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Etymological dictionary of Proto-Germanic (Leiden Indo-F.uropean Etymological Dictionary Series 11). By Guus Kroonen. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Pp. xli, 794.

Reviewed by Marc Pierce (University of Texas at Austin)

Since 1991, an international team of researchers centered at the University of Leiden has been working on an Indo-European etymological dictionary proj-ect, currently directed by Alexander Lubotsky and sponsored by Brill Publish-ers. The goal is to prepare a new etymological dictionary of Indo-European to replace Pokorny (1959), and, while that dictionary has not yet been completed, members of the team have produced etymological dictionaries of a number of Indo-European languages and language families, including Old Frisian (Boutkan & Siebinga 2005), Proto-Celtic (Matasović 2009) and Armenian (Martirosyan 2010). The volume under review here is the 1 lth such dictionary completed under the auspices of the project. Prepared by a relatively junior scholar with an already impressive list of publications to his credit (most prom-inently Kroonen 2011), it is somewhat uneven, admirable in sonie respects, less so in others.¹

The book opens with a refreshingly honest preface, in which Kroonen dis-cusses the limitations of his project at some length. He had to complete most of the work during a two-year postdoctoral period, which put three major constraints on the project: (1) Kroonen was “forced to drastically limit the incorporation of the scholarly literaturę as well as the coverage of the Germanie vocabulary” (vii); (2) he was unable to include forms from all of the Germanie languages, leaving out modern Frisian and the modern mainland Scandinavian languages, as well as Modern Icelandic forms that “are identical to their Old Norse precur-sors” (vii) and (3) he had “to seriously consider the kind of contribution that [he] could make to [his] field” (viii). This last point is of particular interest: Kroonen believed that he could not match or outdo the achievements of other scholars and works, e.g. Libermans excellent 2007 study of English etymology, or the Old High

1

A number of reviews of this volume have already appeared, e.g., Błażek (2015), Liberman (2014) and Dietz (2014). I deliberately did not read these reviews before preparing this one; as it turns out, various other reviewers have madę comments similar to those madę here.

Diachronica 33:1 (2016), 144-149. doi io.i075/dia.33.i.07pie

issn 0176-4225 / e-issn 1569-9714 © John Benjamins Publishing Company