Content area
Full Text
Jaan Puhvel. Ultima Indoeuropea. Innsbrucke Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft143. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachen und Literaturen der Universität Innsbruck, 2012. 280 pp. ?? 72.00. ISBN 978-3-85124-729-9.
The volume under discussion represents a collection of the latest papers (pp. 17-139) and selected book reviews (pp. 147-258) by the retired UCLA Indo-Europeanist Professor Jaan Puhvel. As such, it continues the earlier volumes published in the same series, Analecta Indoeuropea (IBS 35, 1981) and Epilecta Indoeuropea (IBS 104, 2002), which contain collections of the earlier papers by the same author, but very few book reviews. The increase in the amount of the review material is justified in the Preface by the author's wish "to exemplify at least the tenor of criticism and some facets of scholarly discourse in the latter half of the twentieth century". The volume concludes itself with the full bibliography of Jaan Puhvel (pp. 261-80), which consists to date of 326 items.
Jaan Puhvel was one of the founding fathers of the UCLA Program in Indo-European Studies, which has been functioning without interruption since the sixties of the last century as the only institutionalized program of its kind in the United States (a brief account of its early years can be found on pp. 64-65 in the volume under review). The earlier part of his academic career was marked by concurrent forays into a variety of subfields, from the Laryngeal Theory (Puhvel favored a system of six Proto- Indo-European "laryngeals") to topics in comparative mythology. Its later part, however, saw Puhvel's concentration on his magnum opus, the Hittite Etymological Dictionary (HED). At present, its published volumes cover the letters A, E/I, H, K, L, M, N and the first half of P. The first part of the HED (up to K) is also widely used as a synchronic Hittite dictionary, since the author made an effort to collect the complete dossier of contexts for the respective lexical entries. Beginning with the letter L, Puhvel relies more on the synchronic presentation of data in...