Nomina im Indogermanischen Lexikon


Nomina im Indogermanischen Lexikon is an etymological dictionary of the Proto-Indo-European nominals, that is, nouns and adjectives. It appeared in 2008, edited by German linguists Dagmar S. Wodtko, Britta Irslinger, and Carolin Schneider. Like other modern PIE dictionaries, NIL utilizes the modern three-laryngeal theory for its reconstructions.

History

During the 2000s, scientists at the University of Freiburg worked on a project called "Indogermanisches Nomen", comprising a volume on nominal inflection, to become part of Manfred Mayrhofer's series on Indo-European grammar; a dictionary called Lexikon der indogermanischen Nomina ; and a work on PIE primary adjectives. Eventually, the project was cancelled due to cutting of funds.
In 2008, a reduced version of the LIN was published under the title Nomina im Indogermanischen Lexikon. It includes only a limited selection of words and is lacking the planned grammatical section, which should have listed PIE nominal inflection types along with their scope of use and syntactic implications. Still, an overview of PIE mechanisms for deriving nominals from verbs – root nouns, suffixes, vṛddhi derivations, etc. – is included.

Entries

Part of the entries are based on noun stems or adjectival stems, while a large number of PIE nominals are derived from verbal roots.
The entries are modelled on the concept of the LIV. Each contains
The daughter languages often have changed the meanings of inherited words. Consequently, many of NILs entries contain words with widely different meanings. For example, the entry 'deep' treats the Lithuanian words dubùs 'deep' and dubuõ 'bowl, pelvis', Old Irish dub 'dark, black', and Albanian det 'sea', among many others. 'shine, glow' lists derivatives with meanings as diverse as 'a light, insight, appearance, wrath, white, clean.'

Other PIE dictionaries and grammars