Árbók Háskóla Íslands - 02.01.1954, Side 5

PREFACE.
While working on my Icelandic Etymological Dictionary during
the years 1930—50 I examined all the construed Indoeuropean
roots, 2200 in number. I was astonised to observe a conformity
between form and meaning in many of them and therefore adopted
a new arrangement, in which I classed the roots as emotional sounds,
nature sounds, gestural sounds and abstracta, and I published a book
“Um frumtungu Indógermana og frumheimkynni” (On the Primi-
tive Speech of the Indoeuropean People and Their First Home, with
a summary in French, published by the University of Iceland 1943).
The emotional sounds numbered about 5% and the nature sounds
about 10% of the whole material, but the overwhelming majority
of the remaining 85% were, in my opinin, either gestural sounds or
abstracta. I have not given special attention to the last group as
the abstracta must have developed from concreta and are there-
fore of a later date in the development of human language.
In this book I gave explanations of only about 25% of the Indo-
european roots. About that time a book by Sir Richard Paget
“Human Speech” (1930) came to my attention and I saw that he
had reached similar conclusions by observing language from a physio-
logical point of view. In the last ten years I have enjoyed his co-
operation and to him I owe many suggestions. He has constantly
encouraged me in my studies, also when preparing the present essay,
as may be seen from his remarks, which are printed as addenda at
the end of this essay.
Having thus obtained a survey of the whole Indoeuropean material
in its first stages, I was interested to see whether my results and
postulated laws were to be observed in the Semitic group. I therefore
undertook to compare IE. roots with Hebrew ones, choosing Hebrew
as representative of the Semitic languages. I especially examined
the origin of the IE. roots on eu- (196 or nearly 1/10 of the whole
material) and names of parts of the human body, presuming that
such words might belong to a very early stage in the development
of human speech. I succeeded in showing an extensive accordance