the Wheel and Dating PIE

[Stanley Friesen]

At 02:55 AM 1/22/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 1/22/00 12:12:34 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

><<If it 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.>>

>Excuse me, but what are the dates on those specific sound changes you are
>talking about?  And what makes you think they occurred immediately after PIE
>was disunited?

At least *some* of the individual sound changes must have occurred by the
break up of the unity, by *definition*.  As long as there were no
differences between the speech in the different areas, PIE was still *by*
*definition* united.

And the simple observed facts are that languages cannot spread beyond the
range of daily contact for very long without diverging, at least within two
or three centuries.  For a pre-modern language to have been spread over a
large part of Europe without local divergence for *millennia* is just not
possible.  (And millennia of non-divergence is what would be required for
the PIE speakers to have spread during the neolithic revolution and still
have the observed unity of Bronze age vocabulary)

>This has been brought up before a long time ago.  The identifiable sound
>changes in the *kwelos group are prehistoric.  The amount of time that lapsed
>between the end of PIE unity and the time those sound changes took effect is
>undetermined, except that they all occured before attested records.

True, for any given *specific* word, this objection is meaningful.  But the
vocabulary placing PIE in the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age consists
of more than just one word, indeed more than just a few words.

>   There
>is a huge gap of time potentially there.  And if this particular word for
>wheel entered after PIE dispersed but before those sound changes, then we'd
>should have exactly the same outcome.

So, bring in axle, and metal, and horse, and so on.  They cannot *all* have
fortuitously involved only sounds that changed relatively late!

>(And BTW how drastic are the sound changes do we see in one of the other
>wheel words:
> Latin, rota; Lith, ratas; OHG, rod; Ir, roth - cf. Skt, ratha?)

It is not the drasticness, it is the regularity and *opacity* of the
changes.  For instance., modern Lithuanian has round vowels, so mapping
borrowed words with 'o' to 'a' would be odd, to say the least.  And
changing t > d is totally unexpected in early German borrowings (and vice
versa).   Thus the differences seen above would be unusual, at least, in
borrowed words, but completely normal in shared heritage.

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May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com