Indo-European Lexicon
PIE Etyma and IE Reflexes
Jonathan Slocum
Our project goal is to produce a large, heavily indexed collection of Indo-European (IE) "reflex" words having their inferred etymological origins in their reconstructed ancestral language Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Re: "large" we anticipate well over 100,000 reflex words (the present size is already 50,000). By "heavily indexed" we mean every word in the collection will be indexed alphabetically, within its language and family, so that one may click on browser links to see all information associated with each word and its relationship to other words: there will be no search engine, nor any need for one.
At present, the portion of this lexical collection that is available to the public is moderately limited owing to a relative paucity of data resulting from our historically low level of work on this secondary project. Much of what we recently had, as a lexicon, comprised simply the collection of main entries ("etyma") in Julius Pokorny's massive Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (IEW), along with our own glosses of their meanings and chains of cross-references derived from IEW.
Our IE Lexicon is now our primary focus of work. For most of our EIEOL lesson languages, we have attempted to link relevant entries in the Base-Form Dictionaries to etyma in our Pokorny Master lexicon; this work is ongoing. A growing fraction of the PIE etyma listed in our Pokorny Master Collection (see below) are being associated with more modern IE reflex words that historically were derived from them: low-level Semantic Fields Index pages (see below) and the Pokorny Master pages themselves are being linked to reflex entries as we add etymological derivations.
Pokorny Master Collection
There are great disparities in character set capabilities and font repertoires among personal computers in contemporary use. Unfortunately, support for Unicode and/or the collection of fonts installed on your personal computer cannot be detected by a web server! Accordingly, we have prepared multiple versions of each resource, and you may select from among them based on your situation and experience --
- for systems/browsers with Unicode support and fonts spanning the Unicode 3 character set for the relevant languages: Pokorny in full Unicode (v. 3 or higher);
- for systems/browsers with Unicode support, but fonts for only the Unicode 2.0 character set (including combining diacritics): Pokorny in older Unicode (v. 2.0);
- for systems/browsers lacking Unicode support, or having less than full Unicode 2.0 font support: Pokorny in ISO-8859-1 (simplified Roman).
Semantic Fields Index
A recent addition to our collection is a Semantic Index to the Proto-Indo-European etyma listed in Pokorny, using a scheme developed by Carl Darling Buck (cf. A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages, 1949). This semantic indexing scheme has been used by others and, while not perfect, seems adequate for our needs. We are in the process of making other substantial additions to this lexical collection, including "reflex" words (e.g. in Greek, Latin, and English) derived from PIE etyma as listed by Pokorny; these can be found via links in our lowest-level Semantic Index pages, though at present such links are relatively few in number. But check back here from time to time for new resources, as this work is proceeding swiftly.
Pages in the Semantic Field index are entirely represented in ISO-8859-1; however, any IE Lexicon pages that they may link to are replicated in 3 versions, just like our Pokorny Collection, for your browsing convenience. PIE "reflex" pages, each representing derived words in a host of languages, are also replicated in 3 versions. See the following section for more information about these versions.
Text Encodings
Owing to the requirements of the various non-Roman alphabets, we have adopted Unicode® to represent lexical material in scripts other than Roman (specifically, other than Latin-1), and for such material our HTML style sheet requests that browsers use one of the following Unicode-compliant fonts (listed here in alphabetical order):
- Alphabetum Unicode (6.5 or above);
- Arial Unicode MS (Windows only?);
- Code2000;
- Everson Mono Unicode;
- Gentium;
- Lucida Grande (Macintosh only);
- Lucida Sans Unicode (Windows only);
- Palatino Linotype (for polytonic Greek);
- TITUS Cyberbit Basic.
What this means is that, in order to read words written in non-Roman scripts, you must employ Unicode-aware software, and it must have available a Unicode-compliant font -- such as one of those listed here. (At the time of writing these requirements are generally met, on Macintosh, only by OS X 10.2 or higher with a suitably advanced browser.) As we become aware of the existence and wide distribution of other large Unicode-compliant fonts, we will add them to our list.
For those whose browsers refuse to properly render Unicode characters, the editor attempts to replicate all materials using a standard Roman transliteration; obviously these are not sufficient to represent languages, such as Greek, that are not written in the so-called Roman alphabet, but they do offer a start. Anyone wishing to read online resources in their native scripts should acquire software fully supporting the Unicode standard; some supporting software is free, while some may require payment. The Linguistics Research Center and University of Texas cannot, and do not, make vendor recommendations.