Bird Norman. The Roots and Non-Roots of Indo-European: A Lexicostatistical Survey

Harrassowitz in Kommission, 1993. — 90 p.The aim of this study is to update its predecessor The Distribution of Indo-European Root Morphemes (A Checklist for Philologists) (1982) as a result of the advances in this academic field in the last ten years.
My earlier book had the stated purpose of reproducing in a handy form what Pokorny’s etymological dictionary (1959, 1969) implies to be the corpus of root morphemes of Indo-European origin. Vhen writing my earlier book Pokorny's dictionary was frequently dismissed as being sorely out of date and representing the stage reached in philological scholarship in the late 1930s. Despite this general criticism, however, no other compact authoritative dictionary of the same kind had appeared to replace it by 1982, and since that date other etymological surveys clearly based on Pokorny's work have continued to be published, e.g. Watkins (1985) and Claiborne (1989).
Watkins updates Pokorny's work either in confirming some of his suppositions or modifying them in line with modern scholarship. These changes, although not substantial, are taken into consideration in this new survey.
The publication of S.E. Mann’s An Indo-European Comparative Dictionary in eleven fascicles from 1984-87 represents a more fundamental rethinking and reworking of the data that have become available to Indo-European philologists since Pokorny's work was published. Unfortunately, after working for more than half а century on this project, Mann died shortly before the last three fascicles (9-11) of his work appeared. As a consequence, without underestimating its enormous importance, the work is still in many ways incomplete. It contains numerous printing exrors, several infelicities in the cross-referencing, but most seriously of all, it has no index.