IE CLIMATE · Climate and Weather in Indo-European
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-09-01 → 2023-10-03
- EU contribution
- €207,312
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Climate and Weather in Indo-European
This project, IE CLIMATE, has as its primary objective the investigation of the climate and weather vocabulary of the Proto-Indo-European language from a linguistic and cultural standpoint, in order to identify what words the early speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language used to describe the climate and weather conditions they encountered. Proto-Indo-European is the reconstructed language that is hypothesized to be the ancestor of many of the languages spoken in Europe and Asia today (for example, Germanic languages like English, German, and Danish; languages descended from Latin, like Spanish and French [and let's not forget the relatives of Latin who left no descendent languages!]; Indo-Iranian languages, like Hindi, Urdu, and Farsi; Celtic languages like Irish and Welsh; Greek; Armenian; Albanian; Slavic and Baltic languages like Russian and Lithuanian, respectively; and some language groups that are entirely extinct, like Anatolian and Tocharian languages). Researchers hypothesize that the people who spoke this early ancestor language lived in the Pontic-Caspian steppe region in the late Neolithic to early Bronze Age. We can learn about what Proto-Indo-European must have been like as a language by studying its attested descendent languages, also known as "daughter languages"- the languages mentioned above, which have written records. IE CLIMATE specifically investigates the climate and weather vocabulary in order to figure out both what words the Proto-Indo-European speakers used to describe climate and weather phenomena and to investigate cultural attitudes of the speakers of early IE languages towards climate and weather phenomena. This last section is important, since language leaves a record of what people think is culturally important and interesting. The relationship between humans and the natural world they encounter was as dynamic and critical in the prehistoric past as it is today, although people in early societies understood their relationship to the natural world perhaps somewhat differently than we do in modern societies today. Investigating the behavior and attitudes of the people of the past with respect to climate is critical for our understanding of our place in the world as a society, and as a species. The objectives of the project are twofold: 1) gather the lexicon of Indo-European climate and weather vocabulary, and 2) see what we can learn from the study of the use of this vocabulary about speaker attitudes towards climate and weather phenomena.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
"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).""
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET · KOBENHAVNCoordinatorDenmark
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union