Indo-European Language and Society

Translated from the French by Elizabeth Palmer, this online edition has been revised and updated by Jeremy Lin, Jacqueline Lewandowski, and Vergil Parson.

“This work belongs in a bountiful tradition. Less than a decade after Devoto’s Origini indeuropee, Benveniste, leaving aside most apparatus but ever so supremely in control of the data, has produced a classic. We may see it as a collection of monographs or as the systematic work which it is. We are told that while the evidence is all there in the etymological dictionaries, there is little previous discussion of the issues here formulated. This is because the author’s emphasis is not so much on the ancient foundations shared in common but the processes in the descendant languages and their regions. The approach is that of a linguist; correlation of the linguistic interpretations with extralinguistic matter is pointedly left to others. Language must indeed be a fertile source of history—whatever further relationship may exist between history and language—if purism of this kind, in the hands of a master, can produce such riches. To be sure, B.’s purism is that of discipline and clarity, not of rigidity and exclusion; behind it is a wealth of general historical and sociological information.” 

—from Language and Society 4:119 “Shorter Notices”