The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots

Fascinating to browse and with very clear print (important because the text in the dictionary part is pretty small). I love seeing the connections betwen words in the languages I'm interested in (Greek, German, Norse). Some little frustrations when things seem to be missing - for example, the introducion tantalisingly says: "The Germanic word for 'woman' (WIFE) was completely isolated until a cognate was recently identified in Tocharian. For its curious semantic history, see 'ghwibh-'." This piqued my curiosity but I tried in vain to find ghwibh- in the dictionary itself, there was nothing between ghwer- and gladh-. Of course you can find the details on the web, but then why pay thirteen quid for a book? Overall though, for quality of content and printing, it is excellent value.

The Third edition of the American Heritage Dictioanry of Indo-European Roots in corpoorate some important feature not in the earlier editions: language and culture notes interspersed among the main entries, new diagrams, even a new, recently identified Indo-European root. It is extremely valuable; as for my order, it was promptly processed, short delivery time, and fair price.

brilliant. thank you

It is a very interesting view to try reconstructing the proto-language and ideology of a major part of our now civilized world.!

everything as or better than expected

For someone with a casual interest this book is probably useful and interesting, providing information on many of the PIE roots we use in daily life and the cognates in other languages.For someone with more knowledge of linguistics and PIE it is deeply frustrating. Laryngeals are inconsistently used, and only in the notes not the headwords, likewise the distinction between the plain & palatovelars. Many of the roots listed are dubious at best, being attested only in a small number of branches or being obvious substrate borrowings. Many are also not PIE at all but from later languages (although these are marked as such).

The book is not thick but brings together nearly all Indo-European roots. For each entry, the book presents the lexical linkage between different Indo-European languages, and also demonstrates how the roots have evolved into their modern forms.

不思議な辞書である。箇々の英単語の説明が少ない。言葉の変遷とグルーピングの説明が主である。例えば、drizzleはdhreuから派生しており、to fall, dropの意味であり、dreary, droopなどが仲間である。1万語以上の語彙力突破の強力な助っ人である。「語源でたどる英単語まんだら」はこの本の解説書みたいに思えるので、一緒に読むとよくわかる。

J'ajoute au commentaire d'A. Rivière que c'est aussi un livre essentiel pour les indo-européanistes, car Watkins trace la longue histoire des mots jusqu'à leur prototype, qu'il reconstruit sous forme traditionnelle (avec des voyelles longues en omettant les laryngales qui ne sont pas indispensables ici).C'est aussi un livre indispensable pour les romanistes : sachant que plus de la moitié du vocabulaire anglais est constitué de mots d'origine française ou latine, on pourra avoir la longue histoire d'un mot français en cherchant dans ce dictionnaire à l'emprunt que l'anglais a fait (par exemple 'belfry' < vieux-français 'berfrei' > français 'beffroi' < germanique 'berg-frij-' < indo-européen 'bhergh- + prî-)Les dictionnaires étymologiques du français dont en général écrits par des littéraires sans formation en linguistique comparée pour lesquels le fin du fin se résume à citer le premier texte où le mot est attesté (voir par exemple le catastrophique 'Dictionnaire historique du français' d'Alain Rey) et le petit volume de Watkins y suppléera avec profit.

Diese neue (und zugleich letzte) Ausgabe des indogermanischen Wörterbuchs von Watkins ist für alle, die sich für den lautlichen und semantischen Wandel des geerbten Wortschatzes über eine Zeitspanne von etwa fünftausend Jahren (!) interessieren, unentbehrlich. Der kürzlich verstorbene Watkins war ein Indogermanist des ersten Rangs, der leicht verständlich und spannend vermitteln konnte, was in den Händen eines anderen eher wie ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln gewirkt hätte. Nach wie vor bleiben aber kleine Ungereimtheiten -- gelegentlich veraltete bzw. schwer nachvollziehbare Etymologien sowie die völlig unnötige Vermeidung der Darstellung der sogenannten Laryngallaute durch die längst universal anerkannten Symbole h1, h2, und h3. Letztere werden zwar oft und umständlich mit angegeben (angeblich als frühere Stufe der Entwicklung), aber was in der ersten Ausgabe aus typographischen Gründen entschuldigt werden konnte, kann heute nicht mehr gerechtfertigt werden.Dieses Buch kann ich allen empfehlen, die sich für Sprachgeschichte begeistern.

I love this book. The introduction goes through some basic concepts re into-european languages as well as "ur" into-european. It was not hard to read for a laymen. (I am interested and speak several languages, tho I have no linguistics training).The entries are in alphabetical order of the guessed original IE language vocab, w/ an alphabetical index of related English words in the back that tells you the entry of the original IE word the English comes from.Each entry has examples of several English words that the old IE word gave birth to. There are occasional examples of words from other languages besides English that the word gave birth to. My only complaint is that the non-English words could be more frequent. (Example- The same IE word gave us grave and grieve, and gave sanskrit "guru" the teacher, all words coming from an IE word supposed to mean "heavy".) While I recognize including various words from all current IE languages in each entry would be unrealistic and unwieldy, there could have been a little more.Often but not always they will trace how a word changed meaning historically in English, from IE to older English words to our modern senses. This is brief, and not so frequent of a feature. Interspersed thruout the dictionary are brief "essays" or just entries about guessed IE culture, inferred from the word history studies. Really fascinatingOVERALLThis is a lot of fun, and you don't need specialized linguistics knowledge to enjoy it. I speak other languages, but even if you only speak English and are interested in words and word histories you are bound to love this book. Don't hesitate, just get it. I have the OED shorter, the Chambers Etymological dictionary, and the Origins etymological dictionary, and this really complements them all and adds depth to your understanding of word histories and changes.

同語根の単語を調べるのに重宝する。