Reviewed by Mark J. Elson, University of Virginia

This book is comprised of two parts, covering general and comparative Indo-European (IE), each divided into chapters. The first part introduces the discipline, surveys IE languages and culture, and presents relevant linguistic concepts (e.g. sound change, analogy, and morphological change). The second takes the reader through the phonology and morphology, by part of speech, of Proto-IE. There are exercises accompanying each chapter in the second part, all new to this edition and pedagogically valuable. An appendix providing answers to the exercises, a glossary of terms, and brief discussion of articulatory phonetics, is also included, followed by a bibliography, relevant maps, illustrations, and indexes.

The main interest of this book may lie in its Leiden School view of Proto-IE. Perhaps the most important views that either originated with Leiden scholars, or, although proposed by others, have been integrated into the Leiden School include the following: in the proto-language, the existence of an IE-Uralic unity (31–33); in the phonology (119–20), an obstruent system which includes only voiceless segments (distinguished by the oppositions of tense versus lax and glottalized versus non-glottalized); and in the verbal system (282–83), a classification in terms of verbal suffixes correlating with different syntactic constructions (282–86).

The phonology and morphology of Proto-IE are competently and clearly presented, but the general principles of historical and comparative linguistics are less so in certain respects. We find sound change formulated in terms of phonemes rather than phones (60, 64). The author states that the total number of sound changes is ‘very great’ (63), although it is not, typologically at least. We also find the statement that ‘a sound change can only be conditioned by sound elements, i.e. phonetically’ (59). That may be true in the narrow sense of ‘conditioned’, but there is little doubt that morphology may play a concomitant, as opposed to a subsequent, role in the outcome of a sound change (e.g. the phonetically conditioned intervocalic loss of s in Greek). The author feels that the Greek sigmatic aorist ‘restored’ intervocalic s analogically (79), presumably on the basis of aorist paradigms in which s was not intervocalic, but this is questionable. The difficulty arises because the author does not see sound change in its synchronic dimension, failing to distinguish between underlying and surface representations. The statement that the principles of internal reconstruction are ‘quite different from those of comparative’ (103) is nowhere clarified and is disputable. The difference is better described as the domain of their database and not of their principles.

Finally, there are noticeable omissions in the bibliography (e.g. Meillet for Old Persian, Lunt and Diels for Old Church Slavonic, Watkins for the Proto-IE and Celtic verb, and Antilla for historical and comparative linguistics). Instructors will want to exercise care in using the general part of the book, and may prefer to replace it with one of the standard textbooks of historical and comparative linguistics. They will be well served, however, by the treatment of Proto-IE, although the Leiden School orientation may require special attention.