The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages (review)

The new Cambridge Encyclopedia of Ancient Languages is a wonderful research tool, handsomely printed with numerous charts, maps, and tables. The book has forty-five chapters, forty-one of which describe an ancient language or group of closely related languages. Most of these chapters follow essentially the same format: 1) Introduction (covering history, the speakers, the dialectology, etc.); 2) Writing System; 3) Phonology; 4) Morphology; 5) Syntax; and 6) Lexicon. Some, but not all, chapters have additional appended material. The four additional chapters give general background information: an introduction (by Woodard); two chapters devoted to reconstructed languages (Indo-European by Woodard, James Clackson, and the late Henry Hoenigswald, and Afro-Asiatic by John Huehnergard); and finally a closing chapter on reconstructed languages (by Don Ringe). Despite the standardization described above, there is some variation in the presentation from chapter to chapter, but the chapters are well written, and the overall quality of the texts is quite high.

There is a great deal here of interest to the average classicist. The chapter on Latin by Clackson is all that one would expect—a good overview of the language, and it would make good reading for the average undergraduate. More interesting for Italicists, I suspect, will be the chapters by Rex Wallace on Sabellian (i.e., Oscan-Umbrian) and Venetic. For Greek there are two articles, and both are quite good. Woodard's article on Attic gives a solid overview of the language, but he also introduces a number of issues related to the historical phonology of the dialect. A separate chapter, also by Woodard, on Greek dialects, builds on these phonological issues and would make excellent reading for anyone studying the thorny issues of dialect variation.

Numerous other articles on ancient Indo-European languages will be of some service to classical scholars. Calvert Watkins, the dean of American Indo-Europeanists, gives a clear, concise, and extremely helpful overview of Hittite, and there are several articles on minor Anatolian languages by Craig Melchert. There are also excellent articles on Sanskrit (by Stephanie Jamison), on Iranian (by Rüdiger Schmitt and Mark Hale), on Celtic (by Joe Eska), and early Germanic (by Jay Jassanoff and J. T. Faarlund). Strangely, there is no article on Old Irish.

Nonetheless, all told, these articles on Indo-European make up less than a third of the volume (534–942). And in the non-Indo-European languages treated, there is also a treasure trove of information. Most useful to classicists will be Helmut Rix's wonderful article on Etruscan; and despite Rix's unusual views of Etruscan phonology, this brilliant overview gives a clear view of the current state of Etruscan decipherment. The article is especially precious given Rix's unfortunate passing in the same year that the volume was published, and this will be one of the last discussions that we will have from him on Etruscan, a language that he so greatly clarified in his lifetime.

Even beyond these topics, there is a still an enormous amount of interesting material. About four hundred pages are devoted to the old Afro-Asiatic languages, such as Ancient Egyptian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Hebrew, Phoenician, and Arabic. Given the growing interest in the Near Eastern background of classical culture, these will be especially helpful to classicists wishing an introduction to these languages. Finally, there are a number of articles on subjects even further afield such as Ancient Chinese or Classical Mayan, and again, these are also quite informative.