Hacker News Reader

Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

A good book on this is Proto by Laura Spinney, it covers all the branches of Proto-Indo-European and also postulates that the entire family may have started from as few as a hundred speakers who were steppe nomads, which is mindboggling if true.

View on HN

A book I enjoyed in a similar vain is "Wordslut", it's an exploration of the etymology of various English words (mostly pejoratives today) and the difference in language use between genders. It's more sociolinguistics than linguistics, but a good read.

Indeed, there is a PIE 2-branched theogony behind TFA's example

  Asura - Aesir - Olympians

  Devas - Vanir - Titans

And the etymology of "Hormuz", allegedly, "Ahura Mazda"

In a similar vein: "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World" by David W. Anthony

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691148182/th...

+1 on Proto. It focuses on the tremendous amount of information revealed by DNA analysis, and it weaves this together with historical linguistics and archeology.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com