The date for the new publication of the reference book A Grammar of Modern Indo-European has been postponed until a full revision of the grammar and translated texts is carried out, and the mistakes found are corrected.
This decision has been taken – against previous reports – after a new full revision of the grammar and texts was planned for the next weeks.
As previously explained, extended distribution of the Printed Edition is an important decision which might slow down (and thus condition) the publication of future revisions. A correct revision process takes obviously priority over the extended (traditional) distribution of the book.
We think Easter should be a reasonable date for the new full revision of the grammar and translated texts – the lexicon won’t be extensively revised -, although no exact limit was set. This new revision isn’t expected to mean a relevant change to the Printed Edition, which will still be the Second (Revised) Edition, but it will probably drive the grammar up to version 4.5.
Translations not still assigned, as well as the learning courses and podcasts planned, will consequently be halted (again) until the new stable version is reached.
Your Indo-European language team.
Just a recommendation: show as many examples as possible for every grammatical point in MIE, instead of examples in the daughter languages. People who read this grammar wants to learn or know MIE, not Sanskrit or Latin or Gree or whatever; so, MIE examples would be more helpful to learn the target language.
@A reader:
Thank you for your comment. You are right, there are too many examples of daughter languages in the Syntax section, and too little of actual Indo-European. We will hopefully change that in future revisions. That is a persistent weak point of the grammar in both editions, in my opinion.
Regarding the rest of the chapters (and indeed the section on etymological notes), I think it’s too early to create a simplified grammar of MIE, without explaining the possibilities among which our syncretic output was taken. That wouldn’t let others a) verify the true (natural) origin of the reconstructed language and b) challenge our selection of the ‘correct’ reconstruction of each word, which is subject to change. After all, the book intentionally retains some features of a common reference manual on Indo-European linguistics and Proto-Indo-European reconstruction.
We might plan to publish such a simple grammar, or a simple (Assimil-like) self-learning book, as you propose, in the near future, when the revival project and language use are known. Or somebody else might take the opportunity that free licences offer before we do it…
Another concer of mine is about vocabulary. Are you waiting for the indo-european dictionary the leiden project is going to publish in the near future? I’m sure the delay will benefit MIE of an up-to-date PIE vocabulary.
@A reader:
You are probably referring to the third official objective of the IEED project: “to compile a new Indo-European etymological dictionary, which will replace Julius Pokorny’s Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch”.
It will (or would) certainly benefit our project and help us write and speak a better, up-to-date reconstruction – just like any other new work on PIE and IE linguistics in general.
However, we are not “waiting” for its publication, since 1) its working process, publication date and desired output, 2) its authors and contributors, and 3) its quality, are more or less unknown.
As far as I know, it might be the best of works ever on PIE vocabulary, with thousands of proper (Middle or Late) Proto-Indo-European words (not just roots) and full morphosyntactic and phonological data. Or it could be just another compilation of known laryngeal roots and data from daughter languages, with some minor (general) changes, which might (or not) improve some aspects of Pokorny’s work, and which would be of little help to our project. We’ll see.
Thanks for your quick response!
You are right, Carlos. I mean the “new Pokorny project”. I haven’t read any of the published books by myself yet, but according to a friend of mine who has had the chance to look at the one on proto-celtic vocabulary, it seems to include lemma, not just roots.
It is supposed to be the same philosophy for all the dictionaries based on the daughter languages and for PIE itself.
Anyway, I think the vocabulary should be reconstructed having the threshold levels as a reference, because it could make the selection of semantic fields easier and “more didactic” to teach. That’s only my opinion, of course, but I really think it could help.