo-European family: chapter 9, “Anatolian;” chapter 10, “Indo-Iranian I: Indic;” chapter 11, “Indo-Iranian II: Iranian;” chapter 12, “Greek;” chapter 13, “Italic;” chapter 14, “Celtic;” chapter 15, “Germanic;” chapter 16, “Armenian;” chapter 17, “Tocharian;” chapter 18, “Balto-Slavic;” and chapter 19, “Albanian.”
In the chapter on Balto-Slavic, the author is representative of those who claim that originally Baltic and Slavic formed a single branch—the hypothesis of scholars like Andersen (1998:420), for instance, according to whom the resemblance between Baltic and Slavic “should be understood as the sole surviving, originally discontinuous, fragments of a former Slavic-Baltic dialect continuum.” The last chapter is effectively devoted to fragmentary languages, that is, all the languages attested only in some more or less short, fragmentary inscriptions. Included are Phrygian—a brief and tentative description of which is also provided—Thracian, Macedonian, Illyrian, Venetic, Messapic, and Lusitanian. For Phrygian, Venetic, and Messapic, short text samples are presented with relevant linguistic comments.
Chapters 9–18 make up the core of the description of the Indo-European languages. Equal attention is paid to every language or branch, and the result is an excellent overview of the whole linguistic family in a well-balanced presentation. Even treatments of those languages that usually are dealt with as minor or less relevant to our reconstruction or understanding of Indo-European, such as Albanian, cover a good number of pages. No interesting point is missed, and the reader is left with the impression that for the author there are no major or minor languages.
The only case where I would have supplied additional information concerns Gothic. Not mentioned at all is so-called Crimean Gothic, which attests that a descendant of Gothic was apparently still in use in the sixteenth century when the Flemish ambassador de Busbecq was able to list 68 Gothic words. But this is a minor quibble. Almost all the languages are presented in a concise, but complete, survey, which includes meaningful examples taken from the oldest texts with a linguistic commentary.
The textbook is a rich and up to date synthesis of almost all we know about the Indo-Europeans, their language, and their culture. It is difficult to find an introduction to the Indo-European linguistics as rich and well balanced as this one. It is therefore to be welcomed as one of the best textbooks available in this field.
However, even though the aim of Fortson's textbook is to provide the students with an updated introduction to both the methodology and knowledge base of Indo-European linguistics, a simple introduction to comparative linguistics devoted to Indo-European cannot be neutral with respect to some basic assumptions. A few examples will suffice to illustrate. The phonological picture provided for Indo-European as supported by Fortson corresponds to the most common and widely accepted scenario: five series of obstruents are reconstructed (labial, dental, velar, palatal, labiovelar), each of them consisting of a voiced, voiceless, and voiced aspirated consonant. Note, however, that this system was severely criticized by Jakobson on typological grounds.
Another relevant point: the system of three reconstructed laryngeals (h1, h2, h3) is the one to which preference is given (mainly because of Greek, p. 58). Phonology is accurately treated throughout the text, and many so-called “laws of Indo-European” are very clearly illustrated (Wackernagel's Law, Lachmann's Law, Grassmann's Law, Osthoff's Law, Sievers' Law, Lindemann's Law, and many others). It must be remarked, however, that there are some inconsistencies concerning the phonetic transcription and, in general, the way phonetics is treated. For example, the transcription of the colloquial English phrase hit ya is correctly provided as [
] (p. 190). It is difficult, therefore, to understand the reason why the phonetic values of the Indo-Iranian alveo-palatal affricates have not been given in squared brackets as [
], [
], and [
], but have been represented by symbols that do not belong to the IPA inventory (p. 181). In this case, the readers have to recover the correct phonetic value by themselves.
It must also be noted that, when dealing with the phonetics of Gothic, “the short close vowels [ε] … and [
]” are represented by the symbols for open vowels. However, on the same page, a few lines below, “the vowels e and o stand for long open ē and ō ([e:] and [o:] …),” the symbols in square brackets represent close vowels (p. 312). Likewise, when the reader is informed that “Welsh c represents k,” it should be more correctly rewritten as “Welsh <c> represents [k]” (pp. 49–50).
The morphological system reconstructed for Indo-European is also the most common. It is presented as a language with fusional morphology, with possibly nine nominal cases, including directive, which is productively attested only in Hittite, whereas the verbal system reconstructed is mainly based on Vedic and Greek. But the picture of the situation in the different languages is given in a very rich and illuminating fashion.
Finally, the syntax of Indo-European as described in the book is typical of a nominative-accusative language. In this chapter, many phenomena are listed and described, but they are not presented within a coherent and consistent theoretical framework. I return to this point below.
How to evaluate the present textbook? Without any doubt, this is an excellent volume, even though there are some minor flaws. For example, the author opens his book with a few pages devoted to a short illustration of the major concepts that are supposed to be employed in the text, such as grammaticalization. Unfortunately, several of these concepts are never used in the discussion, even though in some cases they could be very useful. Grammaticalization, for instance—whether the theoretical and methodological approach underlying it is right or wrong—could have been suggested as a possibility with some explanatory power for the origin of the otherwise obscure Germanic preterite ending -d. This ending occurs already in the Runic verbal form tawido ‘did’, if this morpheme is in fact related to the root *dheh1- ‘to set’ (on which the verb to do itself is based). Likewise, the reshaping of the noun classes in Tocharian, where apparently many instances of reanalysis took place (p. 356) could be explained in terms of grammaticalization. This approach, however, although mentioned at the beginning of the book, is absent. (Interestingly, in the illustration of the Tocharian nominal forms several times the verb to reanalyze is used, but neither reanalysis nor to reanalyze occur in the glossary; reanalysis is usually assumed to be the first, necessary step in the grammaticalization process).
Another field where the author could have provided additional information is syntax. The chapter devoted to syntax is a list of several syntactic phenomena, such as Wackernagel's law on clitics, subject-verb agreement, basic movement processes such as wh-movement, to mention but a few. However, these phenomena could hardly be at work simultaneously, but rather at different temporal stages of PIE, and none of them seems to be exclusively peculiar to Indo-European. Moreover, some implicit assumptions underlying the chapter are questionable, though not necessarily wrong. For instance, the assumption that fronting or topicalization arise as a result of movement is based on a very soft version of the generative approach presupposed in the book. Phenomena involving the syntax of subordinate clauses seem not to be analyzed according to any particular approach, but are illustrated in a very theory-neutral way, leaving the reader with the impression that the picture is incoherent.
Last, but not least, some issues left untouched by Fortson deserve at least a brief mention. For instance, there is a long-standing debate about the possibility that Indo-European developed from an ergative linguistic system. It could be that the ergative hypothesis is not correct. Nevertheless, it would have been useful to make the reader aware of the many reasons for which the hypothesis has been put forward, given some inconsistencies in the syntax of Indo-European as reconstructed thus far.
To sum up, Fortson's book is a wonderful, updated repository of what we know about Indo-European languages and culture and turns out to be, in the end, an excellent tool for delivering our knowledge of Indo-European to younger generations of students. Had it also provided instructions on how practitioners of historical and comparative linguistics in the field of Indo-European work and why they operate as they do—a task that a textbook has to fulfill, in my opinion—it would have been the perfect textbook.
