Accordance has just released this and I’m considering getting it. Having trawled Textkit on this I’ve run aground trying to track down additional more detailed critiques of Beekes’ work. This quote from mwh from from May points to two things:
Beekes being criticised for leaning to heavily on preGreek, or at least being too idiosyncratic and dogmatic about it. I would like to understand better this criticism. Are there any reviews that I could read on this somewhere easily available ? Or can anyone explain it a bit more ?
Two, and I’ve so far failed to find the reference, a reference to contributions by Timothée. I’ve seen a bunch of posts by Timothée in the searches I’ve done but nothing especially on Beekes. Any chance anyone can point me that ?
Finally there is this post by Joel
I cannot find this document on Academia anymore. The page merely says that “This is a presentation of a project currently in the works”. Would anyone have any other source for this ?
Recently I read Beekes’ dictionary for the first time. Even without knowing the author or the dictionary in beforehand, and with my incomplete knowledge of Indo-European Linguistics, Beekes’ methodology seemed awfully off.
The most obvious was his usage of variants to claim pre-Greek etymologies. Maybe that’s a legitimate technique, but I would limit it to cases where the variants in question are well attested across a variety of authors. But Beekes is fond of citing hapax legomena in order to “demonstrate” pre-Greek etyma. He is particularly fond of using words from Hesychius, which is deeply problematic because of the possibility of copying errors by scribes, later interpolations, errors by Hesychius himself, words from unattested dialects (whose phonology we cannot know), and not to mention the rather late date of Hesychius himself. It’s quite clear he likes using Hesychius in order to inflate the number of pre-Greek words.
This is probably a great example of what happens when a scholar gets attached to a particular pet theory of his. It’s as if Beekes tried to shove his conception of pre-Greek wherever he could, even if it took squaring some circles.
Thanx for this. I have scraped together a few more things on this based on various comments about the traps. Apparently Beekes rests heavily on two contentious points - the existence of a pre-Greek substrate which is apparently an unproven and not generally accepted theory, and laryngeal theory which is perhaps marginally better supported if Hittite is considered evidence. I simply don’t have the background to comment on the validity of either. But apparently he relies on these too heavily in the dictionary, at least for some tastes.
I found a reference to a remark by Beekes himself that he found about 1000+ words which could be accounted for as pre-Greek. If the quote is accurate and all those are in EDG, which has about 7500 headwords I believe, that would certainly account for the impression that he’s using a goto solution more frequently than perhaps he should.
Now, if every entry touched by these issues were clearly identified one could at least be alerted to the need for care. And if the remaining 6500 entries were reliable that would be something. My basic concern is whether EDG etymologies are useful and usable given the concerns various scholars have raised. The fact that other explanations exist or have been proposed and that pre-Greek is still largely considered an unproven theory and that laryngeals are in a similar boat does not mean Beekes is actually wrong. But it makes it a pretty big ask to accept everything at face value.
It would appear that overall like regular dictionaries there is no substitute for having several to compare.
Etymological Dictionary of Greek. In two volumes. (Leiden Indo- European Etymological Dictionary Series, Volume 10) by R. Beekes and L. van Beek
Review by: O.B. SIMKIN
Source: The Classical Review , APRIL 2011, New Series, Vol. 61, No. 1 (APRIL 2011), pp. 1- 3
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
The review I think makes it clear that overall the dictionary is a positive contribution. I dont know enough to engage with the arguments on pre-Greek but it seems to me that any controversy in this area does not invalidate their work in other areas.
Laryngeal theory is in fact the de-facto consensus in Indo-European Linguistics. It was originally advanced to explain irregularities in ablaut and the Greek triple reflex of the so-called schwa Indo-Germanicum. Hittite does indeed provide direct evidence for the second laryngeal and partially the third (generally at the beginning of words, but otherwise lost). I repeat, laryngeals are highly supported since the 70’s or so. One of the reasons Beekes wrote this dictionary is that Frisk didn’t consider Laryngeal theory as in his time it was still fringe. This is hardly the issue in this dictionary.
Substratum in Greek is also well supported. Some consonant clusters in Greek simply don’t have a good Indo-European explanation. The -nth- element that mostly appears in names (Labyrinthos, Corinthos etc. as mentioned in the review Seneca posted) is notable one. The exact details, however, are unclear and arguably can never be salvaged. Beekes argues for a generally unitary pre-Greek language, although as far as I know this is hard if not impossible to substantiate. The most glaring problem, as I mentioned earlier, is that Beekes uses the existence of variants to “prove” that this or that word is pre-Greek. Especially when he uses hepax legomena, that could very well come from later secondary developments or even simple misspellings.
His Indo-European etymologies are up-to-date as far as I can tell, and follow the majority understanding of Proto-Indo-European. This is still a worthy dictionary and a good update for Frisk, but I suggest you take the pre-Greek etymologies with a grain of salt.
I have been considering getting a decent non-scholarly (or at least not particularly so) account of PIE, covering the theory, the methods of creating the proposed vocabulary (comparative method, other methods … etc) and hopefully touching on the theories relevant to this discussion. It would of course want to be fairly up to date. If you have any thoughts on such a work I’d be interested. I see that Oxford has this https://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Introduction-Proto-Indo-European-World-Linguistics/dp/0199296685 which looks good, but it’s 15 years old and probably more than I need.
