Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction (Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics)

I have been studying both linguistics and languages for years. I am particularly interested in historical linguistics. I would consider Forston's book to be a good, updated primer on the subject,especially for those interested and intrigued by Indo-European studies.

This is the book I wish I'd had when I took Introduction to Indoeuropean many years ago. It covers not only the traditional topic of the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European but PIE culture, homeland, and migrations. The most valuable part is the survey of the subgroups of IE. It gives much more extensive coverage than is usual to "minor" subgroups such as Tocharian, Albanian, and Armenian, and does not ignore the lesser known languages within subgroups, such as the Anatolian languages other than Hittite and the minor Italic languages.

By providing information about the entire subgroup, not just its earliest attested languages, it avoids the overemphasis on reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European of so many books on this topic and thereby provides more of a sense of the history of the many and widespread languages of this important language family. Even for linguists, historical linguistics is not only about reconstruction of protolanguages: it is also about how particular languages have changed over time and how language change works in general. Non-linguists are also likely to be interested in questions like: "How did the Slavic languages get to be the way they are?". Books that focus exclusively on reconstruction and earliest attestations do a poor job of responding to such questions.

The view of Indo-European presented is modern, with good coverage of laryngeal theory, but appropriately conservative for an introductory book in not digressing excessively on marginal aspects of the field, such as possible remoter connections of Indo-European and reconstruction strongly influenced by typology.

It is a virtue of this book that all data is provided in romanization as this makes it accessible to people who are not already committed students of Indo-European. The fact is that it has been several generations since educated Americans or Europeans could be assumed to know Greek. Even my eighty-year old mother had a year of Greek in highschool only because the Latin teacher agreed to teach an extra class during the lunch period. For those of us who read Greek it may look funny in romanization, but this book is not intended primarily for us. Furthermore, comparison of data from different languages is facilitated by a common representation of the data.

The chapters on the various subgroups are sufficiently self-contained that they can be read independently by someone who wants to bone up on a particular group of languages so long as he or she has a basic understanding of historical linguistics and of the elements of comparative Indo-European presented in the first few chapters. The bibliographies for the chapters on subgroups focus on recent reference works and important recent developments rather than on the classics. This is appropriate for an introductory work as references to classic works and other information about the history of the field are easily obtained elsewhere.

Fortson has intended this book to be an introduction for the undergraduates, and it exactly is that, and a bit more (in my experience with undergrads, not all of them are very comfotable with learning about complicated linguistic theories).

The book's first part has sections on the history of IE studies and discusses matters of Morphology, Phonology, Nouns, Verbs, and Syntax in seperate chapters which are well written, but sometimes uneven. The second half of the book runs through each major IE linguistic subgroup, sometimes paying attention to some groups more than others.

For those previous reviewers who seem to find the book ineffcient, I have to repeat that this book has no claim of replacing Szemerenyi or Meier-Brugger, which are more advance handbooks for already well-versed IE experts. Also, for someone who asked "do we want to admit people to the field who have no Greek", my answer would be, why not? Who said Greek and Latin should be the prerequisites to IE? Why not admit someone who is familiar with Sanskrit or OCS or Avestan to the field, and then make them learn Greek? It is quite common for people with good Greek or Latin who come in and then embark upon learning Sanskrit and the rest, so why not the other way around? I disagree with the statement on the transliteratio of Greek being annoying. You would expect him to transliterate Hittite and Sanskrit and OCS and the rest, so why not Greek?

A reasonable overview for the absolute beginner, though not one that inspires confidence that the author is fully conversant with the field. The fairly dumbed-down tone and the exercises imply this is for junior high school students - tertiary students are likely to want something more substantial. As a first introductory text it is useful - especially the bibliographic notes, though they are often idiosyncratic.

Introductory handbooks to comparative Indo-European linguistics, expecting their readers to chase monographs and have some prior knowledge of comparative method and a couple of ancient languages, are plentiful. Benjamin Fortson's INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE is the first real textbook for university undergraduates, and in spite of some faults, it is to be welcomed.

What makes this a useful textbook instead of a dry handbook is exercises and a list of terminology to review at the end of each chapter. People new to the field can make sure they're keeping up with so much new information, and even those who have already slogged through the primers of Szeremenyi or Lehmann will be pleased to check how much they've retained. Fortson begins by giving a clear and concise introduction to comparative method and shows how this allowed early 19-century thinkers to work a coherent system out of the resemblance between so many Western languages. The second half of the book explores each of the branches of Indo-European in depth, admirably giving more attention to Tocharian and Albanian than most primers. The Baltic and Slavonic languages are treated together in a single chapter (and, darn it, no coverage of the Slavonic accent). A final chapter covers languages whose preservation is fragmentary.

Fortson's work is not perfect. He transliterates Greek words, resulting in text that is annoying for those who already have some experience with Greek in its own natural alphabet. Furthermore, do we really want to be inviting people into the field when they have no prior experience with Greek? Fortson also neglects much of the exciting application of typology to reconstruction in the last quarter-century, and though he treats laryngeals as a matter of course, the outlook on the language isn't so different from conservative handbooks like Szeremenyi's. Finally, I disagreed with his decision to discuss the modern languages of each branch, instead of the first attested language as usual. This enlarged the work with data not terribly useful for reconstruction.

If you are interested in comparative Indo-European linguistics, there's no single book that can do it all. I would recommend obtaining, at the very least, Lehmann's THEORETICAL BASES, Sihler's NEW COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR OF GREEK AND LATIN, and Gamkrelidze & Ivanov's controversial but exciting INDO-EUROPEAN AND THE INDO-EUROPEANS. However, Fortson's textbook is a worthy purchase, especially for those with no prior experience with diachronic linguistics.