the Wheel and Dating PIE

Dr. John E. McLaughlin mclasutt at brigham.net
Mon Jan 24 06:42:44 UTC 2000


Steve,

You've got a basic flaw in your logic.  Joat wrote:

<<If it [the word for 'wheel', *kwelos] was borrowed into PIE while PIE is
still united, that dates the era of PIE unity.  And if it was borrowed
later, it wouldn't show the characteristic sound-shifts of the daughter
languages... and it does. Therefore if it was borrowed, it was borrowed into
unified PIE.>>

You responded with some lengthy questions about dating and specific sound
changes, but it was your concluding comment that attracted my attention:

<<...If this particular word for wheel entered after PIE dispersed but
before those sound changes, then we'd should have exactly the same
outcome.>>

Absolutely not.  If PIE had already dispersed into separate languages or
speech areas, then there is absolutely no reason to assume that a word
borrowed into one end of the Indo-European region into one dialect/language
would necessarily spread throughout all the languages in the family.  The
ONLY way to account for the very existence of the word in nearly every
branch of Indo-European (Indo-Iranian, Hellenic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic,
Italic, and Tocharian) is that the word was borrowed when PIE was still a
unity.  Unless the word was borrowed when PIE was a unity, then there is no
other way to account for this widespread occurrence in the family, whether
or not specific sound changes had or had not occurred yet.  If the word only
existed in, say, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, and Tocharian, then the borrowing
is quite likely one that only penetrated the eastern end of PIE.  The same
would be true on the western end of PIE if the word only existed in Celtic,
Germanic and Italic.  However, since *kwelos has reflexes throughout
Indo-European, and the sound changes that have affected it in each of the
daughters are completely regular, the only logical assumption that we can
make is that the word was borrowed when PIE was still a unity.  Any other
assumption requires a leap of faith and violates the principle of Occam's
Razor.

John E. McLaughlin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
mclasutt at brigham.net

Program Director
Utah State University On-Line Linguistics
http://english.usu.edu/lingnet

English Department
3200 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, UT  84322-3200

(435) 797-2738 (voice)
(435) 797-3797 (fax)



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