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

[Gábor Sándi]

----- Original Message -----
From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Sent: Friday, 10 March, 2000 12:28 PM

> 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?

My main argument is based on the WHEN question - both absolute timing
(horses are not attested in Italy before 2600 BC, therefore there was no
word for them), and relative timing (horses were attested quite a bit after
cows were in much of Europe and in the Middle East, therefore the word for
horses also came later into whatever languages were used there at the time,
or - alternatively - there was language replacement).

The HOW LIKELY question enters the picture if someone claims that, say,
*kwekwlos was applied to the wheel independently in two different IE
languages, quite distant from each other in space.

> 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.

What used to be is not really relevant. I am trying to use archaeological
dates from the most recent literature that I can find. If you have better
data acceptable to the archaeological "communis opinio", I shall certainly
be prepared to consider them.

> 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.

For trees, see Indo-European Trees by Friedrich (I don't have the
bibliographic data in front of me). For various wild animals in the North
Pontic area, including fish, Mallory wrote several articles in JIE. Both of
these sources look to me pretty consistent with the Kurgan hypothesis. If
someone would analyze the flora and fauna of Anatolia around 6500 BC, it
would be interesting to see how the names in various IE languages for the
various plants and animals found in Anatolia fit in with Renfrew's theory,
and eventually to see which theory fits in better with the biological facts.

> 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.

I specifically excluded words for cow, sow and grain. I assume that there
were words for these concepts among neolithic farmers, so their presence in
IE languages says nothing about PIE speakers except that they were familiar
with agriculture. 'land' and 'milk' are even less indicative - why could
hunter gatherers not have words for them?

The word for 'horse' is of course the crux of my argument.

> 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.

I find this very unclear. I can't even figure out whether you favour Renfrew
or Gimbutas in the above text.

What I find reasonable as a theory is Gimbutas's: the farming population of
much of Europe switched language because it was conquered by a horse-riding,
warlike elite who imposed its hero-worshipping ideology on it. A bit like
what the Hungarians did to the Slavic and other inhabitants of Hungary after
895 AD, or what the Turks did to the various inhabitants of Anatolia in
post-Classical times. The basic ethnic composition of both of these areas
remained pretty much the same, I believe, yet there was a language shift,
with plenty of substratal influence.

Even Renfrew does not deny that such changes are possible: he calls them
"elite dominance". He just does not believe that the Indo-Europeanization of
Europe was due to it.

> 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.

Renfrew himself has modified his theory, and in my view his latest article
is more worthy of a linguistic investigation than his previous attempts.
["Time depth, convergence theory, and innovation in Proto-Indo-European:
'Old Europe' as a PIE linguistic area" (JIES 27 (3-4): 258-293)]. In
particular, he allows for the possibility of the following:

1. Proto-Italic might have been introduced overland from the north or
northwest, rather than by sea from the east (p.282).

2. There might have been a pre-Greek IE "adstratum" in Greece, subsequent to
which there were "ties between Greek and its sister languages in the Balkan
continuum at the end of phase II" (p.279). This to me implies at least two
layers of IE in Greece, the latter of which having strong ties with the
North.

These two modicications already bring Renfrew closer to linguistic
acceptability, and I would certainly love continuing this debate.

All the best,
Gabor