About this title: This book introduces Proto-Indo-European and explores what the language reveals about the people who spoke it. The Proto-Indo-Europeans lived somewhere in Europe or Asia between 5,500 and 8,000 years ago, and no text of their language survives. J. P. Mallory and Douglas Adams show how over the last two centuries scholars have reconstructed it from its descendant languages, the surviving examples of which comprise the world's largest language family. After a concise account of Proto-Indo-European grammar and a consideration of its discovery, they use the reconstructed language and related ...
read more
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9780199296682ISBN:0199296685
Description: BRAND NEW PAPERBACK. 246x171 mm. (760) this book introduces proto-indo-european, describes how it was reconstructed from its descendant languages, and shows what it reveals about the people who spoke it between 5, 500 and 8, 000 years ago. using related evidence from archaeology and natural history the authors explore the lives, thoughts, passions, culture, society, economy, history, and environment of the proto-indo-europeans. they include chapters on fauna, flora, family and kinsh1p, clothing ... read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Country = UNITED KINGDOM
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9780199296682ISBN:0199296685
Description: BRAND NEW PAPERBACK. 760 pages. (756 pages) introduces proto-indo-european, describes how it was reconstructed from its descendant languages, and shows what it reveals about the people who spoke it. using related evidence from archaeology and natural history, this work explores the lives, thoughts, passions, culture, society, economy, history, and environment of the proto-indo-europeans. numerous tables (Paperback) read more
Description: Fine. 0199287910 NEW/UNREAD! ! ! Text is Clean and Unmarked! --Be Sure to Compare Seller Feedback and Ratings before Purchasing--Has a small black line on bottom/exterior edge of pages. May have light shelf wear to cover from storage, if any. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9780199296682ISBN:0199296685
Description: New. Introduces Proto-Indo-European, describes how it was reconstructed from its descendant languages, and shows what it reveals about the people who spoke it. Using related evidence from archaeology and natural history, this work explores the lives, thoug... read more
Description: New. PLEASE NOTE: All books are promptly imported from the UK using DHL or Royal Mail international mail WITH TRACKING NUMBER. Delivery is typically 5-10 working days. Please do not select expedited shipping. Professional and reliable bookseller (est.1987). This book introduces Proto-Indo-European and explores what the language reveals about the people who spoke it. The Proto-Indo-Europeans lived somewhere in Europe or Asia between 5, 500 and 8, 000 years ago, and no text of their language ... read more
Description: New. PLEASE NOTE: All books are promptly imported from the UK using DHL or Royal Mail international mail WITH TRACKING NUMBER. Delivery is typically 5-10 working days. Please do not select expedited shipping. Professional and reliable bookseller (est.1987). This book introduces Proto-Indo-European and explores what the language reveals about the people who spoke it. The Proto-Indo-Europeans lived somewhere in Europe or Asia between 5, 500 and 8, 000 years ago, and no text of their language ... read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN-13:9780199296682ISBN:0199296685
Description: Good. 0199296685 Good condition. May have some markings & or shelfwear. All pages intact. Used items may not include extras such as infotrac, CD or other web access codes. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN-13:9780199296682ISBN:0199296685
Description: New. 0199296685 Absolutely Brand New. No marks and in pristine condition. Used items may not include extras such as infotrac, CD or other web access codes. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN-13:9780199296682ISBN:0199296685
Description: New. Please note that deliveries to addresses in the UK and Europe will be in 4-14 business days. Other countries should refer to Alibris standard times. This book introduces Proto-Indo-European, describes how it was reconstructed from its descendant languages, and shows what it reveals about the people who spoke it between 5, 500 and 8, 000 years ago. Using related evidence from archaeology and natural history the authors explore the lives, thoughts, passions, culture, society, economy, ... read more
Description: New. PLEASE NOTE: All books are promptly imported from the UK using DHL or Royal Mail international mail WITH TRACKING NUMBER. Delivery is typically 5-10 working days. Please do not select expedited shipping. Professional and reliable bookseller (est.1987). read more
Description: New. PLEASE NOTE: All books are promptly shipped from our UK warehouse using Royal Mail International Priority mail. Heavier or more expensive books are shipped with a TRACKING NUMBER. Professional and reliable bookseller (est.1987). This book introduces Proto-Indo-European and explores what the language reveals about the people who spoke it. The Proto-Indo-Europeans lived somewhere in Europe or Asia between 5, 500 and 8, 000 years ago, and no text of their language survives. J. P. Mallory and ... read more
Description: New. PLEASE NOTE: All books are promptly shipped from our UK warehouse using Royal Mail International Priority mail. Heavier or more expensive books are shipped with a TRACKING NUMBER. Professional and reliable bookseller (est.1987). This book introduces Proto-Indo-European and explores what the language reveals about the people who spoke it. The Proto-Indo-Europeans lived somewhere in Europe or Asia between 5, 500 and 8, 000 years ago, and no text of their language survives. J. P. Mallory and ... read more
Description: New. PLEASE NOTE: All books are promptly shipped from our UK warehouse using Royal Mail International Priority mail. Heavier or more expensive books are shipped with a TRACKING NUMBER. Professional and reliable bookseller (est.1987). read more
"It's not by J.P. Mallory, it's by J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams. Here's how this book is structured.
After Introduction, follows 1 Discovery 1.1 Language relations 1.2 Indo-European The discovery of IE is a fascinating subject, but it's well known, and this book doesn't add much to it. The ensuing discussion of how the linguistic perspectives changed is informative, though
2 The Elements 2.1 The Indo-European languages 2.2 Celtic -- 2.13 Tocharian - 2.14 Minor languages
3 Reconstructing Proto-Indo-European 3.1 The Comparative Method 3.2 Schleicher's Tale (it's a nice touch to devote a whole subchapter to the history of Schleicher's tale and its various incarnations). 3.3 Laryngeal Theory (don't remember what it was) 3.4 Reconstruction and Reality
4 The System 4.0 The System 4.1 Phonology 4.2 The Noun -- 4.9 Derivation
6 A Place In Time This is a fascinating chapter: when did the Proto-Indo-Europeans actually live? Did they at all? How sound our judgment can be? As usual, approximations vary widely.
7 Reconstructing the Proto-Indo-Europeans 7.1 Approaches to the Past 7.2 How Many Cognats? (the fewer, the more reliable) 7.3 Reconstructed Meaning 7.4 Semantic Field 7.5 Folk Taxonomies 7.6 Level of Reconstruction 7.7 Root Homonyms 7.8 How Long a Text? (we cannot recreate a PIE text longer than two or three words, and even those attempts are extremely tenuous) 7.9 Vocabulary - What's Missing?
After that, the longest part of the book, which constitutes its bulk, begins. It is essentially what the book is about. It's a thesaurus of PIE language divided into thematic fields and studied at length across the whole IE continuum. Basically it looks like a list of words and cognates with some comments, sometimes very brief, sometimes a bit more flowery. Perfect reading for an autistic teenager, I guess. I kind of liked it.
8 The Physical World 9 Indo-European Fauna (fascinating: the elk/moose story to compare, the salmon controversy) 10 Indo-European Flora (and the beech controversy) 11 Anatomy 12 Family and Kinship 13 Hearth and Home 14 Clothing and Textile 15 Material Culture 16 Food and Drink 17 Proto-Indo-European Society 18 Space and Time 19 Number and Quantity 20 Mind, Emotions, and Sense Perception 21 Speech and Sound 22 Activities 23 Religion 24 Grammatical Elements 25 Comparative Mythology
This concludes the section. Phew.
26 Origins: The Never-Ending Story (a brief retelling of the eternal quest for the PIE homeland).
Appendix I Basic sound correspondences between PIE and major IE languages Appendix II PIE to English wordlist Appendix III English to PIE wordlist (as the authors note, for the Klingon-minded freaks).
References, index, etc.
The authors wrote the book with wry humor, which is excellent to find in an academic book. They don't have much space to exercise it, but when they do, the results are great. One of the best features of the books is its laid-back skepticism towards any megalomaniac 'solutions' and concepts; they know only too well the limitations of any research into a language whose very existence is only surmised.
I have noticed numerous strange examples and outright mistakes in OCS and Russian cognates, and I'm sure other languages do not fare any better. It's not very good - certainly not if you want to use this book as a jumping-board for your own research; but if you want to have a general overview, you can skim over such mistakes; they do not significantly distort the picture. It is an amazing adventure (for bookworms at least) to find correspondences and PIE roots in words from languages as distant as, say, English and Russian; and potentially a sobering (and humbling) exercise for any nationalistic goon (if they only knew how to read). Almost all so-called mat words in Russian (the taboo swear words) are ultimately PIE (in spite of folk etymology which ascribes them to Tartar influence).
So: not perfect; not for everyone; in its niche, a splendid accomplishment."
"The first thing I want to say about this book is if you don't want a detailed discussion of Language as opposed to history then this book is not for you. However, since this was one of the things I was looking to study it was perfect for me.
The book covers the following main ideas:
(1) Concise introductions to the discovery and composition of the Indo-European language family. (2) The way the proto-language has been reconstructed. (3) Its most basic grammar (4) The interrelationships between the different language groups (5) The temporal position of the Indo-European languages (6) Some of the difficulties in reconstructing a proto-language. (7) Semantic field of the Proto-Indo-European lexicon. (8) An examination of mythology and possible homelands of the Proto-Indo-Europeans.
For me the most interesting chapters were the last two, as they talked about the mythology and religion and how they can be reconstructed, and the possible homelands of the Proto-Indo Europeans. Its amazing what you can get from the words of a language!"
"OK, it's at some level incredibly boring..but also very satisfying and exhaustive on the subject. I was a "put me to sleep after two pages book" I kept reading for months."
"When I heard that Oxford University Press would be publishing THE OXFORD INTRODUCTION TO PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN AND THE INDO-EUROPEAN WORLD, I was excited. I envisioned an update of Oswald Szemerenyi's old Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics that, because of the specific research interests of authors J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, would not only reflect contemporary developments in IE linguistics, but would seamlessly show what we can reconstruct for the culture of PIE speakers. Well, the book is something like that, but it turns out not to be much of a useful introduction to the field.
The book is over 700 pages long, but the introduction to Proto-Indo-European itself is quite small, less than a 100 pages really. It's certainly no substitute for a real handbook like Szemerenyi's, Beekes', Fortson's, or (my favourite) Lehmann's. The branches of Indo-European, its phonology and the basics of its morphology, and the debate over the relationship between the disparate languages that are first attested are set out. The authors nicely use Schleier's tale in its progressive versions to show how reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European have been consistently refined. While the view of Proto-Indo-European is generally the same as in introductions from the 1990s, the authors do reconstruct four laryngeals instead of the usual three, and prefer the transcription *h-subscript-x for an unknown laryngeal instead of *H.
The bulk of the book's content concerns the reconstruction of PIE lexicon, with chapters divided along such themes as "Food and Drink", "Speech and Sound", and "Material Culture". This portion is exciting, especially when the authors link reconstruction to archaeological evidence to make even more detailed ventures about the nature of PIE society. Nonetheless, the material can be tiresome to read straight through; it works best in pieces or in consultation for specific topics.
A final chapter discusses the debate over the IE homeland, where the authors remain very non-committal about the whole deal. There are two appendices. The first sets out basic sound correspondences between PIE and the major IE groups in tabular form. The second a PIE-English and English-PIE wordlist, nearly a hundred pages long. The bibliography and general index together are nearly 200 pages long. So, one can understand that the book contains quite a bit that might seem "fluff".
If you are a student of Indo-European linguistics with previous knowledge gained through one of the great handbooks like Lehmann's Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics, then the reconstruction of the lexicon in this work of Mallory and Adams is sure to offer some entertainment. However, this is the sort of the thing that is best consulted in a university library, and I found the book not worth obtaining for a home collection."
We guarantee every item's condition, as described on Alibris. If you are not satisfied that an item is as described, return your purchase for a refund.
rating
