Fortson Chapter One

Important concepts: supplement to exercises, reading, and discussion in class.

• Question-begging
• Was there a unified culture and language that was PIE? We assume so as a heuristic aid to asking questions about the past and deciding what are meaningful and supported answers, but it is all to some extent controversial. THAT DOES NOT MEAN IT IS NOT WORTH DOING OR NOT RIGOROUS. It means we are on uncertain ground.
  
• 2.2 "The temporal side to all this is that we cannot hope to know, except maybe in a few important cases to be discussed below, which reconstructed words belong to which chronological layer of the proto-language."
• George Dumézil's Trifunctionalism §2.4
• Omaha Kinship 2.5
• Männerbund §2.8
• Sky God §2.19
• Divine Twins §2.23
• asvamedha 2.26
• taboo-deformation 2.34
• 'imperishable fame' 2.31
• oral-formulaic poetry 2.39