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.