Proto-Indo-European syntax, 0th Edition by Winfred P. Lehmann (PDF)

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⭐That sure is an important book. It uses the general linguistic frame of generative grammar. You can read the book without accepting this reference, even if at the end of the book the author becomes particularly heavy in a reference to Object-Verb and Verb-Object syntaxes without realizing that he is mixing up deep hierarchical functions and superficial linear roles. But the book is essential because the author collects all we can know about Proto-Indo-European. There is a first mistake that is irritating when he situates PIE north of the Black see and systematically considers it can be traced in Hittite, Indo-Iranian languages, without quoting Avestan texts, and Vedic Sanskrit and old European languages like Homeric Greek. This method is unacceptable since the four branches he uses are just that, branches after the break-up had occurred quite a few thousand years somewhere on the high Iranian plateau. He never imagines that there must have been a common source one day and that any proto language has to go back up to this older common source, before the break-up. He does not understand, in spite of the thousands of cases, examples and instances proving the point, that the oldest form, the common source we can imagine has to be before some discriminating choices have occurred. He does not see that we have to see a linguistic state when all elements are “verbal”, dynamic and expressing processes, before nouns are discriminated out of this process-matrix. He does not understand that we have to go beyond the eight cases identified in old Indo-European languages, a situation when the first and only case was the genitive attached to the connection of one noun to another, the beginning of non-syncretic syntax. And that’s the main point he misses in spite of the thousands of elements he traces and gives: the very first syntax of the linguistic matrix produced by human intelligence and man’s need to communicate is pure syncretic syntax. One element plus a second element, the two-word sentence of babies by the way, the meaning of the two being purely situational and deictic and with a simple linear hierarchy that puts the second element forward, hence gives it more importance than to the first one, hence the standard order of N2 (secondary element) + N1 (main element). Then he would have understood that everything comes from the discrimination of characteristic traits to these two elements that are differentiated into nouns and verbs from pure process elements. Nouns are then active and dynamic nouns, like still in Sanskrit. From there everything comes in successive stages that always differentiate a new element out of one older element getting to a dual pair. Gender is typical. Original neuter. Then differentiation between inanimate and animate, animate singular being derived from neuter plural. Then in this inanimate masculine is extracted and what remains is feminine which explains why the declension of feminine singular is identical to neuter plural in some languages. Masculine is the last gender to come out and not the first one as many would like us to accept. The book is filled with references to and quotations of fundamental instances and cases that prove that the whole evolution of language was from this syncretic syntax I have just spoken of to a more and more analytic syntax via a phase of analytic agglutinative syntax. Semitic languages are the best examples of all roots being processes and the differentiation between words and then syntax coming from the externalization of different values and functions in the vocalic elements superimposed onto the consonantal roots. In other words this book is a milestone on our road due to the matter it collects but the author is blocked in a more general theory that prevents him from seeing the extremely rich matter he has at the tip of his fingers. That theory, generative grammar, is like thick gloves that prevent you from feeling what your touching.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

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