Thomas Olander

After a few chapters on background and methodology, this book consists on a chapter on each of the main branches of Indo-European*, giving a brief overview of the branch and discussing the evidence for its unity, its internal structure. and for relations to other branches. The second bit seems a bit superfluous in many cases - to argue that the various dialects of Albanian, for example, do not constitute a genetic branch would be manifestly silly.

While the chapters are similar in structure, the authors vary quite a bit in their views. For example, the chapters on Greek (by Lucien van Beek) and Armenian (by Birgit Anette Olsen and Rasmus Thorsø) disagree rather sharply on how close those branches are.

The subtitle is thus somewhat misleading: there is not a phylogenetic perspective on offer here, but a variety. While a few things, such as the basal position of Anatolian, are becoming generally accepted, a consensus on what the Indo-European tree looks like, or even one whether there is a reasonably resolved tree to be found, remains distant.

* Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic are taken as single branches; Italic and Celtic get separate chapters, but there is also a brief one on Italo-Celtic.… (lisätietoja)