The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots
10 best books like The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (Calvert Watkins): Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages, The Story of English, A History of the English Language, Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts, The Wandering Scholars of the Middle Ages, The Singer of Tales, A Guide to Old English, Indo-European Poetry and Myth, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
| Author | Ebenezer Cobham Brewer |
Various editions of this book are available online in digitized form. But that shouldn't stop you from getting your own physical copy. Nothing can rival the joy of browsing through it - you're bound to learn something fascinating along the way. As Terry Pratchett says in the Foreword, it's a storehouse...
It is at the same time a history of language, a guide to foreign tongues, and a method for learning them. It shows, through basic vocabularies, family resemblances of languages—Teutonic, Romance, Greek—helpful tricks of translation, key combinations of roots and phonetic patterns. It presents...
| Author | Robert McCrum |
| ISBN | 0142002313 |
Now revised, The Story of English is the first book to tell the whole story of the English language. Originally paired with a major PBS miniseries, this book presents a stimulating and comprehensive record of spoken and written English—from its Anglo-Saxon origins some two thousand years ago to...
| Author | Albert C. Baugh |
| ISBN | 0415280990 |
Comprehensive and balanced, this classic exploration of the history of the English language combines internal linguistic history and external cultural history from the Middle Ages to the present. The emphasis is on political, social and cultural forces that affect language.
The fifth...
| Author | Andrew Robinson |
| ISBN | 0071357432 |
""Andrew Robinson has now followed up his beautifully illustrated The Story of Writing "with a highly appropriate sequel--Lost Languages, "on undeciphered scripts. Many, it seems likely, will never be deciphered ..."--Sir Arthur C. Clarke, C.B.E.A landmark study of the world's most important...
| Author | Helen Waddell |
| ISBN | 0486414361 |
This is that strangeness, without which beauty is not made perfect.
This is the wonky cousin of The White Goddess from Robert Graves. Rampant rolls of verse citation seep and suggest all the anxious influence of the ancients, particularly the Irish, who survived the initial pillage from the...
| Author | Albert Bates Lord |
| ISBN | 0674808819 |
This 40th anniversary edition of Albert Lord's classic work includes a unique enhancement: a CD containing the original audio recordings of all the passages of heroic songs quoted in the book; a video publication of the kinescopic filming of the most valued of the singers; and selected photographs...
| Author | Bruce Mitchell |
| ISBN | 0631226362 |
For more than thirty years, A Guide to Old English has been the standard introduction to Old English language and literature. This updated sixth edition retains the structure and style of the popular previous editions, and includes two new, much-requested texts: Wulf and Eadwacer and Judith.The...
| Author | M.L. West |
| ISBN | 0199280754 |
The Indo-Europeans, speakers of the prehistoric parent language from which most European and some Asiatic languages are descended, most probably lived on the Eurasian steppes some five or six thousand years ago. Martin West investigates their traditional mythologies, religions, and poetries,...
| Author | Henry George Liddell |
| ISBN | 0199102066 |
This abridgement of the world's most authoritative dictionary of ancient Greek is based on the 1883 revision. It includes some discussion of word usage, citing examples and characteristic phrases. Generally speaking, only words used by late writers and scientific terms have been omitted from the...
There is an occasional meme going around about how so many things we refer to have lost all mooring from any possible meaning. Who today knows how black pitch is, or has personally heard a broken record?
But this is simply the story of language. If you write with a pen you are figuratively writing...
| Author | Ernst Robert Curtius |
| ISBN | 0691018995 |
In this "magnificant book" (T.S. Eliot), Ernst Robert Curtius (1886-1956), one of the foremost literary scholars of this century, examines the continuity of European literature from Homer to Goethe, with particular emphasis on the Latin Middle Ages. In an extensive new epilogue, drawing on hitherto...
| Author | D.P. Simpson |
| ISBN | 0025225804 |
Since its first appearance in 1854, this dictionary has remained constant in its appeal to scholars through its many revisions. This Latin dictionary is among the best of its kind, reliable, compact and adequate for the needs of all save the specialist. Simpson has produced a book typographically...
| Author | Herbert Weir Smyth |
| ISBN | 0674362500 |
Sponsored by the Department of Classics of Harvard University, a revised edition of the late Professor Smyth's A Greek Grammar for Colleges is now available. All necessary corrections have been made, and the book retains the form which has long made it the most complete and valuable work of its kind....
Latin was an IE language spoken in a small area in Central Italy in mid-first millennium BCE. It shared certain features with other IE languages of Italy; for example, the proto-IE consonant bh became f: "bhrater" became "frater", similar to how in Cockney English "things" turn into "fings"; the sound...
| Author | J.P. Mallory |
| ISBN | 0500276161 |
This is the third time that I read this book since I bought it last year. Every time I read it I discover something new. Its an amazing book for anyone interested in the Indo-Europeans.
The book is written from the point of view of an archeologist who has knowledge of historical linguistic methods....
| Author | Henry Strutz |
| ISBN | 0764102842 |
From Schzen (to groan) to ziehen (to pull), 501 of the most commonly used German verbs are presented alphabetically with translations. The arrangement is one verb per page in easy to comprehend table form. Each verb is listed with its principal parts and followed by complete conjugation in all tenses....
| Author | Richard E. Prior |
| ISBN | 0812090500 |
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Dictionary of Word Origins: Histories of More Than 8,000 English-Language Words
| Author | John Ayto |
| ISBN | 1559702141 |
One of the better etymological dictionaries of English, not because it's especially comprehensive but on the contrary because it takes a smallish selection (around 8,000 words only) and treats each entry in detail. Unlike traditional dictionaries of this kind, which work backwards in time, Ayto...
Old English and Its Closest Relatives: A Survey of the Earliest Germanic Languages
| Author | Orrin W. Robinson |
| ISBN | 0804722218 |
At first glance, there may seem little reason to think of English and German as variant forms of a single language. There are enormous differences between the two in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, and a monolingual speaker of one cannot understand the other at all. Yet modern English and German...
Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins
| Author | Colin Renfrew |
| ISBN | 0521386756 |
This is another one of those books which I've read and enjoyed.
The basic idea is that the dominance and spread of Indo-European languages is a puzzle, where did the first speakers come from and how did they get to be ubiquitous from Scandinavia to North India. Renfrew has a neat answer to this...
The Klingon Dictionary is the first comprehensive sourcebook for Klingon language and syntax, including fundamental rules of grammar as well as words and expressions that illustrate the complex nature of Klingon culture. It features a precise pronunciation guide, rules for proper use of affixes...
The World's Major Languages
| Author | Bernard Comrie |
| ISBN | 0195065115 |
From English, French, Spanish and Russian to Pashto, Tagalog, and Swahili, this is the first comprehensive reference work to provide detailed information about the world's forty major languages. Written by acknowledged specialists in the field, the volume begins with a general introduction to...
| Author | Lyle Campbell |
| ISBN | 0262532670 |
Lyle Campbell's Historical Linguistics: An Introduction is a textbook initiating students into the study of language change. Already published in several editions, the book is quite impressive and I highly recommend it to anyone entering the field.
Campbell begins by discussing three...
