My M.A. is in historical linguistics, focusing particularly on northern European languages and how they interacted in (relatively) recent times. (While "recent," to a linguist, isn't quite as out of line with common usage as compared to how it's used by geologists, it bears mentioning that my earliest point of research is around fifteen hundred years ago.) One of the difficulties I ran into was that two of the languages I studied -- Old English and Old Norse -- descend from a common root a very long time ago, so they share some similarities that are "genetic." A simple example is that the Old English word for home (hām) and the Old Norse word (heim) are both descended from a reconstructed Proto-Germanic root *haimaz. So if a word in Modern English comes from an Old Norse borrow-word -- one that came into English following the Viking invasions in the ninth and tenth centuries -- how could you differentiate that from a word that had been there all along, descending from the common roots of the two languages?
The most effective method is that during the time following the split between the ancestors of Old English and Old Norse, each of the languages evolved in different directions. To take just one of many examples I used, some time around the eighth century, a pronunciation shift occurred called palatalization. This is when words with a stop (p, t, d, g, and so on) followed by a front vowel (i or e) eventually "palatalize" the consonant, usually to y, j, or ch. (It's driven by ease of pronunciation, and it's still happening today -- it's why in fast speech most people pronounce "don't you" as something like /dontchu/.)
In any case, words with /gi/ and /ge/ combinations in Old English all got palatalized to /yi/ and /ye/. It's why we have yield (Old English gieldan), yet (Old English gīet) and yellow (Old English geolu), to name three. So how do we have any /gi/ and /ge/ words left? Well, if they were borrowed -- mostly from the Norse-speaking invaders -- after the palatalization shift happened, they missed their chance. So most of our words with that combination (gift, get, girth, gear, and so on) are Old Norse loan-words.
That's just one of the patterns I used, but it gives you the flavor of how this sort of work is done. Differentiating genetic relationships between languages (inherited from common ancestry) and incidental relationships (through migration, cultural contact, and borrowing). Anyhow, the point is, I've been steeped in this kind of research for a long time. (Since "recently," in fact.)
But what I didn't know is that the same techniques have been brought to bear not on linguistics, but on religion, myth, and belief patterns. The work I saw was done on Indo-European speaking cultures (encompassing languages from the British Isles all the way to India), but there's no reason the same techniques couldn't be used for other linguistic/cultural groups.
When I found out about it, my immediate thought was, "Brilliant! That makes total sense." Deities can be "inherited" (passed down within a culture) or "borrowed" (adopted because of cultural contact), just like words can. The names are a big clue; so, of course, are the physical, personal, and spiritual attributes. Some of the more obvious ones -- here called by their reconstructed Proto-Indo-European names -- include *Dyḗws Ph₂tḗr, the daylight-sky god; his consort *Dʰéǵʰōm, the earth mother; his daughter *H₂éwsōs, the dawn goddess; his sons the Divine Twins; *Seh₂ul, the sun god; and *Meh₁not, the moon goddess.
When you start seeing the patterns, they jump out at you. *Dyḗws Ph₂tḗr directly led to Zeus, Jupiter, the Vedic sky god Dyáus, the Albanian sky god Zojz, and the Norse war god Týr. To take only one other example -- *H₂éwsōs, the goddess of dawn, gave rise to the Greek Eos, the Vedia Ushas, the Lithuanian Aušrinė, and the Germanic Ēostre or Ostara -- from whose name we get our word Easter. (The word Easter has nothing to do with the Babylonian god Ishtar, despite the rather hysterical post to that effect that seems to get passed around every spring. The two sound a little similar but have no cultural or linguistic connection other than that.)
What I find most fascinating about all this is how conservative cultures can be. If the name of a dawn goddess in the three-thousand-year-old Indian Rig Veda is linguistically and thematically connected to the name of a similar goddess revered in eighth century C.E. Scandinavia, how far back do her roots go? That there is any similarity considering the geographical separation and the long passage of time is somewhere beyond remarkable.
Our beliefs are remarkably resistant to change, and when a belief is hooked to something in a language, that bit of language becomes frozen, too. Well, not frozen, exactly, but really sluggish. The old gods, it seems, are still with us.
Changed, perhaps, but still recognizable.
