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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Sources
- Watkins, C. (1995). How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780195085952
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 23). Comparative Philology of Sacred and Liturgical Languages. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/religious-studies/comparative-philology-religious-languages
Which method?
Set this method beside its closest kin and read them side by side — the library lays the books on the table; the choice is yours.
- Comparative Method in ReligionReligious Studies↔ compare
- Phenomenology of ReligionReligious Studies↔ compare
- Ritual Density CodingReligious Studies↔ compare