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Title: In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth by J. P. Mallory ISBN: 0-500-27616-1 Publisher: Thames & Hudson Pub. Date: April, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.58 (24 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: One of many good books on the subject
Comment: This is very good book, with a lot of references to consolidate the author's approach to where really was situated in Europe the homeland of the early Indo-europeans, who lived somewhere in Europe some 4000 years BC and spoke a so-called Proto-Indo-european family language, from where a lot of branch langues (English included) originated.
In fact, the task is gigantic, given the few support each one of the approaches he takes (myths, language and archeological analysis) gains from the others. But this is the beauty of it all, seeing a respected scholar paving the path to the truth with sound work and plenty of patience.
If you like to know a bit more about the origins of many languages like English, this a good book to buy.
Rating: 3
Summary: Language not People
Comment: This is a book tracing the relationships of Indo-European languages to a common ancestral root.
Don't be fooled by a general synopsis or the headlining title into thinking it's about people as I had been. Although it does from time to time trace the history and origins of its speakers, the book most focuses on relationships between Latin, Tocharian, Irish, English and so forth. However, I still found it pretty worthwhile, because I do take an interest in language and culture.
The book is a bit outdated by now, but has lots of good graphs and illustrations throughout. I was dissappointed, because I was looking for something more anthropological rather than linguistic or archeological. Therefore, it would be five, even though it's kind of old.
Rating: 5
Summary: Very good overview of PIE theory for the common person
Comment: Indo-European studies, like Representation Art, was adversely affected by the Nazi endorsement of Aryan studies. Only recently has this field of study started to truly recover from this setback. It is **not** race-theory, but language theory and related folk-movements that most affect the core of the discipline.
This is the best book written on the topic for a general reader. The common origins for the peoples of Europe, Iran, India is something that anyone wishes to have a good understanding of history needs to understand. Many of the particulars of history are still obscure, even to the experts of the field, but the relations between these peoples all go back in the recesses of ancient history.
One of the major problems of history is a simple issue, why is it so short? Human history appears to, at best, be about 10,000 years. But the human species has been around for at least ten times that long. Why the great gap there? Indo-European studies can be seen as an attempt to push things back further into the past by studying out languages. Sanskrit and Latin have a common source, that we can see by doing comparisons, so where is the common source? And who were those people that were the common source? People want to understand who they are and this discipline is an attempt to try and understand who we are.
Of course, the research and thinking on the subject is very much complicated by the interactions the Indo-European languages has with non-IE languages, and even by those interactions that sub-groups within the IE had with each other. None of these groups existed in a vacuum. Word bowering between speakers has happened throughout history, and this gives rise to many oddities.
The author only mentions the concept of Nostratic once. Nostratic linguistics is a theoretical idea that tries to ascribe the arising of, more or less, all language to one development or discovery at some point in the far distant past. It is a much broader approach to the concept of the Proto-Language, in so far as it is looking for a Proto-Proto-Language or a common source to the various Proto-Languages. It has a certain appeal to me because it seems to make sense on a very theoretical level.
The reason the good author avoids more than page length of discussion to the idea is that it is very, very, very theoretical. There is very little real evidence going for the Nostratic concept. Of course, science - even social ones like linguistics - must confine themselves to the evidence. Nostratic is thinking of things outside the box though, and can be helpful to think like that at times as long as one sees it as a useful exercise and not as a replacement for real scientific thinking.
All in all, this is a good book and I like it.
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Title: The Origin of Language : Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue by Merritt Ruhlen ISBN: 0471159638 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: August, 1996 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Archaeology and Language : The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins by Colin Renfrew ISBN: 0521386756 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 26 January, 1990 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Genes, Peoples, and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Mark Seielstad ISBN: 0520228731 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 07 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, Sarah Thorne, Heather Mimnaugh ISBN: 0201442310 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: October, 1996 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Comparative Mythology by Jaan Puhvel ISBN: 0801839386 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: September, 1989 List Price(USD): $20.95 |
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