Sue- en grec ancien: La famille du pronom reflechi: (Linguistique grecque et comparaison indo-europeenne) (review)

A work in the best tradition of Indo-European studies, Petit’s book combines a careful philological analysis of the data available from ancient languages with the linguistic insight provided by the internal comparison inside the same language and the external comparison with other languages of the family. P is concerned primarily with reflexive pronouns in ancient Greek, basically those forms derived from the Indo-European root *su̯e, but in order to develop his arguments and analyses he also provides attention to other forms of the reflexive pronouns, both in Greek and other Indo-European languages, not derived from that root.

The book is organized into five chapters, plus a foreword, conclusions, and appendices. The first chapter is devoted to a thorough analysis of the uses of the pronouns he/hé in ancient Greek. The opposition between stressed and unstressed forms was variously explained by ancient grammarians—there were two main competing criteria: emphasis and a grammatical opposition between anaphoric (unstressed) pronoun and reflexive (stressed) pronoun. P has revised systematically all the occurrences in Homer of these pronouns, and of the possessive adjective heós as well, checking the actual uses against those two possible explanations for the difference between stressed and unstressed forms. P has carried out a skillful philological analysis of the passages, pursuing the variants existing for each of them in order to gain a degree of accuracy in his data not so frequently found nowadays. He also provides data from post-homeric epics and Greek dialects, both from literary and epigraphical sources. He concludes that the two mentioned criteria seem, in fact, to have combined in the first stages of Greek, so that reflexivity and emphasis and anaphorical reference and lack of emphasis are usually associated, the cases of conflict being rare.

The remaining four chapters follow the same structure (introduction, analysis of the data from Greek, and comparison to the data provided by the other Indo-European languages), showing clearly the methodology followed. As in the first chapter, the exhaustive analysis of the data from Homer is then augmented with data from post-homeric epics and the various dialects. Provisional conclusions from the analysis of the Greek data are then drawn. It follows the survey of the data provided by the other Indo-European languages, which can then be combined with those from Greek in order to gain a general insight into the matter from a general Indo-European perspective.

Ch. 2 is devoted to the problem whether a base *se or *su̯e should be reconstructed on the basis of the Greek data. An important remark is found on pages 127–8—absence of initial digamma, that is, forms pointing to a base *se, can be correlated to higher frequency of use (dative hoi and possessive adjective hos), while less frequent forms (accusative he and genitive heo) point undoubtedly to a base *su̯e. The conclusion is thus clear—rarer forms have preserved an archaism while commoner forms show the expected final outcome of -w- in Greek, its disappearance. The question is not so easy to answer, however, when the data from all the Indo-European languages are taken into account, for both bases *su̯e and *se have been used to build reflexive pronouns. In this point P makes another interesting remark—*su̯e is primarily reflexive, and it is only in Greek that it has been used as an anaphoric via introducing the opposition between stressed and unstressed forms while forms derived from *se have been used as reflexives only in languages in which that same root had no anaphoric uses.

Ch. 3 focuses on the opposition between he- and hee- in Greek which, in spite of the ambiguity of some of the Greek data, must go back to Indo...