Dating the final IE unity, in particular the word for "horse"

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/9/2000 4:35:46 AM, g_sandi at hotmail.com wrote:

>It is very hard to see what kind of evidence you would accept as
>"disproving" Renfrew's dates (and, consequently, Renfrew's theory). After
>all, any word in a language can be a loanword, therefore - in principle -
>the words for horse, wheel, the cart and its parts, yoke, copper/bronze,
>various trees and wild animals, can all be borrowed in a specific IE
>language. Alternatively, they can all be derived independently from native
>roots. The main question is: HOW LIKELY is it that such borrowings /
>derivations happened independently from each other, often in languages far
>removed from each other?

No, I'm sorry.  This must be a misunderstanding.  The main question has not
been HOW LIKELY?  The main question is WHEN?  When did the words enter the
languages?

I'd like to address just this part before I go onto the case of the Italian
horse.

g_sandi at hotmail.com writes:
>It is very hard to see what kind of evidence you would accept as
>"disproving" Renfrew's dates (and, consequently, Renfrew's theory).

I'll tell you what the evidence USED TO BE.  I have a list of dates I pulled
from literature appearing before or about1920: the domestication of the horse
was @2000BC.  The cow about 3000BC in the Near East, 2000BC in Europe.  The
discovery of metal working made the wheel possible in the Near East about
2500BC.   When that Near East technology reaches the IndoEuropean homeland
about 2000BC, it sets off the invasions of the "Indoeuropeans" in 1600BC when
they enter Greece and India and the Near East.  All culminating in 1125BC
with the fall of Troy.

The above would STILL disprove Renfrew.  If any of those dates were still
true.

The problem is that they are not still true.   And the dates have moved
backward in time.  And that makes Renfrew's hypothesis more likely.  And what
was described above less likely.

>the words for horse, wheel, the cart and its parts, yoke, copper/bronze,
>various trees and wild animals, can all be borrowed in a specific IE
>language. Alternatively, they can all be derived independently from native
>roots.

But 'native' or 'borrowed' isn't really the first question as far as Renfrew
goes.  The dates are first thing you have to address.  I don't know what you
are referring to as far as "trees and wild animals" go.  But all the rest of
those things NOW date pretty well in the range for Renfrew's hypothesis -
especially if you don't find words like <kwelo> and <ekwos> in Anatolian -
which you don't.

And basically you can find a reasonable explanation for why words referring
to milk and land and horse and cow and yoke and sow and grain and field are
often common in IE languages - those languages came with farming.

Or you can find it more reasonable that all these words were somehow forced
on a large trans-continental population of 'passive' farmers (already armed
with copper and bronze axes) by a relatively small group of outsiders who had
a language with no apparent relatives but still wonderfully endowed with
roots for all occasions, allowing that cowardly European population to pop
that language right into place from the Ukraine to Holland, every meaning and
sound changes exactly where it supposed to be. - done with such skill it
would seem as if they had been speaking PIE all along.

Those are the two scenarios I have been given so far.

g_sandi at hotmail.com writes:
>It is very hard to see what kind of evidence you would accept as
>"disproving" Renfrew's dates (and, consequently, Renfrew's theory).

Conversely, given the above, it's equally hard to see what kind of additional
evidence you would need to consider Renfrew's dates possible.

Regards,
Steve Long