Review of Imagines Italicae

The BMCR review of Imagines Italicae by me and Benjamin Fortson is now online.  The blog version has supplements posted in the comment section.

Two projects of interest

To the bibliography for etymological dictionaries on p. 503 add a reference to the new project for a revised etymological dictionary of Romance, Dictionnaire étymologique roman, of which some 72 sample entries already exist.

To the bibliography for Latin dictionaries on p. 15, n. 34 add a mention of the Dictionnaire historique et encyclopédie linguistique du latin a new project under the direction of Prof. Michèle Fruyt.

Summary of Addenda

I've finally drawn up a summary sheet of all the addenda posted here and a few corrigenda that didn't get corrected in the second printing (based on a list originally maybe by Prof. Kevin Muse). The corrigenda are now arranged by page order.  If you'd like a copy of a pdf please email me. 

Reviews of OHCGL

These are the printed reviews of OHCGL known to me:

J. Clackson. 2010. BMCR 09.35

L Pultrová. 2012. Graecolatina Pragensia 23:153–5.

H. Bichlmeier. 2012. Das Altertum 57:221–223.

O. Hackstein. 2012. Kratylos 57:109–15.

A. Blanc. 2012.  BSL 107.2.

Multi Nominis Grammaticus

On December 15th, 2012 we were pleased to present a Festschrift to our teacher, colleague, and friend, Alan Nussbaum, in honor of his 65th birthday. The book is titled Multi Nominis Grammaticus (a quote from Aulus Gellius): Studies in Classical and Indo-European Linguistics in Honor of Alan J. Nussbaum on the Occasion of his Sixty-fifth Birthday and was edited by Adam I. Cooper, Jeremy Rau, and me.  It will be published by Beech Stave Press and will be generally available in about 45 days. You can see Alan holding the volume, and from left to right Draga Zec, Craig Melchert, Jay Jasanoff, and Sheila Jasanoff.  The presentation was a complete surprise to the honorand. Thanks to all the contributors, my co-editors, and the publishers for helping make this volume a success.

Multi Nominis Grammaticus is now generally available from Beech Stave Press.

Two more corrections, pg. 26 and pg. 159

Coulter George points out two more mistakes: 

On pg. 26, fn. 17 I give the Etruscan form transcribed kacriqu as an example of the K/C/Q rule, but the attempt to illustrate the actual Etruscan alphabet is marred by the fact that the 4th letter (reading from right to left) is mistakenly a digamma instead of an iota. You can see a correct rendering of the word in question on pg. 23 of Rex Wallace's Zikh Rasna or online here http://tinyurl.com/9hpxkeg

On pg. 159 I give the preform of pessimus as *ped-tm̥mos, but on pg. 359 as *ped-ism̥mos.  So which is it? Both reconstructions have been maintained and both can be made to work, but given the comparative peiior < *ped-yos- and given the fact that superlatives are almost always derivatives of the comparative,  *ped-ism̥mos with *-is- the zero-grade of the comparative suffix is preferable. Sihler 1995:368 opts for *ped-tm̥mo- on the grounds that the -tm̥mo- superlatives typically come in antonymic pairs and *ped-tm̥mo- would form the antonym for optimus that is otherwise missing, but it seems to me that the comparative-superlative relationship is a strongly established universal (see J. Bobaljik 2012, Universals in Comparative Morphology) whereas the antonymic pattern is a Latin specific fact, and thus I prefer to go with the reconstruction *ped-ism̥mos.

2nd printing error, pg. 77

I don't know how this happened, but Coulter George of the University of Virginia alerts me to an error occurring in the 2nd printing that wasn't in the first!  On pg. 77 of the 2nd printing I cite Pamphylian Greek ϝεχετω 'let me bring' as a representative of the Greek cognates of Latin vehō.  This is doubly erroneous.  First, if the form existed it would, of course, be a 3rd sg. 'let him bring', but as I already noted in an earlier post (http://ohcgl.blogspot.com/2009/11/another-form-bites-dust.html) there is no such form.  There are, in fact, Greek cognates of vehō like Cypr. e-we-kse 'brought' and the nominal form (ϝ)ὄχεα 'carriage' (Hom. +). 

Another strange thing about these lines on pg. 77 is that they seem to suggest that Lat. vehitur is a deponent verb. Latin has a perfectly good active vehō 'I convey' (Plaut. +) that is the exact match for the active forms cited from the other Indo-European languages. Vehitur is only noteworthy in that it is semantically a tiny bit unexpected.