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Comparative Philology of Religious Languages/Evidence
Method evidence record

Comparative Philology of Religious Languages

Comparative philology of religious languages applies the historical-comparative method of linguistics - regular sound laws, cognate sets, and reconstruction - to the sacred vocabulary, ritual formulae, and poetic diction of related languages. Building on the comparative method that recovered Proto-Indo-European, Calvert Watkins's How to Kill a Dragon (1995) showed that one can reconstruct not only individual words but inherited phraseology and poetics, tracing formulae such as 'imperishable fame' and the dragon-slaying narrative from Hittite and Vedic through Greek and Germanic to medieval Irish. Applied to religion, the method uses systematic phonological correspondences to establish the prehistory of divine names, ritual terms, and liturgical expressions, reconstructing the proto-forms and inherited religious poetics that underlie attested traditions, while guarding against chance resemblance and borrowing.

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Comparative Philology of Sacred and Liturgical Languages
Taxonomic method record · process-pipeline / religious-studies
  • Watkins, C. (1995). How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. New York: Oxford University Press. · ISBN 9780195085952
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Related methods

Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.

Same method familyComparative Method in Religionmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Same method familyPhenomenology of Religionmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Same method familyRitual Density Codingmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.

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Sources recorded, not reviewed

Bibliographic sources are present. Claim-level evidence review has not been performed.

Sources

1 recorded citation, copied from the method source record.

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