Watkins Calvert. Indo-European Grammar: Volume III: Morphology: Part I: A history of Indo-European Verb Inflection

Harvard University , 1967. — 436 p.A grammar of Indo-European must take account of certain realities. The first is naturally that in dealing with an unattested, reconstructed language we must operate by inference, and not by direct observation of speech or written text. The consequence is that a description of that reconstructed language must be necessarily far from complete. One must have no illusions on this matter; even after a hundred and fifty years of steady progress of the comparative method and the establishment of Indo- European grammar, we are still not capable of reconstruction a single well-made Indo-European sentence of the most trivial complexity. Reconstructions of sentences are of course not our aim, but to a lesser degree the same indeterminacy is to be found in most parts of the grammar of Indo-European.