User talk:Matt Heard/Latvian mythology/Source mining/Marija Gimbutas - The Balts - Chapter 8

"For comparative religion..."

What does this mean?

• For comparative religion, the value of the Lithuanian and Latvian folklore and folk art is the same as that of the Baltic languages for the reconstruction of the “mother tongue” of the Indo-Europeans.

Kind regards, Matt (talk) 22:46, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Baltic languages are considered to retain extremely archaic features, so author suggests that it would be hard to reconstruct PIE without them, so too a common religion. You ought to read article on her. Anyways, I don't quite understand the structure you have here, I'll therefore write down my own views on how relevant the content is to Latvian mythology ~~Xil (talk) 01:51, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

• Hi, Xil. Thanks for contributing to my mining page. :) I'm sorry the structure of my page is a bit confusing. Feel free to keep adding notes in your own section like you have done.
• PIE: Thanks for answering my question about that sentence. That helps me understand it a lot better and I'm going to add Proto-Indo-European language to my reading list. It looks like it will help my understanding of Latvian mythology and related subjects.
• Explaining my structure: I was going through the text of the source, sentence by sentence, trying to pull out any reliable 'facts' that may or may not be relevant. This way, I can make sure that I've truly perused the source and scraped out all the useful stuff before moving onto other sources. By mining the source this way, I can find content that might have been ignored had I only looked for resources relevant to Latvian mythology. For example, there are a few facts which I have found already which have to do with Lithuanian history, so I might be able to use them in a Lithuania-related article too. Thanks for your help again. Kind regards, Matt (talk) 22:39, 22 July 2012 (UTC)