I am an actual Indo-Europeanist and currently employed in the field. Please stop trying to oversell this. The sibling comment is referring to the aforementioned vague lexemes, too vague for much reconstruction of anything meriting being called a common IE religion. Earlier work by scholars like Dumézil, which are common to pop-sci shit and still hang on here and there on Wikipedia, are generally discussed within the field now as cautionary tales.
replyNo one has any problem with reconstructing some branch-level stuff like Italic or Indo-Iranian. But projecting it back to even Nuclear/Core Indo-European, let alone Proto-Indo-European, is too fraught with problems.
would you recommend a more recent book comparable to "Empires of the Word" by Nicholas Ostler on the subject of languages ? I am really enjoying the book, but it's over 20 years old at this point. I wonder how much of the information is out of date now.
replyI don't recommend any books written for the general public. Too full of compromises, oversimplifications, and obsolete ideas. I can only recommend learning the field through the same course materials used in training the next generation of researchers. Of course, this is a very large time commitment.
replyHonestly David Anthony's book ("Horse Wheel Language") is pretty good, no? Maybe a bit dry for "general public"? Also a bit old at this point?
replyThe problem with "scholars" when it comes to religion, unlike just for languages, is that scholars often are ideologically biased by the pro-Semitic chain of religion which would have a vested interest in suppressing PIE religious history. For thousands of years, even the local PIE-derived religions were unfairly dismissed as paganism. You'd have more luck talking to an LLM about it, as it's more likely to independently know the full picture, and hasn't yet been brainwashed by "scholars" into asserting otherwise. An LLM can trivially pull together bits of evidence across all of world history. At the very least, consider the shared cgpt chat with ID 6a7e0d45-0478-83ea-8142-8172433fad21.
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