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I'm addled why newer edns. of the books embolded below haven't been published? I'm assuming those authors have died or are too senile. Indisputably, etymological dictionaries probably won't be best-selling and turn historical linguists into millionaires.

Is it because historical linguistics hasn't markedly advanced since 1959? Or has it, but historical linguists aren't interested in revising these editions?

Apprise me if you'd like me to ask about each of these etymological dictionaries singly, but I thought to tackle them all in one post.

      To get the most out of this textbook, you will fi nd it extremely helpful (and, if you’re a student, essential) to consult certain reference books. Chief among these is the Oxford English Dictionary, the great dictionary of English that covers the last thousand years of the language. Most libraries will possess the OED, either on paper or on the web, and you should become familiar with it and learn how to use it. You will also find it useful to consult one of the etymological dictionaries of English: Onions (1966), Partridge (1966) or Klein (1971); your library will probably have at least one of these. It will not be necessary to consult etymological dictionaries of other languages, but, if you can read the relevant languages, you will find it illuminating to browse through Corominas and Pascual (1980) for Spanish (written in Spanish), Ernout and Meillet (1959) for Latin (written in French), Meyer-Lübke (1935) for the Romance languages (written in German) or Pokorny (1959) for Indo-European, the vast family to which English belongs (written in German). And, if your library has it, you should certainly become acquainted with Buck (1949), which is a treasure trove of information about the vocabularies of most of the major Indo- European languages; this book is written in English. A recent, and generally excellent, introduction can be found in Mallory and Adams (2006).

Revised by Robert McColl Millar, Trask's Historical Linguistics (2015 3e), pp xii-xiii. Trask died in 2004. From this book's bibliography, I now cite merely the books that I emboldened above.

Buck, Carl Darling 1949: A dictionary of selected synonyms in the principal Indo-European languages: a contribution to the history of ideas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ernout, A. and Meillet, Antoine 1959: Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue latine: histoire des mots. Paris: Klincksieck.
Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm 1935: Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. 3rd edn. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
Pokorny, Julius 1959: Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, vol. 1. Bern: Francke.
—— 1969: Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, vol. II. Bern: Francke.

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More recent etymological dictionaries have been published, but generally by different people with different names.

Ernout, for example, died in 1973, so I'm not surprised he hasn't updated his Latin dictionary since then. Instead, other authors have published more recent etymological dictionaries, such as de Vaan 2011. That's now become a standard reference work for Latin etymology, and Ernout and Meillet's work has been superseded and faded into history.

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    The main reason is that professors in the 19th century had servants to do the housework, look after the children, etc., while modern professors have to do these things themselves. Also, older generations of scholars did not have endless committee meetings. Today nobody has time to write big dictionaries.
    – fdb
    Commented Aug 30, 2021 at 13:16
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    @fdb hear hear! Sadly, “today nobody has time to write big dictionaries” is very true.
    – Alex B.
    Commented Aug 30, 2021 at 13:43
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    @fdb I also think there's another issue at stake here. Now that we have so many good etymological dictionaries published in the last one hundred years, to truly write yet another etymological dictionary has become extremely harder - it has to offer something new, otherwise it would be a mere compilation.
    – Alex B.
    Commented Aug 30, 2021 at 16:16
  • Re: de Vaan, I strongly recommend an excellent review of this dictionary by Brent Vine in the Kratylos (Vine 2012), here's a quote: "It can be fairly said that we are better off with this dictionary than without it. But the Latin language, and the many scholars and students who make use of it in a wide variety of humanistic disciplines, deserve a better than this poorly-edited, incomplete, and highly partisan version of an etymological dictionary."
    – Alex B.
    Commented Sep 9, 2021 at 15:23
  • @AlexB. Huh! I have to say I'm disappointed to hear that; it always seemed like a good reference to me, but I'm certainly not enough of an Indo-Europeanist to recognize all the flaws Vine is talking about. Is there a better etymological dictionary out there, or are we still waiting for some other scholar to supersede de Vaan?
    – Draconis ♦
    Commented Sep 9, 2021 at 16:17
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As a rule, European languages have been studied (seriously) for about two centuries, so that etymological dictionaries on these languages have a definite level of maturity. Things can change or need update only if something new emerges, like an unknown language like Hittite or Tocharian that would change the picture, or a new approach of proto-languages like a new model of PIE or Proto-Uralic. Otherwise, I would expect existing dictionaries to be fairly reliable and only marginal or obscure words might be improved. It can be noted (and regretted) that recent dictionaries in the Leiden series only involve supposedly inherited words, which obviously mutilates the languages.

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There is a simple legal explanation. Works of a dead author are still protected by copyright law for 50-70 years after the author's death (depending on country), so until the work goes into the public domain, it's not legal to modify the work.

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    Many works are owned by the publisher or a university though, so they could be updated. Or the original author could allow modifications. But copyright is still a factor - you can only publish a modified version of something in copyright with explicit permission.
    – curiousdannii ♦
    Commented Aug 30, 2021 at 6:35

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