nobody except a dedicated, desiccated bookworm could conceivably spend hours browsing through walde-pokorny’s vergleichendes wörterbuch der indogermanischen sprachen for the sheer pleasure of it. that is a book one consults for reference, with reverence, perhaps, but not love. it is not a book you take to bed with you. buck’s book [a dictionary of selected synonyms in the principal indo-european languages] makes the indo-european lexicon spring to life in your mind. as you brose through the various sections […] you acquire a vivid sense of the real world in which the proto-indo-european people and their farflung descendants have been living for the last several thousand years. *
1:0 für buck. 🙂
* aus: matisoff, james a. (1978): variational semantics in tibeto-burman. the „organic“ approach to linguistic comparison. philadelphia: inst. for the study of human issues. (= occasional papers of the wolfenden society on tibeto-burman linguistics. 6.) s. 142f.
