the Wheel and Dating PIE

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>frank at uiowa.edu writes:

>Then does the IE model posit that PIE, understood here as an actual unified
>linguistic system, was a linguistic isolate? It would seem that the model
>would have to do this.

-- no.  To use a historical example, Latin was a member of a group of related
languages ("Italic").   Eg., Latin "bos" is probably a loan from a related
Italic language, since the regular shift from PIE *gwous would give "vos" in
Latin,

However, the group of Italic languages didn't expand;  Latin, alone, did, and
then diversified into the Romance languages we're familiar with.  The other
Italic languages were blotted out by the expansion of Latin.

The PIE situation is similar, with the _possible_ exception of the Anatolian
group.

>For example, how many language groups must the item be attested in for it to
>quality? I assume, for example, that identifying cognates/reflexes of the
>same item in Sanskrit and Celtic would be sufficient for the item to qualify?

-- two in widely separated IE languages is usually considered indicative,
three fairly definitive; if you had a word in, say, Anatolian, Germanic and
Indo-Iranian.

>For example, just glancing over the entries in Buck, it would seem that
>there isn't as much uniformity for "wheel" across IE languages, as there is
>for, say, "cart" which shows up most IE languages (obviously with the help of
>Latin). >>

-- late loan-words can be distinguished.