Anatolian corrigenda to the Etymological dictionary of Latin.

• Author: Vaan, Michiel De
• Position: Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages

In July 2008 my Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages (EDLIL) was published. It is part of a Leiden University project for a new Indo-European Etymological Dictionary (IEED), which involves the publication of separate etymological dictionaries for each major branch of Indo-European, followed by a comprehensive and synthetic volume on Proto-Indo-European, which is to replace Pokorny 1959. For many years the contributors working in Leiden have been gathering weekly to discuss the etymologies that should enter the final version of the IEED; this is one of the reasons why one finds so many cross-references in our works. As I state in the introduction:

For the collection and interpretation of the cognate words, I have relied heavily on the works of colleagues in the IEED project: Kloekhorst 2008 for Anatolian, Alexander Lubotsky's Indo-Iranian database, Robert Beekes forthcoming, for Greek, Derksen 2008 for Slavic, and Derksen forthcoming for Baltic (p. 13). The expression "relied heavily" is intentionally ambiguous, since the extent to which I relied on the cited works differs from case to case. Also, it is not customary in studies of this nature to indicate the source of the cognate forms, since they are generally collected from standard dictionaries and grammars.

In 2007 my colleague Alwin Kloekhorst received his Ph.D. on the basis of his Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon (EDHIL), which was officially published in 2008. His detailed and well-argued study has fundamentally changed our view of the history of the Anatolian languages, and, by extension, of Proto-Indo-European. I made extensive use of Kloekhorst's text from the moment it was defended in 2007 for incorporating cognate Anatolian forms into EDLIL.

I now realize that the absence of specific citations for cognate forms in EDLIL may cause confusion as regards the Anatolian evidence, since many of Kloekhorst's analyses differ from what scholars have hitherto assumed. Even though EDHIL was published well before EDLIL, both carry 2008 as their year of publication. Unfortunately, colleagues might first encounter Kloekhorst's interpretations of Anatolian through EDLIL, for the simple reason that more libraries will acquire the latter than the former. I would therefore like to add the following line to the previous statement from my introduction: "All interpretations and reconstructions of the Anatolian evidence are taken from Kloekhorst 2008...