Description:
The objective of this work is to present a reasonably full (but certainly not exhaustive) collection of Proto-Germanic lexemes with their reconstructions, their reflections in main branches of Germanic and, whenever possible, with plausible etymologies and etymological references (the latter include main etymological dictionaries as well as articles and notes). As it sometimes happens in other fields of knowledge, for the last fifty or sixty years linguists have operated under the misleading impression that Germanic
etymology does not leave us much more than minor issues to deal with and that the main bulk of relevant problems in this field has been solved. I do not believe this view to be true and this book is to prepare grounds for a future serious revision of the etymologies (mainly, root etymologies) automatically accepted today and sanctified more by habit than
by reason. The dictionary includes the following categories of (Proto-)Germanic
words:
(a) words attested in two or three branches of Germanic;
(b) words attested in only one Germanic branch but having precise external
cognates or being sources of wider attested Germanic derivatives;
(c) words attested in only one Germanic branch but representing ancient
loanwords that might have penetrated Germanic at the Proto- Germanic level.