Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries: A Guide for the Perplexed

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I started creating this series of blog posts as a guide to the main etymological handbooks for the languages of the Indo-European language family since it struck me that there isn’t really an accessible go-to place to find what are the best and up-to-date handbooks and dictionaries currently available, and I was getting a little bit tired of repeating myself once every month or two in various social media groups trying to point people to the best and most reliable resources available so they can try to find answers for themselves. It has been said (probably not unrealistically) that there are as many different takes on Indo-European reconstruction as there are Indo-Europeanists, and so one of the objectives of these posts is also to give some further information regarding the advantages, drawbacks, and idiosyncrasies in the interpretative frameworks of individual reference works rather than simply providing bibliography.

The following is a list of the currently published posts and projected future posts in the series. Some of these might get broken up into several posts if they end up getting a bit unmanageable as single blog posts, as I suspect Romance, Germanic, and Indo-Iranic will inevitably need splitting up into sub-branches, different temporal periods, etc. I originally planned on trying to publish one of these per month since I started in October 2018, but it seems that they’re taking longer than I expected to write. In any case, they will get written when they get written. In the meantime I hope that people will find something useful out of this. I also hope that I won’t be self-sabotaging my own career here by committing into informal writing all my personal hot takes on the entire history of Indo-European etymological scholarship. 🙃

  1. Part I: Dictionaries of Reconstructed Indo-European Roots and Stems
  2. Part II: Anatolian Etymological Dictionaries
  3. Part III: Tocharian Etymological Dictionaries
  4. Part IV: Hellenic Etymological Dictionaries
  5. Part V: Armenian Etymological Dictionaries
  6. Part VI: Albanian Etymological Dictionaries
  7. Part VII: Indo-Iranic Etymological Dictionaries
    1. Part VII.1: Indic Etymological Dictionaries
    2. Part VII.2: Iranic Etymological Dictionaries
  8. Part VIII: Baltic Etymological Dictionaries
  9. Part IX: Slavic Etymological Dictionaries
  10. Part X: Germanic Etymological Dictionaries
  11. Part XI: Italic/Romance Etymological Dictionaries
    1. Part XI.1: Etymological Dictionaries of Old Italic (Latin & Sabellic Languages)
    2. Part XI.2: Etymological Dictionaries of Medieval and Modern Romance
  12. Part XII: Celtic Etymological Dictionaries
  13. Part XIII (???): Trümmersprachen