LINGUIST List 26.2328
Mon May 04 2015
Review: Historical Ling; Morphology; Phonology: Beekes (2014)
Editor for this issue: Sara Couture <saralinguistlist.org>
Date: 08-Jan-2015
From: Eleonora Sausa <eleonorasausa
gmail.com>
Subject: Pre-Greek
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AUTHOR: Robert S. Beekes
TITLE: Pre-Greek
SUBTITLE: Phonology, Morphology, Lexicon
SERIES TITLE: Brill Introductions to Indo-European Languages
PUBLISHER: Brill
YEAR: 2014
REVIEWER: Eleonora Sausa, Università degli Studi di Pavia
Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry
INTRODUCTION
The book ‘Pre-Greek - Phonology, morphology, lexicon’ by Robert S. P. Beekes belongs to the prestigious Brill collection ‘Brill Introductions to Indo-European Languages’ edited by Michiel de Vaan and Alexander Lubotsky. This concise lexicon constitutes a further development of the recent ‘Etymological Dictionary of Greek’ by the same author published by Brill (2010), in which all non-Indo-European forms in the Greek lexicon are discussed. In this volume, the substrate language of Greek, called Pre-Greek, finds a separate treatment and a balanced space. The Pre-Greek material is, here, systematically collected and analyzed, with specific sections on phonology, morphology and an accurate lexicon of Pre-Greek etyma.
The book is based on the study by Furnée (1972), and is the result of personal research carried out over almost 40 years, with the collaboration of other specialists, namely Alexander Lubotsky and Wouter Henkelman. The part of the work devoted to the lexicon was partially compiled by Michael Peyrot and then brought to completion by Stefan Norbruis, who is the editor of the entire book.
SUMMARY
After the preface of the editor and a short introduction of the author, the book develops in five chapters. Chapter 2, ‘Phonology’, and Chapter 3, ‘Morphology’, give a general overview of the phonological and morphological features of Pre-Greek. Chapter 4, ‘The unity of Pre-Greek’, and Chapter 5, ‘Pre-Greek is Non-Indo-European’, provide together a synthetic explanation of the linguistic unity and affiliation of Pre-Greek. Finally, Chapter 6, ‘The Pre-Greek Lexicon’, presents a detailed lexicon of all etyma considered Pre-Greek, internally organized per semantic areas. After that, an index of the lemmas collected in Chapter 6 is provided.
The introduction contains some basic concepts and a brief state of the art on Pre-Greek studies. The ‘Pelasgian’ theory, i.e. the theory which states that the substrate language of Greek, ‘Pelasgian’, was an Indo-European dialect and traceable in few Greek etyma, is briefly mentioned and totally rejected. The author ideally accomplishes the work of Kuiper and Furnée (1972), who explicitly rejected the Pelasgian theory and theorized a Non-Indo-European Pre-Greek substrate, reconstructable from the Greek lexicon. Furnée’s book provides a wide collection of all Pre-Greek forms, analyzing 4,400 words and discussing approximately 1000 Pre-Greek etyma.
Chapter 2 provides a phonemic system of Pre-Greek, reconstructed on the basis of all Greek words considered as Pre-Greek. At paragraph 2b, the author gives some important indications concerning how to recognize a word as Pre-Greek: if a given word has no Indo-European etymology or shows some typical Pre-Greek suffix, or the meaning concerns names of plants or animals, we are most likely dealing with a Pre-Greek word. Concerning the phonemic system, three series of consonants are hypothesized, without any distinction for either voice or aspiration, which are not considered distinctive features within this system, but rather distinguished for palatalization and labialization: the system comprises consonants, palatalized consonants and labialized consonants. The author assumes a five vowel system (a, e, i, o, u), where the vowels ‘e’ and ‘o’ were originally variants of the phoneme ‘a’, resulting from the influence of coarticulation with palatalized and labialized consonants, respectively.
Characteristic phonemes and phoneme clusters of Pre-Greek words, rare in Proto-Indo-European (PIE), are also shown and explained in this chapter, such as the diphthongs ‘au’, ‘ou’, the phoneme ‘b’, the clusters ‘bd’, ‘gd’, ‘gn’, ‘dn’, ‘kt’, ‘kch’, ‘mn’, ‘pph’, ‘rd’, ‘rkn’, ‘rn’. Some other phonetic features considered typical of the Pre-Greek are geminated consonants, the prothetic vowel, the s-mobile, labial stops.
In Chapter 3, the author takes into account some relevant morphological phenomena of Pre-Greek, focusing in particular on reduplication, suffixation and word end. A partial reduplication is attested in the Pre-Greek forms. Large space is devoted to suffixation, because the author believes that the presence of some suffixes is a signal of a Pre-Greek origin, and, for this reason, a wide survey of the suffixes is provided, followed by examples, mostly taken from Furnée (1972) and Fick (1905). Most suffixes have the same structure: a vowel (mostly a, i, u), a consonant (stops can be prenasalized) and the usual variant of the consonant. Another type of suffix contains -n- directly following the root, and yet another a -s- followed by a dental. Then some word end structures, considered original Pre-Greek finals, are discussed.
Chapter 4 contains arguments in support of the unity of Pre-Greek, considered as a single language. According to the author, the fact that all material illustrated in the preceding chapters concerns one language is self-evident. Even though other languages have existed in the same area, and other non-Indo-European loanwords have entered into Greek, the position of the author is that non-Greek words are Pre-Greek, unless there is a reason to assume another origin.
Chapter 5 argues that Pre-Greek is certainly a Non-Indo-European language. The evidence proposed by the author is that, as our knowledge of PIE has greatly improved in the last 30 years, in particular thanks to the laryngeal theory, if for some words a PIE reconstruction is impossible, their origin is surely Non-Indo-European.
Chapter 6 opens the richest part of the book: a Pre-Greek lexicon, with 1106 words organized into semantic areas. Each lexical entry starts with the lemma, followed by the gender of the word and its English translation. For each word a short explanation why the word is considered Pre-Greek is given, along with the main literary sources of attestations.
The words collected mainly belong to the semantic category of natural entities, such as Flora, Fauna, Landscape and Minerals. Many terms refer to the cultural world and are connected to agriculture, viniculture, utensils and art. Adjectives, verbs and adverbs are separated from nouns and appear in dedicated sections. Very interesting is the section on theonyms, divine epithets and mythical characters, which shows that many terms universally associated to the Ancient Greek world are, actually, Pre-Greek.
EVALUATION
The book, certainly, constitutes a precious resource for Indo-Europeanists, Greek scholars, and historical linguists, and fills an important gap in the history of the Greek language and in the studies on Pre-Indo-European languages spoken in the Mediterranean. The last work completely devoted to this topic before this edition was ‘Die wichtigsten konsonantischen Erscheinungen des Vorgriechischen’ by Furnée (1972), on which Robert Beekes bases many considerations and examples, but the need for a new, updated edition in English was shared by linguists of different fields.
The work ideally completes the comprehensive work carried out in the ‘Etymological Dictionary of Greek language’, providing deserved attention to a minor but fascinating topic, the unattested substrate language of Greek, reconstructable thanks to its traces left in the written Ancient Greek texts.
The consistent and detailed reconstruction of Pre-Greek phonology is particularly valuable, and the evidence the author provides for the non-Indo-European origin of a number of Ancient Greek etyma is especially compelling.
The richest part of the book is, nonetheless, the Pre-Greek lexicon, which is a significant improvement on that by Furnée (1972), and appears for the first time in English, in a concise but accurate version. Each lexical entry is reduced to the essential for basic consultation, without lacking in rigor and completeness. The importance of semantics in such study is highlighted by the systematization of the lexicon in semantic areas. Meaning is, indeed, one of the indicators that a word is Pre-Greek. This classification, thus, is particularly helpful both for specialists, who can appreciate the semantic homogeneity of the Pre-Greek words used by Greeks, but also for non-specialists, such as historians and anthropologists of the ancient world, who can, in this way, approach easily the obscure Pre-Greek era.
The relationship between Pre-Greek and other substrate languages spoken in the same area, which most likely left loanwords in Ancient Greek, is not ignored but remains outside the aims of the book. This seems to be, in my opinion, the only limit of the book, which could have provided more updates on the puzzling Mediterranean contact situation.
Furthermore, one of the biggest merits of the volume, an extraordinary conciseness combined with a detailed completeness, shows sometimes, in my opinion, some weakness. Chapters 4 and 5, for example, devoted to the unity and affiliation of the language, are surprisingly clear but extremely reduced and, probably, such a controversial topic deserved more space.
Nevertheless, conciseness and brevity are, globally, an appreciated choice and are also understandable, as the author could not accomplish the final draft of the book for health reasons and the editor only completed the work, without making substantial changes.
These minor issues, however, do not detract from the overall quality of the volume, which represents as a fundamental resource in the studies on substrate Pre-Indo-European languages and, at the same time, opens new horizons in this field, towards language contact between Indo-European and Non-Indo-European languages in a pre-historical era.
REFERENCES
Beekes, Robert S.P. 2010. Etymological dictionary of Greek. Leiden: Brill.
Fick, Arnold. 1905. Vorgriechische Ortsnamen als Quelle fur die Vorgeschichte Griechenlands. Göttingen.
Furnée, E.J. 1972. Die wichtigsten konsonantischen Erscheinungen des Vorgriechischen. Mit einem Appendix über den Vokalismus. The Hague.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Eleonora Sausa is finishing her PhD in Linguistics at University of Pavia, Italy. She works on Ancient Greek in a constructionist approach, and her thesis focuses on verb argument structure constructions in Homer. She is also interested in computational methods and digital resources for ancient languages, and in teaching Italian as second language.
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