On Sat, 16 Aug 2003 03:08:32 -0700 (PDT), random randomersson
<
valrkirin2@...> wrote:
>For one of the projects I have thought of doing in or before graduate school I
>need to get a reliable list of Indo-European roots. I have searched this group
>and found the Pokorny list, but I have heard he is not the most rigorous linguist
>and it's not smart to trust the work of just one man besides.
I don't think it's fair to say that Julius Pokorny (1887-1970), perhaps
apart from some peculiar ideas he had about a Berber substrate in Celtic,
was not a rigorous linguist. His IEW does have a tendency to group words
together under a single root where it may have been more careful to keep
them separate, but maybe that was simply an understandable practical device
to keep the number of entries in the (huge) dictionary to a manageable
level. While the IEW is the work of one person, it is based on a thorough
review of almost the whole literature on IE in general and IE etymology in
particular from the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.
The main problem with Pokorny's IEW today is that it's outdated. In
particular, the laryngeal theory is not overtly expressed in the
reconstructed roots (although it's usually no problem to extrapolate them
from the forms as given by Pokorny).
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...