Horses

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

Sean Crist <kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu> wrote:

>On Tue, 18 Jan 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

[ moderator snip ]

>> But Armenian eys^ (< *ek^wos) means "donkey".

>A transparent case of semantic drift.  Are you arguing that this poses
>some problem for the reconstruction of *ek'wos as "horse"?

I'm pretty sure that when the pre-Armenians walked (or rode) into
Anatolia, their *ekw^os (however it sounded at the time) meant
"horse" (and shifted to "donkey" in the apparently donkey-rich
and horse-poor environment of Eastern Anatolia).  But if Renfrew
is right, and PIE did come from Anatolia, an *ek^wos (or however
it sounded at *that* time) meaning "donkey" would have trivially
drifted to "horse" in the horse-rich (donkey-poor) environment of
Northern and Eastern Europe.

The argument works both ways, except that it's apparently
intellectually unattractive to have a theory where one thing goes
from A to B and then back again from B to A.  That's why such
theories are rare (not because such things do not happen).  As a
matter of fact, I personally believe that Renfrew is wrong, but
that some of the *ancestors* of the Proto-Indo-Europeans *did*
come from Anatolia, became PIE-ans somewhere in the Tisza-Danube
area, and then some of them (the Anatolians, later the Armenians)
went *back* to Anatolia.  Renfrew (because you can't have
A->B->A) prefers to have the Anatolians (and I believe the
Armenians as well) never to leave Anatolia, which poses some
severe linguistical problems such as the lack of affinity between
Anatolian and Armenian or Greek.

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