Reddit reviews Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction

No problem, it was fun. :D

If you're interested in IE Historical Linguistics, you might want to check out Ben Fortson's awesome Introduction, though this is much more focused on the reconstructed language itself and the development of the individual daughter languages than in the history and culture of the original Indo-Europeans.

For more of a broad cultural history, you might want to check out Mallory's book, which is written in a very easy to read style.

Get hold of Fortson's
Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction: it's the best possible introduction from the linguistic angle.

This is a nicely annotated compendium that teaches the history of Ancient Greek through reading. You will find a huge assortment of dialects and genres represented:

https://www.amazon.com/Historical-Greek-Reader-Mycenaean-Koine/dp/0199226601

Combine with an historical grammar and you should be good to go. This is a recent introduction by a great scholar:

https://www.amazon.de/Historische-Grammatik-Griechischen-Laut-Formenlehre/dp/3534206819

Anything by Pierre Chantraine is highly recommended if you can read french. Both his treatment of Homeric, his historical grammar and his dictionary.

Another good dictionary to consult for individual glosses is the one by the late Robert Beekes. It's not perfect but very accessible:

https://brill.com/view/title/17726?lang=en

I would recommend you to consult Fortson and Ringe if you have little previous experience with diachronic linguistics. Ringe for methodological questions and Fortson for Proto-Indoeuropean. Proto-Greek contains many morphological archaisms inherited from Proto-Indoeuropean. You can focus on inner greek developments, but not everything you encounter can be analyzed in a meaningful way within Greek, so it's good to know where to look if the greek data is insufficient:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/historical-linguistics/6722029555C7DB845251785673A48B4C

https://www.amazon.com/Indo-European-Language-Culture-Benjamin-Fortson/dp/1405188960

If you want an in depth introduction to Ancient Greek dialects for students at graduate level and above this tome by Gary Miller should come in handy along with Buck's classic work on the subject, but it's not necessary if you only want to brush up on the fundamentals:

https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Greek-Dialects-Early-Authors/dp/1614514933

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-greek-dialects-9781853995569/

Well I'm no expert on IE but I don't see what other methods you could use other than the comparative method. There are books on IE linguistics.

>How do linguists determine how/when a particular phonetic shift was likely to occur?

Let's start with the when, since that is easier to answer. Now one thing that linguists cannot do is give a specific time when a sound change occurred, based solely on comparative linguistic evidence (of course this might be possible with historical or archaeological evidence). What linguists can do is put sound changes in the sequence in which they occurred.
For example, if you know that a language reflects two protophonemes t and k as k and ʔ respectively, then you know that k>ʔ must have occurred earlier than t>k. Why? Because if t>k had happened first, then the k>ʔ change would have then affected the /k/s resulting from this change and you would have a change that looks like this: t>ʔ. Incidentally, these changes I just described actually happened in Hawai'ian.

Now onto how, there's a couple of ways this question can be interpreted and it's not clear to me exactly which you mean. Are you asking why sounds change? How linguists choose a proto-phoneme to reconstruct? Whether we can predict a future sound change?

>Is there a good book I could read to learn more about (proto-)Indo-Europeans and all those subgroups you mentioned?

For the Proto-Indo-Europeans, you can read Beekes, Mallory, or Fortson. For the Pre-Indo-European people, there has yet to be a book addressing all of them (and there's a good chance there will never be a book, because so little is known about them). You can see my blog, which I linked in my first post, to see a survey of all the Pre-Indo-Europeans. From there, you must google search. If you have any questions about specific Pre-IE people, just ask.

>I'd like to learn more about this stuff too. In a way, it seems to parallel the old (and probably wrong?) legends about the ancient history of India.

Yes, well, the linguistic conquerors of Europe were the same conquerors of India: the Indo-Europeans. A lot more of the Pre-IE cultures of India survive than do in Europe.

edit: A side-note, my list on my blog is incomplete. There is a bounty of Pre-IE studies of tribes in northernmost Europe: the Baltic strip, the higher reaches of Sweden, Finland, and Norway, and the expanse of northern Russia. These tribes are often called Pre-Proto-Uralic tribes, because those lands were displaced by the Urals rather than the Indo-Europeans. Unfortunately, the good majority of stuff being written on it is in Finnish, which I can't read.

I assume you mean Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction by Benjamin W. Fortson IV?

Studying PIE isn't really like studying a modern language or ancient languages with an extant corpus. Courses in Proto-Indo-European linguistics are often very technical and a lot of it involves getting to grips with the principles behind reconstruction (so, sound change laws etc). Most people who specialize in PIE academically learn ancient IE languages to facilitate their research, not the other way round.

EDIT: if you are interested though this textbook is a good place to start

I haven't read The Horse, the Wheel and Language. I will look out for it now, I'm very interested in Indo-European history and the reconstruction of Indo-European ur-culture.

I can't really claim to be an expert on linguistics. But Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction, while not exactly a riveting thrill-ride, does set out the whole basis of linguistic change and development over time, and explains the way in which languages can be reconstructed. I studied philology as a part of history (you can track cultural changes through vocabulary, for example, or date sections of a manuscript using word changes), and this kind of guide is very helpful. It does help with understanding how Tolkien managed to create a language, too.

Especially on Greek literature German is very usefull as your second modern language. For native English speakers it's not that hard to learn either.

In Germany English and German are required for your bachelors (additionaly French or Italian for masters, and both for your doctorate at most universities).

> I was wondering if anyone who has experience in the major or something similar had anything to offer as far as advice and suggestions are concerned.

Getting into the basics of Indoeuropean Studies is very helpful. I've seen many students who didn't do it and lack an understanding of grammar. They have memorized der neue Menge for composition, but couldn't get behind the concept of latin or indoeuropean grammar.

I'd recommend Clackson and/or Fortson. When you have learnt German pick up Meiser for Latin and Rix for Greek.