From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 19120
Date: 2003-02-23
----- Original Message -----
From: "I know that you are there!" <dehua_andrew_chen@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2003 11:18 PM
Subject: [tied] Reference
> Does anybody know if there's any good reference material out there for PIE that isn't describing theories, but rather documenting PIE as if it were a modern language? (Grammars, I mean) Of course, I understand nothing is definite, but for once it would be nice to see something like that instead of just lots of books on theories etc.
There's a radical difference between a documented language and a reconstructed one: in the latter case _nothing_ is directly documented and _everything_ is hypothetical, so you have to know something about the technical side of reconstruction methods if you want to be able to judge for yourself whether a given piece of reconstruction is valid in the first place, whether the meaning proposed for a given form is justified, etc. On the other hand, once you master the methods, you don't really need A Beginner's Guide to PIE Grammar; you can write one yourself :-) . All right, I know what you mean, but I haven't seen any up-to-date handbook like that. It's standard practice at least to explain the whys and wherefores of comparative method first.
> And I don't know of a PIE root dictionary with a good index so I can look up English (or German, or French, or Spanish, or Russian) glosses, that would be appreciated (as of now, I only know of ones where you can only look words up by their PIE word and not the gloss)
http://flaez.ch/pok/index.html
This index to the online version of Pokorny's dictionary allows you to search it according to forms found in a given language (if you can work out the German abbreviations of language names). Not quite what you have ordered, but I hope it may help a little.
Piotr