Asya Pereltsvaig, Martin W. Lewis, The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2015) ISBN 978-1107054530 Bookfinder link
A few years ago, some very bad linguistics was published in some very famous journals and credulously reported by newspapers which are very widely read. Usually, academics respond to nonsense by ignoring it, because proving something wrong is much more work than claiming it in the first place (Brandolini’s Law), and because the authors of bad research rarely respond well to criticism and fans of that research are not always interested in a second opinion. But two blogging philologists, Martin Lewis and Asya Pereltsvaig, have written an entire book exploring the problems with these papers and standing up for the importance of geography and historical linguistics in any attempt to understand past languages and cultures.
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Chicago Assyrian Dictionary “S” page 313 (abbreviations are expanded for clarity):
siriam (sariam, siriannu, širiam, širˀam, širˀannu) substantive masculine and feminine; [meanings] 1. leather coat, often reinforced with metal pieces, 2. (a garment); [attested in the following dialects and archaeological sites:] Middle Babylonian, Boghazkuei, Early Assyrian, Nuzi, Standard Babylonian, Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian; foreign word; pl. sarijamāti, širˀamēti.
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Some academic books overcome such obstacles that they should be accompanied by trumpets and parades when they come out. Two volumes published by Walter de Gruyter in 2005 and 2009 completed an edition of Hesychius’ lexicon which was begun in 1914 and carried on through two world wars, shortages of money, economic crises, the closing of the original publisher, the death of the original editor, and the illness of his replacement. This edition, in turn, was the descendant of one published in Venice as early as 1514. The editor, M. Musevius, wrote his corrections on top of the original text before lending the manuscript to the printer, and that turned out to be unfortunate because his manuscript was the last one in existence. The manuscript, in turn, had been made circa 1430 and was linked to Hesychius’ own work in the fifth or sixth century by a long process of copying, condensing, and interpolating. The purpose of a scholarly edition is to publish a text which is as close to what Hesychius actually wrote as possible, with a few comments on sources, especially controversial entries, and related texts.
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