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Guus Kroonen, Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic. Leiden- Boston: Brill (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series, vol. 11), 2013, xlii+794 pp., ISSN 1574-3586 / ISBN 978- 90-18340-7
More than a century ago Falk and Torp mapped the Germanic lexicon in the monograph Wortschatz der Germanischen Spracheinheit (Göttingen: Vandhoeck & Ruprecht 1909), which remains valuable to this day, especially as a source of proto- Germanic reconstructions. More than 90 years later Vladimir Orel tried to compile an updated version under the title A Handbook of Germanic Etymology (Leiden-Boston: Brill 2003). In it he projected the main themes of etymological solutions from the end of the 19th to the end of the 20th century, beginning with the systematic reconstruction of proto-Germanic nouns by A. Zaliznjak (1963, 1965), through reception of numerous articles devoted to Germanic etymology, to excerpts from new etymological dictionaries of various Germanic and other Indo- European languages. But in actuality Orel's book offers practically no new solutions. Since the pioneering study by Falk and Torp, and its updated compilation by Orel, the first complete etymological dictionary of proto-Germanic was not published until 2013. Its author, Guus Kroonen, is a representative of the Leiden school of Indo-European studies, and despite his youth (*1979), has already published several important studies in the field of the Germanic historicalcomparative linguistics. In a truly groundbreaking monograph (Kroonen 2011a), he systematically analyzed doublets in which long vowels accompanied by simple consonants alternate with short vowels accompanied by geminated consonants, and these consonants usually differ in voicedness. As long as 130 years ago F. Kluge (1884) had already found a rational explanation for this vacillation. Kroonen analyzed all adequate examples and confirmed the validity of Lex Kluge. It should be mentioned that more than century later some Indo-Europeanists exclusively from Leiden started to interpret all deviations as results of substratal influence (Kuiper 1995; Schrijver 1997, 2001; Boutkan 1998; Beekes 2000). In this context Kroonen's courage, in explaining the doublets systematically from already formulated laws, is apparent. Kroonen himself does not reject the substratal influence on proto-Germanic, but from studying in detail the whole lexical corpus of all Germanic languages, he estimates the share of substratal lexemes to be 3%, as against the 30% estimated by Feist (1914, 88). In his lexical corpus Kroonen...