Anatolians

Miguel Carrasquer Vidal mcv at wxs.nl
Sat Mar 6 05:36:13 UTC 1999


JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>>mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>We know Renfrew's 7000 BCE is too early for PIE
>because of the absence of the late-Neolithic innovations recorded in PIE in
>7000 BCE.  However, that vocabulary _is_ there in Anatolian.

Let's take a closer look at this.  What are these late Neolithic
innovations?  Mallory claims that such words as "wool", "milk",
"plough" and "yoke" belong here, as central parts of the new
vocabulary associated with the "Secondary Products Revolution"
(Sherrat) of the late Neolithic.   But surely there's no reason
to think that words such as "milk" and "wool" didn't exist in the
vocabulary even in pre-Neolithic times.  In the early Neolithic,
sheep, goats and cattle were domesticated, and there is evidence
for dairying of cattle in Northern European LBK sites.  The
plough was also used since the very beginning of the Neolithic,
if only in the form of a branch or stick (Irish ce:cht, Gothic
ho:ha, Slavic soxa; Skt. hala-).  That leaves only "yoke", with
the undoubted Hittite reflex <yukan> as a possible candidate for
being a late Neolithic innovation.  I've been unable to find a
reference to the first archaeological evidence for the yoke, and
I gather that Sherrat's inclusion of the yoke in the "Secondary
Products Revolution" toolset is mainly based on Sumerian
depictions of it (Johanna Nichols compares PIE *yugom with
PKartv. *uG-el- and PEC *r=u(L')L' (*r=u(k')k')).

Another undoubted Late Neolithic innovation is metal working, but
here the Hittite vocabulary is completely unrelated to the main
IE one (except maybe the word for "white, silver" harki-).

Finally, the principal lexical argument revolves around the horse
and horse technology.  The Hittite word for "horse" is unknown
(aways written Sumerograpically as AN$E.KUR.RA), but there is a
Luwian attestation: asuwa.  This looks very much like an
Indo-Iranian borrowing (Skt. as'va < PIE *ek^wos), were it not
for the fact that Luwian "dog" is <suwana> (PIE *k^won-).  So
either there was a satem-like Luwian sound law *k^w > sw, or
Luwian borrowed both words from Mitanni-Aryan.  Borrowing of the
horse word is not surprising (the Hittite archives at Boghazko"y
yielded a treatise on horses, containing a number of words of
Indo-Iranian origin, written by a Mitannian called Kikkuli).
Borrowing of the dog word seems less plausible (although Slavic
sobaka is of course borrowed from Iranian as well).

The other words related to horse technology yield no Hittite
cognates (Hittite "wheel" is not *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- but
<hurki>, related only to Tocharian <wa"rka"nt> "circle, wheel"),
except for two curious items: "shaft/pole", Hittite hissa ~ Skt.
i:s.a:, Grk. oie:ks, Slav. oje(s)- and "(to) harness", Hittite
turiia- ~ Skt. dhu:r-.  It is, I believe, no coincidence that
these are Hittite-Sanskrit isoglosses (if we discard the Greek
and Slavic words for having different Ablaut).  Again, the most
likely explanation is that these are Mitanni-Aryan loanwords.
After all, it would be rather strange to find the exact same
inherited words for cultural items such "shaft" and "harness"
when Hittite doesn't even share its basic kinship terminology
with Indo-European and has a different word for "four".

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam



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