Reviewed by Joseph F. Eska, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
This magnificently produced volume is in honor of Professor Anna Morpurgo Davies on the occasion of her retirement from the Chair (now the Diebold Chair) of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford, which she held from 1971 through 2004. Most of the forty-two contributions are written in English, but there are also four in German, three in Italian, and two in French. The majority of the contributions reflect the honorand’s interests in Greek (eighteen) and Anatolian (five) diachronic linguistics and philology and the history of linguistics (two), with the remainder concerned with Proto-Indo-European itself (five), Indo-Iranian (four), Italic (four), Germanic (two), Tocharian (one), and Celtic (one). Professor Davies has always been held in high esteem and regarded with much affection in her field—I note that many of the contributors are her former students—and the generally high standard of contributions reflects this. I have not detected any examples of articles pulled out of a contributor’s drawer because they could not otherwise be placed—a not uncommon phenomenon in Festschriften—in this volume’s pages.
It is impossible, of course, to adequately review all of the contributions in this volume in the amount of space allowed, so I mention some of my favorites. C. J. Ruijgh argues that the Proto-Indo-European verbal exponent *-eh1– possesses stative rather than fientive force, as has recently been in fashion. Calvert Watkins provides evidence from Sanskrit, Hittite, and Greek for an Indo-European origin legend involving the sacrifice of sexually aroused donkeys, an instance of what he refers to as ‘genetic intertextuality’. Stephen Colvin cogently examines evidence for social varieties of speech in Attic Greek. Don Ringe convincingly demonstrates that the Old English verbs maþelian, mæþlan, and mǣlan, all roughly ‘speak (formally)’, continue a single inherited etymon. And J. H. W. Penney examines the difficult matter of the vocalism of the Tocharian B form päst ‘away’ and n)äś ‘I, me’, which has not been adequately explained heretofore.
The volume is completed by a bibliography of Professor Davies’ major publications through 2001 and a valuable select index of forms discussed. Everyone interested in Indo-European historical linguistics will find something of interest in this Festschrift, which the editor could not have produced with greater care.