Periodic Reporting for period 1 - IE CLIMATE (Climate and Weather in Indo-European)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2021-09-01 al 2023-08-31
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.
In my work, I try to continually raise a subject which is not often discussed: what historical linguistics methodologies can tell us about climate and prehistory, and how climate can affect the history of languages. This subject is relevant not only for the subject of the past but for societies today: climate change affects speech communities all over the world, and in affecting the lives of these communities, it affects the history of the languages themselves, in ways that will not be seen for many years. By studying the way that climate and weather have affected the shape of language in the past- whether by looking at what terms were present in the lexica of ancient languages, or by assessing speaker attitudes towards weather phenomena- perhaps we can learn more about the ways that speech communities react to changes in their environment.