volumes of proceedings, Festschriften and Gedenkschriften for distinguished
Indo-Europeanists, and other substantial books. Since 1997 we have had an
imposing and decidedly useful (if uneven) Encyclopedia of Indo-European
Culture.
THE INDO-EUROPEANS IN SPACE AND TIMEIn assessing the evidence from the diverse literatures and traditions of the
Indo-European peoples, we shall need to have a notion of their historical
relationships. Just as in reconstructing a manuscript archetype one cannot
simply take agreements between any two or three manuscripts as reflecting
the archetype reading, but must consider their stemmatic relationships, and
the degree to which these relationships are confused by cross-contamination,
so with Indo-European.
Thefirst question concerns dialect groupings within Indo-European.^10
There is a growing consensus that the Anatolian branch, represented by
Hittite and related languages of Asia Minor, was the first to diverge from
common Indo-European, which continued to evolve for some time after the
split before breaking up further. This raises a problem of nomenclature. It
means that with the decipherment of Hittite the ‘Indo-European’ previously
reconstructed acquired a brother in the shape of proto-Anatolian, and the
archetype of the family had to be put back a stage. E. H. Sturtevant coined
a new term ‘Indo-Hittite’ (better would have been ‘Euro-Hittite’), and at a
recent conference Robert Drews advocated using this for the larger construct
and reserving ‘Indo-European’ for what remains after the separation of
Anatolian.^11 The great majority of linguists, however, use ‘Indo-European’ to
include Anatolian, and have done, naturally enough, ever since Hittite was
recognized to be ‘an Indo-European language’. They will no doubt continue
to do so. For the time being we lack a convenient term to denote the non-
Anatolian side of the family. I shall call it ‘Mature Indo-European’ (MIE),
and use ‘Proto-Indo-European’ (PIE) for the archetype of the whole family
(Drews’s PIH).
(^10) Among recent works on this topic see Gamkrelidze–Ivanov (1995), 325–74; EIEC 550–
s.v. Subgrouping; Berkeley Linguistic Society: Proceedings of the Twenty-fourth Annual Meeting:
Special Session in Indo-European Subgroupings (Berkeley 1998).
(^11) In Drews (2001), 250. It may be mentioned here that some scholars regard Etruscan
as representing another branch of the family, related to Anatolian. See F. R. Adrados, JIES 17
(1989), 363–83; F. C. Woudhuizen, JIES 19 (1991), 133–50 and 29 (2001), 505–7; doubted by
E. Neu, HS 104 (1991), 9–28; response by Adrados, HS 107 (1994), 54–76.
Introduction 5