Selected Papers on Indo-European Linguistics: With a Section on Comparative Eskimo Linguistics (review)

This two-volume work reprints a number of articles by the Danish linguist Jens-Elmgaård Rasmussen. Most of the articles (56 of 63) were previously published, generally in working papers published by the University of Copenhagen. The author comments in the preface that, although he had hoped that quick publication of the various articles would provoke immediate discussion, this proved to be wrong. Instead, the articles were buried in obscure journals, and he felt that, since the articles had been published, his work on a particular topic was complete and that it was time to move on to other things. This collection is meant to remedy that situation. The papers are mainly unrevised, although some misprints and other minor errors have been silently corrected, and additional footnotes or afterwords have been added to some. These additions are always clearly indicated.

This is very much a ‘dip in and see’ kind of book. The papers cover a wide range of topics and are wildly disparate in length, ranging from nearly 70 pages to 2 pages. Languages or language families dealt with include Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, Armenian, Italic, and Celtic, among others. Some papers I particularly enjoyed were ‘Two phonological issues in Germanic’ (82–99), which addresses one set of exceptions to Grimm’s Law, namely voiceless stops preceded by s as well as certain instances of Sievers’ Law in Germanic; ‘The constituent elements of the Indo-European personal pronouns’ (256–75), where R discusses the development of the personal pronoun system reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European (e.g. he argues that *mé ‘me’ goes back to an original *mew-mé, which then traversed the following path of development: *mew-mé>>*mewé>>*mowé>> *mwé>>*mé); ‘Die thrakischen Inschriften: Beiträge zu einer neuen Deutung’ (276–93), where R argues for a new interpretation of the Thracian inscriptions; and ‘Some Armenian etymological intricacies’ (619–27), which discusses certain Armenian words of disputed or unclear etymology (words for ‘branch’, ‘milk’, and ‘sky’, among others).

I also enjoyed the various papers titled ‘Miscellaneous problems in Indo-European languages’. Seven of these papers are scattered throughout the book; each contains brief investigations of a number of linguistic phenomena. For instance, in ‘Miscellaneous problems in Indo-European languages VII’ (644–54), R examines the etymologies of Lithuanian dovaná ‘gift’ and Slavic slava ‘fame, glory’, the development of Germanic instrument nouns containing a suffix *-la- (e.g. *slutilaz ‘key’>>Old High German sliozan ‘close’, Modern German schließen), and the Hieroglyphic Luvian word for ‘child’, among other topics. Although the individual notes are all brief, they are generally detailed and well-argued.

While there is much to admire in these volumes, several criticisms should probably be made. Typographical errors abound (mostly self-correcting, but they would have been caught by a more thorough spell-check). It also surprised me, given how much can be done with computer prepared fonts, that some phonetic symbols appear to have been drawn in by hand. Such quibbles aside, however, this is a valuable book, particularly for Indo-Europeanists.