the Wheel and Dating PIE

[Eduard Selleslagh]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Larry Trask" <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2000 1:17 PM

> Ed Selleslagh writes:

> I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree with most of what Ed has written
> here.

>> After my first response on Dec. 18, 1999, I have been thinking about the PIE
>> root *kwekwlo- (and *rotH-) in a wider context, in particular about its
>> possible presence in Basque.  It is almost certain that the Basques, who had
>> been living in virtual isolation throughout the last Ice Age,

> Maybe a little rash?  The Basque language was certainly in place before the
> Romans arrived in the first century BC, and very probably before the Celts
> arrived in the first millennium BC.  But anything before that is sheer
> speculation: there is no evidence.

[Ed]

See H. Haarmann's article in FLV77 (1998) "Basque ethnogenesis, acculturation
and the role of language contacts".  He is very cautious, but the text contains
serious indications for what I said. Of course no 'evidence'.

>> learned about the wheel from IE peoples or their otherwise spreading
>> culture, since the terrain of the Pyrenean peoples offered little incentive
>> for inventing the wheel, as opposed to steppe peoples who had to travel long
>> distances over essentially flat terrain.

> Maybe, but what evidence is there?  There is no evidence for IE speech near
> the Basque Country before the first millennium BC.  But I confess I simply
> don't know how early the wheel is attested there.

[Ed]

Evidence, no, indications: yes, albeit almost exclusively cultural and in
suspected substrate effects. See also above. What is much better known, is the
presence of 'Basque genes' in the area, probably going back to the Upper
Palaeolithic.

>> In Basque, there is a root *bil that has a meaning of 'round'.

> Correct. Though our reconstructed *<bil> is nowhere recorded as an
> independent word, its presence in a number of transparent formations makes
> its former reality certain.

>> It appears in compounds like 'ibili' ('walk', originally: 'go around')

> No; I can't agree.

[Ed]

I learned it (i.e. "go around") from you, maybe two years or so ago, on the
Basque-l list.

> First of all, the verb <ibili> does not mean 'walk', though it is often so
> glossed, for want of a better equivalent.  It is a verb of undirected motion,
> and the best English gloss I can offer is 'be in motion'.  And no such sense
> as 'go around' is attested or reconstructible.

> Furthermore, the verb <ibili> is definitely not a compound, nor does it
> contain the element *<bil> 'round'.  It has the normal structure for a native
> Basque verb.

[Ed]

In that case I don't understand your statement of a few years ago. Have you
changed your opinion? (which I would readily accept).

> The citation form of a Basque verb is its perfective participle, and a native
> verb has a participle of this form: *<e-Root-i>.  Here <-i> is the
> participial suffix, possibly identical with the ancient adjective-forming
> suffix <-i>, as in <gazi> 'salty', from <gatz> 'salt'.

> Removal of this suffix yields the stem of the verb, which was formerly a free
> form and still is in the east, where it is called the 'radical'.

> The prefix *<e-> is of unknown function, but it occurs in all non-finite
> forms of native verbs.  In my 1990 paper, I argued that it was probably a
> nominalizer which created verbal nouns.

> The original <ebili> (well attested) becomes modern <ibili> by a
> well-understood phonological change, a vowel-height assimilation:

> e --> i / #Co __ C(C) V[+high] C V

> Now, it seems clear that, in early Basque, verbal roots were sharply
> distinguished from all other roots.  A verbal root could only be verbal, and
> never nominal or adjectival, unless converted to a nominal or adjectival stem
> by the addition of a category-changing affix.  There is no known case of a
> nominal or adjectival root appearing inside a prefixing verb (a verb taking
> the prefix *<e->).  Hence <ibili> surely cannot contain adjectival *<bil>,
> and the resemblance in form is a coincidence.

[Ed]

Do we really know the kind of root *bil originally was?

>> and 'biribil' (a reduplicated form meaning 'round').

> Agreed.

>> This could be a phonological adaptation of a derivation of *kwekwlo-,
>> especially its Germanic forms (cf. Eng. wheel, Du.  wiel), or -just maybe-
>> one of its oldest Celtic forms (But: mod. Welsh: 'olwyn' = wheel,
>> apparently with metathesis), because Basque doesn't have /w/, and the
>> closest Basque phoneme is /b/ (a tendency that is still alive in Castilian:
>> Washington = Bassinton, at times even on TV! And a WC is often called 'un
>> bater').

> I am not sure what the word 'this' at the beginning is meant to refer to.
> But I cannot see how *<bil> can plausibly be derived from the IE word, and
> still less its reduplication <biribil>, which itself can be accounted for
> within Basque.

[Ed]

What I meant was this (I'm sorry for having been so elliptic), and you may
agree or not: *kwekwlo (or *kwekulo) looks to me like a reduplicated form,
probably inspired by the reconstruction from Grk. kyklos. Indeed, it is the
logical thing to assume if you try to reconstruct from Germanic (Eng. wheel, or
Du. wiel < hwi:l- < *kwelo), and we know the Old Greek tendency to
reduplication and insertion of quasi-dummy syllables for basically 'prosodic'
reasons, like in the sigmatic aorist etc. So, it is not unreasonable to assume
(no hard evidence!!) that *kwelo gave rise to a Basque re-interpretation *bel-,
via some intermediate (most likely IE) stage *(h)wel-.

>> The Basque word 'ibili' needs some further explanation. It is obviously a
>> compound, but of what?

> No; I can't agree.  It is not a compound at all.  It consists of one root and
> two affixes.

[Ed]

That may be right or not: at face value it looks right, but not if it is a
contraction of syllables as explained hereafter. I agree I shouldn't have said
'obviously': it was only to me.

>> My hypothesis is as follows: *i-b(i)-bil-i, with haplology.  The initial and
>> final i's are common features of Basque verbs. -b(i)- would be a root that
>> means 'walk, run' (cf. IE wad-), and -bil- '(a)round', of course.

> Those vowels are more than "common features": they are affixes, one of which
> is fully understood, the other of which is only partly understood.  And this
> proposal strikes me as very fanciful: it is supported by no evidence at all,
> and it conflicts with the observation that a native Basque verb has the form
> *<e-Root-i>, where the root must be strictly verbal.  Moreover, native verbal
> roots are usually monosyllabic and very commonly of the form -CVC-.

>> The hypothetical root *b(i) is the subject of a long running historical
>> controversy. It is supposedly found in words like:

>> bide ('way, road'), probably a compound of *bi- and the common suffix (of
>> 'extent') -te, meaning something like 'the physical area where one walks'.

> No such root as the suggested *<b(i)> can be defended, in my view.  Moreover,
> <-te> is not a suffix of extent, but rather a temporal suffix indicating
> 'duration'.  Examples: <gerrate> 'wartime' (<gerra> 'war'), <gosete> 'famine'
> (<gose> 'hunger'), <eurite> 'rainy season' (<euri> 'rain'), <negute>
> 'wintertime' (<negu> 'winter'), <agorte> 'drought' (<agor> 'dry'), and many
> others.

[Ed]

It is also part of (compound) 'extent' suffixes like -ate, -arte, ...You're
right if you consider -te in isolation.

> Finally, an original *<bite> should *not* develop into <bide>.  There is no
> parallel for such a development.

[Ed]

Right, but not impossible for such an old term.

>> ibi, more commonly ubi ('ford, a place where one can wade through the
>> water'), according to e.g. Michelena, u-bide ('water-way': u-, uh- or ug- is
>> the form of ur, 'water', in compounds),

> Correct.  In Basque word-formation, a first element loses its final /r/.
> Hence <ur> 'water' + <bide> 'way' yields *<ubide> regularly, followed by
> reduction to <ubi> (such reductions in final elements are sporadic but
> frequent), and then by vowel assimilation to <ibi>.  In fact, the form
> <ibide>, with assimilation but no reduction, is recorded in 1630, in the
> writer Etxeberri of Ziburu, so the etymology is directly confirmed.

>> and to Bertoldi, a compound of ibi-bide, with haplology.

> Far less likely, I'd say, and in fact unnecessary: why try to derive <ibi>
> from a hypothetical *<ibi-bide>?  What does this achieve?  Anyway, the
> attested form <ibide> confirms the proposal *<ur-bide>.

>> The existence of a root *(i)b(i) has been posited since Hubschmidt,
>> because of its wide diffusion, not only in the Basque areas, but also, and
>> mainly in the Iberian zones.

> But Hubschmid was not a Vasconist, and his ideas about Basque have been
> widely dismissed by specialists as fanciful and unsupported.  His problem was
> that he wanted to find Basque sources for just about every problematic word
> and name in the Romance-speaking area -- though, to be fair, his conclusions
> are somewhat more sober than I'm making them appear here.

>> Both explanations are not necessarily contradictory: u-ibi-bide > ubi or
>> ibi.  A related problem is that of the Basque word for 'bridge': zubi, a
>> compound of zur ('wood, wooden', possibly a remote relative of a.Grk. xylon)
>> and ubi or bide, thus meaning either 'wooden road' or 'wooden ford'.

> Michelena proposed <zur> 'wood' + <bide> 'way', and I endorse this, even
> though this time we are not so fortunate as to find *<zubide> recorded.

>> ibai ('river') and ibar ('river valley bottom, Sp. vega, Du. waard,
>> polder'), but this is very controversial.

> Not all of it.  The word <ibai> 'river' is pretty clearly a derivative of
> <ibar>.

[Ed]

Agud and Tovar in Dicc. Etim. Vasco don't think so and neither do their
numerous sources. They seem to find it rather problematic (the final r of ibar
is rr).

> This may look funny, but recall that a final /r/ is regularly lost in the
> first element in word-formation.  Compare cases like <izter> 'thigh', <iztei>
> 'groin', the second being <izter> plus a suffix of the approximate form
> *<-ei> or *<-i> (or quite possibly *<-egi>, in fact, but that's another
> story).

>> It would be explained via 'running [water]'.

> Sorry, but I can't follow this.  How on earth can <ibai> be assigned such a
> meaning?

[Ed]

Through the meaning of 'movement' in the hypothetical root (i)b(i).

>> Ibai is often thought of as the origin of Sp. vega (via ibai-ka),

> This etymology is popular in some Romanist circles, but I stress that it
> remains speculative at best.  See Corominas and Pascual for some discussion.

>> while ibar is usually related to Iberia, the Iberians and the river Ebro,
>> etc.

> Well, I query that "usually".  Modern <Ebro> is clearly from Latin <Iberus>,
> but the origin of this name is unknown, and Basque is an implausible place to
> look.  The Romans used the name <Iberia> before they encountered the Basques,
> I believe.

[Ed]

Two remarks:

1. There are clear indications that Iberian and Basque share some words,
suffixes and some external features, probably through contact or other exchange
mechanisms. Quite a few Iberian toponyms could just as well be Basque (Oriola,
Aspe, Ibi, Tibi.....and maybe Calpe). So looking for a Basque-like etymology is
not far-fetched, even though it hasn't been proven that this is admissible.

2. The Romans (after the Greek) called what is roughly Georgia 'Iberia'.  This
is probably derived from Kartvelian 'bari' meaning 'valley' (of the Araxes one
can guess).

>> Finally, I would not exclude the possibility of *(i)b(i) being related to IE
>> wad- (ua-dh-) (Eng. wade, Du. waden, Lat. vade:re), especially via the forms
>> ibai and/or ibar, if the initial i is a prefix, as has often been thought.

> But there *is no evidence* for this fanciful *<(i)b(i)>.  It looks to me, I'm
> afraid, like nothing more than an excuse for dragging in everything under the
> sun containing /ib/ or /bi/ or even just /b/.

[Ed]

Of course: this is exploratory thinking! See below.

> As for the idea that initial /i/ is a prefix, this goes back to Schuchardt,
> but it has proved entirely fanciful, and it is accepted today by no
> specialist known to me.

>> All this is, of course, rather speculative, even though based upon a body of
>> pretty well accepted ideas.

> Not all of the ideas put forward above can reasonably be described as "pretty
> well accepted".

[Ed]

Accepted by quite a few people, and often not the least.

>> Anyway, it looks like the hard core of very ancient and definitely Basque
>> words is still shrinking after words like (h)artz (bear, Gr.arktos), gizon
>> (man, PIE*ghdonios) and maybe buru (head, Sl. golova) etc. have been exposed
>> as of IE origin - or was it simply a very ancient common substrate origin?

> This is far too fanciful for me, and I object to that word "exposed".

> Some kind of IE origin for <hartz> 'bear' is considered plausible by many
> specialists, but no good IE source is known, and the proposal remains
> speculative.

[Ed]

Grk. arktos (and related IE) looks like a pretty good candidate to me.  Of
course, it is possible that it is a shared substrate.

> As for the other two, these strike me as beyond belief.  Sorry to be such an
> old grouch, but, with comparisons like these, we can derive anything from
> anything.

>> If you don't believe Basque has any relatives, not even extinct ones, forget
>> what I said.

> My own view is that no one has ever made an even vaguely plausible case for
> linking Basque genetically to any other language at all, living or dead,
> apart from its own ancestral form Aquitanian, and that there now remain so
> few stones unturned that it is extremely unlikely that any link will ever be
> found.

>> If you do,

> Er...what?  If you *do* believe that Basque has relatives?  How can any
> reasonable person believe this, when no link has ever been demonstrated?

[Ed]

I am familiar with your viewpoint and I respect it. But there are those that
think this is an unfinished business that needs to be looked into.

>> I hope it will stimulate you to look into this type of problems. Something
>> interesting might come out of it, both for Basque and for P...PIE.

> Well, with respect, I think we need a lot more than very vague resemblances
> and entirely fanciful etymologies.  We need hard evidence.

[Ed]

If one never leaves the beaten track, it is hard to find anything really new or
unsuspected: a priori theories and speculation are OK as long as 1) one is
aware of it being speculation, 2) it is followed by verification, and the
results of that, be they negative or positive, are accepted.  It's the way
science works.

That's why I said myself that it was speculation, and hoped it would stimulate
others to think about the problems involved.

Regards,
Ed. Selleslagh