The Weather in Indo-European: Environment in Language and Culture

The aim of the conference is to convene scholars interested in the interaction between early Indo-European speakers and the climate and weather in their environment.

Talks will deal with numerous aspects of this relationship, including weather phenomena as reflected in religion and mythology; the phonology, morphology, and semantics of weather terminology; approaches to meteorology and weather phenomena in the individual daughter languages; and the significance of weather and climate to archaeolinguistics and the determination of the early locations of PIE speakers.

Registration

Programme

Friday 10 November

Room 21.0.19 - note location
10.00 - 10.15	Coffee
10.15-10.30	Welcome, opening remarks
10.30-11.00	The heavenly stormtroopers: The Maruts in the light of Indo-European comparison. Krešimir Vuković, Charles University of Prague
11.00-11.30	Stormy weather in the Rigveda. Christiane Schaefer, University of Uppsala
11.30-12.00	Rain, Ranae, and rebirth ritual. Arjun Srirangarajan, University of California, Los Angeles
12.00 - 13.15	Lunch
Room 23.4.39 - note location
13.15 - 13.45	Proto-Indo-European *sneigwh- ‘to fall down, to snow’. Guus Kroonen, Leiden University/University of Copenhagen; Andrew Wigman, Leiden University, & Rasmus Thorsø, Leiden University
13.45 - 14.15	Germanic weather terms with suffixal *st- and their Indo-European heritage. Adam Hyllested, University of Copenhagen
14.15 - 14.45	Coffee
14.45 - 16.00	Ten constraints that limit the late (core) PIE homeland to the steppes. David Anthony, Hartwick College
19.00	Conference dinner (location TBA)

Saturday 11 November

Room 23.4.39
9.30 - 10.00	What color was the Hittite cloud? The etymology of Hittite alpaš revisited. Dariusz Piwowarczyk & Marcel Nowakowski, Jagiellonian University
10.00 - 10.30	A tale of two skies: diéu̯- ‘bright sky’ and nébhes- ‘cloud’, and their implications for prehistoric uranology. Stefan Höfler, University of Vienna
10.30 - 11.00	Reading the clouds: An investigation of Indo-European cloud words. Julia Sturm, University of Copenhagen
11.00 - 11.30	Coffee break
11.30 - 12.00	The genesis of the Anatolian storm god. Zsolt Simon, Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics
12.00 - 12.30	Vedic parjánya- ‘(god of the) raincloud’, pŕ̥śni- ‘speckled’ and the Proto-Indo-European word for ‘sprinkling, speck, drop’. Johan Ulrik Nielsen, University of Copenhagen
12.30 - 13.45	Lunch break
13.45 - 14.15	The heat of the Greek summer: Words and names, motifs and myths. Michael Janda, University of Münster
14:15 - 14:45	Ancient Greek (ἀ)στεροπή, ἀστραπή ‘lightning-flash’ revisited. Matthew Scarborough, University of Copenhagen
14:45 - 15:15	Coffee break
15:15 - 16:15	Weather and climate in archaeolinguistics. Martine Robbeets, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Jena