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  • Latin suffixal derivatives in English and their Indo-European ancestry
  • Benjamin W. Fortson IV
Latin suffixal derivatives in English and their Indo-European ancestry. By D. Gary Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xxxvi, 386. ISBN 9780199285051. $125 (Hb).

The meat of Miller's book, after the preambulatory material1 and an introductory chapter outlining his theoretical views,2 consists of five chapters detailing the history of Latin derivational suffixes in English from their Proto-Indo-European (PIE) origins, through earlier and later stages of Latin, into Romance (where relevant) and English.3 The sketches of each suffix's origin and development often tidily summarize a good quantity of technical material, including evaluation of recent literature. Following each sketch is a copious list of English borrowings, from Classical or later Latin, that contain the suffix. The words are given a distilled OED-type treatment with dates of first attestation in both languages and often additional etymological information, most frequently the PIE root.

Prodigious and admirable labor has gone into assembling this material. The subject matter is of intrinsic interest to readers in Classics, Indo-European studies, the history of English, and both synchronic and diachronic linguistics. Some aspects of the presentation call to mind that very successful popularizer of IE studies and compendium of the IE origins of English vocabulary, The American Heritage dictionary of Indo-European roots (Watkins 2000) and its earlier incarnations, which is referred to constantly and which M sometimes corrects and supplements.4 If M's book is able likewise to instill an interest in comparative grammar and certain theoretical linguistic issues among specialists in other disciplines, it will have served a good purpose. That having been said, and in spite of my own enjoyment of the book, I confess to being uncertain as to who [End Page 727] will benefit most from M's efforts, at whom the book is really directed, and to what extent the work is meant to be an original contribution to scholarship as opposed to an assemblage of historical data with opinions interspersed by the by.

One difficulty concerns the level at which the book is pitched. Classicists are the only intended audience M mentions explicitly (vii), but besides assuming knowledge of Greek and Latin, he also assumes knowledge of theoretical linguistics and IE.5 It is a major merit of this book that M has grappled with up-to-the-minute technical scholarship from a wide variety of sources. But his discussions could make thorny reading for most nonlinguists, while linguists may encounter frustration of the opposite kind because those same discussions are often brief and superficial. For example, he challenges Jay Jasanoff's theory of the origin of the ē-statives and the Latin verbs of the calefacere type (234), but a challenge to a theory as fully elaborated (and generally well received) as Jasanoff's needs to be fully elaborated itself to be effective. The positive side of this coin is that the discussions were stimulating enough to make me wish for much more (maybe in exchange for fewer pages of bare lists of English derivatives). Whether this book is a good place to house information and opinions on cutting-edge research of this kind is an allied question, as it requires interleaving a reference work purportedly aimed at one audience with critical discussions of technicalia aimed at another.6

Another problem is that the book has multiple foci that are not consistently or fully elaborated. This polycentrism affects the introductory chapter in particular, which covers a miscellany of topics in morphology and derivation such as the formulation of synchronic rules for nonnative morphemes, the diagnosis of productivity, constraints on derivation, states and changes of state, backformation, conversion, and the aspect-head hypothesis. The chapter is not well integrated into the rest of the book and is referred back to only spottily; it feels like an outline of a separate work. Whether Classicists will derive much benefit from it is also unclear, given for instance the quantity of Greenlandic Eskimo data that it contains. By contrast, if, as the topics would suggest, the chapter is aimed at theoretical linguists, it is equally unclear who among...

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