The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots

User Review: - Good book, but misleading title
In this book, Calvert Watkins seeks to make the Indo-European linguistic hypothesis accessible to interested English readers who are not trained on the subject. In this regard he succeeds quite well.

The target audience for this book is the interested English reader who has had no training on the subject. For this reason he sticks with words which are understandable to his target audience. Note that if you want comprehensive analysis of vocabulary, this is not the book for you.

The book is arranged in four sections. The introduction is a brief summary of what is known about the Indo-Europeans coupled with a brief overview of comparative linguistics. The second section is the dictionary of Indo-European roots with an emphasis on English-language words. The section is an index of English words and their corresponding Indo-European roots.

In general, I find this book to be quite interesting and useful, but perhaps the book should be renamed to avoid the confusion some of the more critical reviewers seem to have.

---

User Review: - same old same old
This booklet is merely a reprint of the appendix found at the back of the American Heritage Dictionary. I already have the dictionary -- so, had I known that this booklet contained nothing new, I would not have purchased it!

---

User Review: - Intriguing theories ... to be taken with a pinch of salt
Authors of works on word origins must choose whether to err on the side of including fanciful derivations, or to err on the side of sticking to the well-attested and uncontroversial. Scholars are tempted to show off their novel theories, and Watkins tops them all. His book cites alleged relationships so fanciful that many or most of them may be spurious, but it is impossible to tell which are solid and which are air. A truly honest work would label speculative theories with appropriate caveats.
Those who believe that new roots cannot emerge ex-nihilo may be inclined to believe that words with far-flung meanings and frail phonetic similarities are "genetically" related, but I have my doubts. Neologisms influenced by analogies with existing words may play a greater role in word-genesis than orderly evolution per rule. Even if many of Watkins's theories about genetic relationships are based on illusion, he has laid out an intruguing map of the network of real or perceived semantic associations that underpins human language.
In a perfect world, there would be some way of calculating the odds of a false-positive match between alleged cognates, but words are not DNA, and we must settle for subjective screening criteria, especially with respect to semantics. Who will rise to the challenge of assessing the reliability of Watkins's theories?
By conservative counts, only 600-700 semantically distinct roots are attested beyond dispute, from multiple branches of the IE family tree. Doubly-attested roots are somewhat suspect, especially when they occur in branches thought to bear close relations, such as Greek and Sanskrit, or Latin & Celtic. Watkins lists roughly twice that many roots, but some unknown percetage must surely be spurious. Be warned.

---

User Review: - As Near Perfection As One Could Ask
This beautiful and scholarly tome has more facts per inch in its 149pp than in almost any other work in my library. The second paperback edition is easily worth three times its cover price, and except for one flaw, (minor, and noted by other reviewers) this work is as near perfection as one could ask in a work of linguistic reference.

First, in praise:

To the scholar (or layman) studying the Indo-European roots of the English lexicon, there is no other work (in the English language) of comparable value to this book.

(View the index pages available above to see the English words referenced in the work.)

Each word is derived from its putative IE root, and each root is exemplified by its various reflexes in English, whether native or borrowed. For example, if we look up "deal" in the index, it gives two roots, *dail- (from which we get the meaning "portion out") and *tel- meaning plank or flat stone:

"*tel- Ground, floor, board. 1) DEAL from Middle Low German and Middle Dutch dele, "plank," from Germanic *thil-jo. 2)Suffixed form *tel-n-, TELLURIAN ...[also tile, title].... From Latin tellus "earth, the earth.....[Pokorny 2. *tel- 1061.]"

Hence, Watkins gives us the modern English exemplars of the root, whether they come through Germanic directly or indirectly, or through another PIE sister language such as Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, etc.,. For each root Watkins refers to the proto-form as it is given and numbered (i.e., here 1061) in Pokorny's authoritative "Indogermanisches Etymologisches Woerterbuch" or notes its absence therein.

Watkins also inserts a "language and culture note" on about every other page, giving philological/ethnological insight into the implications of the existence of certain forms and their connotations in the IE proto-language.

Regarding the PIE nominal root *Rtko-s "bear," which is absent as an inherited form in English, Watkins explains that the root (which is found in the Hittite "Hartaggas," Latin "ursus" Greek "arktos" and so forth) is replaced by "taboo" avoiding forms meaning "the brown one: "bruin" or "the honey-eater" as in Slavonic "medv-ed." The significance of such avoidance for hunter-gatherers such as the putative PIE speakers is obvious to anyone who knows the meaning of the word "jinx."

Yet, in criticism:

The book as it is currently titled (second edition, paperback) implies a completeness that the work lacks. When we find that certain English words such as "basket, boy, dwarf, dog" and "girl" are not listed in the lexicon, what are we to assume?

Are they neologisms as are perhaps "boy, dog" & "girl?"

Are they Germanicisms such as "dwarf" (although it apparently has a canonical PIE root structure)?

Or are they just inexplicable - as it would seem is "basket" which looks an awful lot like a cognate of the Latin "fasces"?

Also, PIE roots not native to or not borrowed into English are ignored, as are most non-PIE-derived yet acceptably 'English' words such as "alcohol."

Nevertheless, even Tolkien had his criticisms of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) and that work was some 1000 times the length of Watkins' achievement. Anyone who finds these caveats discouraging will know where to seek for further enlightenment.

This work is worth well more than its dime a page asking price

---

User Review: - Great book for language lovers
It's a great book for fans of Indo-European, of course. The other reviewers have commented on that. I must comment on one aspect of the book which is disapointing: the binding. It is the most poorly-bound hardback I have seen recently. Parts of the binding are falling apart. Also, some of the ink transfered from one page to the opposite page. These kinds of flaws should never happen with modern bookbinding technologies. It is a shame that such a wonderful book was let down by the printers. Don't let this stop you from buying it, though.

  Next page of reviews >