Bird Norman. The Distribution of Indo-European Root Morphemes: (a Checklist for Philologists)

Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 1982. — 122 p.The purpose of this study of Julius Pokorny's Indo-European Etymological Dictionary is to reproduce in a handy form what Pokorny implies to be the corpus of root morphemes of Indo-European origin and to comment on these implications from a predominantly statistical point of view.
This compact checklist should enable linguists to check Pokorny's findings, correct and complete them as necessary, and so help produce a more accurate and comprehensive linguistic tool for the future. Pokorny's dictionary is nowadays frequently dismissed as little more than a re-working of A. Walde and J. Pokorny's earlier dictionary” with Hittite, and some new Tocharian additions, the stage reached in linguistic scholarship half a century ago, and therefore simply out of date.
While respecting these opinions I believe that Pokorny's dictionary, and this study of it, still have an important role to play in linguistic research, The following three reasons may usefully be considered:
1. J. Pokorny's dictionary is the most recent attempt to provide a comprehensive summary on the subject, and, however dated, it is still frequently used at least as a starting point by students in the field.
2. Hitherto the contents of the dictionary have remained in German, thus creating something of a barrier for non-German-speaking students of Indo-European philology. This much shortened list in English should do something to extend the available information to a wider readership.
3. The statistical materiaл which forms the main body of the work is new, and furthermore its presentation demonstrates a method which can usefully be applied to any new dictionary on the subject when it appears.