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) words having their inferred origins in the reconstructed language Proto-Indo-European (PIE). By "heavily indexed" we mean every word form 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 form and its relationship to other word forms. 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 sharply limited owing to the incompleteness of our data and the low level of work on this unfunded project. What we have now comprises a listing of the main entries in Julius Pokorny's massive Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (IEW), along with our own glosses of their meanings and cross-references derived from IEW. For most of our EIEOL lesson languages, we have attempted to link relevant entries in the Base-Form Dictionaries to entries in our Pokorny Master lexicon; this work, too, is preliminary and ongoing.
In the future, we expect to make substantial additions to this lexical collection; check back here, from time to time, for new resources.
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 cannot, and does not, make any vendor recommendations.
The 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);
- 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).