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From: neal@druxv.UUCP (Neal D. McBurnett)
Newsgroups: net.books
Subject: Re: Dictionaries: American Heritage for etymologies!
Message-ID: <1479@druxv.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 12-Feb-85 11:01:42 EST
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Posted: Tue Feb 12 11:01:42 1985
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Recently I've been studying Esperanto (the "Universal Second Language"),
and have wanted to compare Esperanto words to similar English words.
(E.g., montri (to show) is related to demonstrate.  Read net.nlang for
more information).
I have been quite impressed with the American Heritage Standard dictionary
for its etymologies and especially for the section on Proto-
Indo-European roots in the back.  (I don't think the collegiate version has the
Indo-European section.)  For each inflexion of each root, several
derived modern words (mostly English) are listed.  Great fun!

There are also some wonderful articles on the history of English and
Proto-Indo-European in the front of the the dictionary, along with an
article on using computers for language study.

-Neal McBurnett, ihnp4!druny!neal, 303-538-4852