Indo-European Personal Names

From: petrich@...
Message: 10105
Date: 2001-10-10

URL: http://www.bartleby.com/61/

One interesting pattern is that many of them are compounds,
like Rudolf (Germanic: red wolf), Leucippus (Greek: white
horse), etc. It might be interesting to catalogue the recognizable
parts of these names ("Horse" is common in Greek names and
"wolf" in Germanic names, for example)

That URL has not only a discussion of ancestral Indo-European
linguistic and cultural inferences, but also a similar treatment of
ancestral Semitic. One interesting pan-Semitic feature is names
like <> of <some deity>, and even sentences mentioning some
deity. However, that sort of pattern is not very common among IE
personal names, though some of them are compounds that
include deity names.