JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES

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October-December 2009 JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES Volume I., Issue 4. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Svonni, M. 1990. Sámi-ruota, ruota-sámi sátnegirji. Samisk-svensk, svenk-samisk ordbok. Jokkmokk: Sámi Girjjit. Tenišev, Ė.R. (ed.). 2001. Sravnitel'no-istoričeskaja grammatika tjurkskix jazykov. Leksika. Moskva: Nauka. Tereščenko, N.M. 1965. Nenecko-russkij slovar'. 3 vols. Moskva: Sovetskaja ėnciklopedija Tietze, A. 2002. Tarihi ve Etimolojik Türkiye Türkçesi Luğatı. Sprachgeschichtliches und etymologisches Wörterbuch des Türkei-Türkischen. Birinci Cilt. A-E. İstanbul/Wien: Simurg. Vasil'ev, V.M. & Učaev, Z.V. 2003. Marijsko-russkij slovar'. Joškar-Ola: Marijskoe knižnoe izdatel'stvo. Vaxrušev, V.M. (red.). 1983. Udmurt-żuč slovar'. Moskva: Russkij jazyk. Vovin, A. 2005. The end of the Altaic controversy. Central Asiatic Journal 49.1: 71-132. Zaikov, P. & Rugojeva, L. 1999. Karjalais-venäläini sanakirja (pohjois-karjalaiset murtehet). Petroskoi: Periodika. Vilmos Voigt: Review of: The Indo-European Language Family: Questions about its Status 1. The subtitle mirrors the aim of the book. There are twelve (as the number of the Apostles) papers in the book (page-numbered separately, as if expressing that the authors do not share all their views with each other), framed by a substantial introduction by the editor, the Italian Professor Angela Marcantonio. First she speaks about general issues (e.g. comparative method, borrowing vs inheritance, IE phonology, morphology and grammar, morphological reconstruction and prehistoric reconstruction etc.), then she scrutinizes the twelve chapters in the book. (The chapters follow the alphabetical order of the family names of the Authors – expressing thus a non-hierarchic but mosaic construction of the book.) The Introduction is an interesting reading indeed, since Marcantonio was the first person being able to review what the twelve authors had postulated. I should suggest to any reader of the volume to start with the Introduction, then to read the chapters, and then go back again to the Introduction. By this ‘nonroyal-way of knowledge’ one could but realize how complex and simple at the same time the problem under discussion can be: not whether, but how and why (and to which extent) the IE language family exists. Needless to say, all the papers are of excellent and up-to-date quality. I admire the wealth of knowledge, clarity and wit. IE linguistics is a heavy-weight job: one has to hike on a mountain of books, plus very many other things. I agree with the first part of the first sentence of the book (“to survey the current state of the Indo-European theory”), but I feel uncomfortable with the second part of the same sentence (“in the light of modern linguistic knowledge”). Who has the privilege to say: “I represent the modern linguistic knowledge”? Luckily, the whole book (and the Introduction too) refer to very many different approaches in current IE studies, even if not quoting many other, interesting views. For example, I do not believe in the Nostratic comparative linguistics, but it exists, and was founded by linguists as well-trained as the authors that feature in Marcantonio’s book. As it is well-known, the Nostratic theory connects IE languages with African languages, Uralic languages, Dravidian languages, and others. Since it is not that well known that comparison of European, Asian and African languages is _____________________________________________________________________________________ © Copyright Mikes International 2001-2009 36
October-December 2009 JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES Volume I., Issue 4. _____________________________________________________________________________________ an OLD idea regarding the possible correlations among languages, let me quote just a single ‘prenostratic’ etymology: *gruny (Latin glis; see below), whose precise meaning we do not know. It could be the name of the ‘dormouse’ or the denomination of the ‘rat’. One could also assume a kind of spontaneous, onomatopoeic origin for this noun, as shown by the following nouns in other languages: in (Bantu-Sudanese) Mano gere, in Gbere ,n-girä, in Bambara n-yira. Amomg the Camitic languages we have Old Libian ζεγέρι (Erodotus, IV: 192); among the Semitic languages we have guraδ and plural gurδan in Arabic; among the IE languages we have Sanskrit girí- ‘mouse (correspondent to Latin glis ‘dormouse’). I find it hard to believe that there may be a genealogical connections among these words (as claimed by Trombetti: Comparazioni Lessicali; Bologna 1920, p. 144); their similarity is instead based on onomatopoeia. It would be more plausible to consider gruń as a dialectal variant with limited scope of occurrence (see Tagliavini: Lexicon Marsilianum. Dizionario Latino-Rumeno-Ungherese del sec. XVII. Bucureşti; 1930. Cultura Natională, pp. 154-155). My second remark concerning the Introduction is an arithmetic one. At the end of Angela Marcantonio’s excellent survey, there are ‘References’, i.e. a current bibliography of 115 publications. First I tried to list all the years of publication into my son’s hand calculator, and then divide it with 115, but the result was frightening. So, I repeated the calculation: the result was the same. The average year of publication of the quoted works will be the very end of 1990’s, close too 2000. Good news from the flourishing IE studies! It is heart-warming to see a companion with so up-to-date bibliographic references. Congratulations for everybody who joined the book under review! We just need such books for refreshing our knowledge. But are there around the world sound linguists, who will think that before 1990 there was no linguistics worth of mentioning? In some areas of study (e.g. in Ket linguistic and mythological studies, where 40 years ago no serious publications were available) this might be the case, grosso modo. But IE linguistics has hundreds of years of venerable traditions. If we consider IE linguistics valid only from 1990 to 2010, there will be soon, let us say, from 2010 onward the next turn of generation, who will forget all the previous books, including our own books as well. (I have to tell you, I am not afraid of that, but I am afraid of the tendency that in a few coming years there will be no more IE linguist capable of understanding the large diapason of Marcantonio’s recent hand book value collection of papers). 2. There is no way to reflect on all the problems mentioned in the book. At the moment there is no time for it, and I am not an expert of all the questions. I try to share with you only some of my impressions. IE linguistics has gained in the recent decades very important new results. It has reevaluated topics like: the Indian homeland hypothesis, the Indo-Aryan migration, Proto-IE language patterns, the dichotomy: archaisms vs innovations, etc. Trying to gather a somewhat coherent view, I found the following theorems as the most important ones in the new publications: 1) the Dravidian languages are older, and not younger than the IE languages in India; 2) Indo-Aryan is more divergent from Sanskrit than previously believed; 3) various ideological patterns, as suggested by e.g. Dumézil, Benveniste, Ivanov, Toporov – (Gamkrelidze), etc. cannot help to solve the severe problems of IE language reconstructions; 4) archaeology at the very moment cannot help much either IE comparative linguistics, since scholars such as Gimbutas, Renfrew and the other, less known experts do not ‘speak’ the same epistemological vocabulary. Being a down-to-soil empiricist, I find the situation not at all _____________________________________________________________________________________ © Copyright Mikes International 2001-2009 37
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