Climate and Weather in Indo-European

ended

"""Climate and Weather in Indo-European"" (IE CLIMATE) is a research project which investigates the weather- and climate-related vocabulary of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language from a linguistic and cultural standpoint, with the goal of identifying the weather phenomena and climate conditions the speakers of PIE were exposed to and were familiar with, and of better understanding these early speakers' attitudes towards and interactions with the weather and climate of the areas in which they lived. I will attain these goals by: 1) collecting and analysing the Indo-European stock of climate and weather vocabulary in order to reconstruct the PIE words for these terms, ascertain the dates and locations of first attestation, and extrapolate from these the weather conditions of the Indo-European homeland; 2) collecting and analysing Indo-European religious formulae related to the weather, names and epithets for gods associated with weather and climate phenomena, and other relevant cultural material, in order to gain familiarity with and draw conclusions about the way the ancient Indo-Europeans lived with and understood their environment; 3) creating an interactive atlas of Indo-European climate and weather terminology. This aspect of the project involves correlating climate-related terms to the location and time at which they are first attested, in order to assess the origins and spread of climate terminology. IE CLIMATE will substantially increase our understanding of the physical world inhabited by the Indo-Europeans and the vocabulary they used to describe it. This project will also significantly add to the body of knowledge in the developing subdiscipline of Indo-European archaeo-linguistics (the integration of historical linguistics and archaeological methodologies in order to understand the material and social culture of the ancient unwritten past)."