A Dictionary of Tocharian B: Second Edition, Revised and Greatly Enlarged.

• Author: Malzahn, Melanie
• Position: Book review

A Dictionary of Tocharian B: Second Edition, Revised and Greatly Enlarged. 2 vols. By DOUGLAS Q. Adams. Leiden Studies in Indo-European, vol. 10. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. Pp. xvi + v + 964. $294.

This two-volume dictionary is the second edition of a work originally published (in one volume) in 1999 and welcomed in this journal by the late Werner Winter (JAOS 123 [2003]: 202-8).

The first edition was immediately hailed as a major handbook, even though it was also criticized for inconsistencies, misprints, and omissions of data. In view of these shortcomings, as well as the dramatic progress that Tocharian studies has witnessed since 1999 (rightly stressed by the author himself in his introduction, pp. vii-viii), a "revised and greatly enlarged" edition was a first-rate desideratum, and we have to thank the author for having undertaken such a massive endeavor for a second time. As with the first edition, these volumes provide both a thesaurus and an etymological dictionary of Tocharian B (= TB), with forms of Tocharian A (= TA) regularly called into service in etymological discussions. The highly useful "English - Tocharian B reverse index" (pp. 815-76) appears again in this edition. The basic layout of the entries has also been preserved: lexical and grammatical information, as well as the paradigms, are presented in a lucid way, and are usually accompanied by textual examples, basic references to the secondary literature, and a concise appraisal of the etymology. Concerning issues of substance, those familiar with the first edition will note that Adams continues to be one of the very few Indo-Europeanists who reconstructs four PIE laryngeals (*[h.sub.4] being defined as a second a-coloring laryngeal existing beside *[h.sub.2] the cover symbol *ha standing for a laryngeal that may be either *[h.sub.2] or *[h.sub.4]; for a critique of *[h.sub.4], see most recently Stefan Schumacher and Joachim Matzinger, Die Verben des Altalbanischen: Belegworterbuch, Vorgeschichte und Etymologie [Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013], 267). He also remains the only Indo-Europeanist to assume that pre-PT *a and *a fell together in PT, both resulting in PT * a.

Elsewhere, however, the second edition differs in significant ways from the first. Owing to the massive new input from primary documents and secondary literature, this edition has 134 additional pages and 784 new entries (the latter a twenty percent increase); there is also an index verborum at the end of...