Some Advice for Writing Papers in Indo-European Linguistics:

Things I’ve Learned over the Years

Michael Weiss
Department of Linguistics, Cornell University
May 28, 2022

Making the leap from learning the grammars and histories of the IE languages to writing original
research papers is the most difficult transition that a grad student makes in their education. I’ve put
together a few tips that are based on experience, tips that I have often not followed myself, much to the
detriment of my papers. It might help to keep these in mind when you are writing something or teaching
others how to write.

Major Conceptual and Process Things

1. Have an idea, but be ready to give it up. It doesn’t have to be a good idea or one that you will
ultimately argue for, but it is much easier to get started collecting and analyzing the data if you have a
hypothesis and know what to look for. If the idea doesn’t work out, that’s ok, you will have another one.
Not giving up an unworkable idea is the number one cause of bad papers.

2. Remember you are telling a story. There should be a discernible throughline from beginning to end.
Each paragraph should contribute to the advancement of your argument. Starting with an outline of how
you plan to present and argue your case is a good idea. If you want or need to digress, footnotes or
appendices are fine, but footnotes should be moderate and are not to be used for showing off.1

3. You should form your own ideas by personal investigation of the language data, but don’t forget to
check your findings with what others who have worked on the data have found. This will save you a lot
of headaches. You will see that you have missed things or misanalyzed things that you thought were
obvious. In Indo-European the relevant literature can go all the way back to the early 1800s. It is also
much easier to criticize another scholar’s views when you control the data.

4. Check everything (forms, accents, lengths, meanings, dates of attestation, etc.) twice. Never trust
yourself to remember a form correctly.

5. If a particular form is crucial for your argument make double sure that it is really attested in a reliable
source. See it for yourself. Supply the supporting philological armature.

1
If you look at my earlier papers, you will see I violated the footnote rule a lot!

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6. Ask experts for help. If you are not an expert in Albanian or Latvian, ask someone who is. It is very
easy to go astray in languages you don’t know well.

7. Think what an intelligent person outside your own school would say about your argument. Try to
counter what objections they might raise and answer those in your own narrative.

8. Give the evidence to support your claim in the paper. Don’t make the reader go look for it. For
example, if you say “we can exclude proto-form X because that would have given Y”, give us the parallel
that shows that what you say is in fact the case.

9. Share your ideas with colleagues, teachers, and friends while you are in the process. Don’t wait. They
may see a flaw or be able to help you improve an argument. Don’t be shy about dropping by. Professors
of Indo-European love the subject more than just about anything and are always happy to talk about it.

10. Know your audience. If you are writing for Linguists you will have to explain IE notation, or
technical terminology. If you are writing for Classicists or other language specialists, you will have to
explain all that plus general linguistic terminology. If you are writing for Indo-Europeanists, then you
can assume knowledge of IE terminology and basic linguistics, but you will still have to explain any
theoretical linguistic innovations more recent than 2000 (that date is a moving target obviously).

Minor Technical Things

1. Words that are the subject of linguistic discussion go in italics.

2. Use single quotes for one-word glosses. If you gloss something with a sentence, then double quotes
are appropriate.

3. Punctuation goes outside of single quotes.

4. Don’t forget asterisks on all reconstructed forms.

5. Asterisks after forms that are not actually attested but securely inferable are good too.

6. To illustrate what a form would be if the sound laws had been different or ordered differently, I use
the symbol †.

7. Don’t italicize asterisks or Greek alphabet forms.

8. Never give a reconstructed form in the Greek alphabet.

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9. Never quote a Greek or Vedic word without its accent. The only exceptions would be clitics,
obviously, and Vedic verb forms that happen to never be attested with an accent. Otherwise if it doesn’t
have an accent, it’s not Vedic.

10. Translate all passages from foreign languages. The days of pretending that IEists can easily read all
ancient and modern IE languages are over. In general, use a standard translation rather than your own.