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

X99Lynx at aol.com X99Lynx at aol.com
Fri Mar 17 08:20:32 UTC 2000


g_sandi at hotmail.com wrote:

>> The main question is: HOW LIKELY is it that such borrowings /
>> derivations happened independently from each other,...

I wrote:

>>The main question has not been HOW LIKELY?  The main question is WHEN?
>>When did the words enter the languages?

In a message dated 3/16/2000 1:51:59 AM, g_sandi at hotmail.com replied:

>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)

Yes, but that date is artificial, because of your assumptions. There is lots
of evidence of horses - both wild and domesticated - across northern, western
and eastern Europe and North Africa before this date.  You're presuming that
lack of evidence of the horse in the vicinity before a certain date where
Latin was spoken means lack of knowledge of the horse before that date.

By the same token, because we have no evidence of lions anywhere near Britain
since the pleistocene, there should not be a word for lion in English.

Horses did not fall out of thin air.  And unless you are claiming some
extraordinary isolation for the Italian peninsula - something that is
thoroughly contradicted by the evidence - there are good reasons to think
this date is inappropriate for establishing knowledge of or a word for the
horse.

There are parts of France and England where no evidence of iron, horses or
even textiles have been found that are datable before 1800AD.  You can
certainly use that evidence to suggest that no words for iron, horses or
textiles can be expected in the local vocabularies.  But the dating and the
localization are artificial and your conclusions would be false.

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).

I replied:

>> 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.

g_sandi at hotmail.com replied:

>What used to be is not really relevant....

Wait a second.  You said it was hard to see what evidence would disprove
Renfrew.  I gave you what evidence would disprove Renfrew.  And you say it's
not really relevant.

g_sandi at hotmail.com replied:

>I am trying to use archaeological
>dates from the most recent literature that I can find.

But you are actually using selective evidence.  The date of the horse in
Italy applies neither to your own idea of the PIE homeland nor to the date of
the horse in that location.  Evidence of the so-called 'true horse' has been
dated as early as 4300BC in the middle Ukraine.  Evidence of wild horses of
any type (a prerequisite for domestication) can be found between that
location and Italy throughout that period.

You are making an assumption and that assumption is neither archaeological
nor linguistic.  You are assuming that the word for a horse cannot be present
in a language unless horses are also present.

If IE speakers entered Italy well before 2600BC, there is absolutely NOTHING
to necessitate their having horses with them.  Jarred describes in Guns,
Germs and Steel just how inefficient keeping horses can be.  The standard
burial wagon of the pre-3000BC period in central and eastern europe is drawn
by an ox.  Even before wheeled transport, the ox would have provided better
cartage.  The rather small tarpan-related domesticated horse of the period
may not have been particularly useful in hauling and probably were not
particularly rideable.  As opposed to the steppes where sufficient pasturage
and range would have been available, the terrain of the Italian peninsula
would have made horse-rearing undesirable and inefficient for either the
purposes of meat or milk.

So once again knowledge of the horse and a word for the horse did not make
the horse either desirable or a necesssary presence.  There is more than
sufficient evidence of contact between Italy and areas where the horse was
present well before 5500BC for the horse to be neither a mystery or a dim
memory.

<<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.>>

This is mainly pure fantasy.  The very notion that a species unique to the
Caspian region 8-5000 years ago can be identified with a word in documented
IE languages a thousand miles away and 4000 years later is just absurd.  Any
name for flora in one region could just as easily be applied to similar flora
in another region - this has happened constantly throughout history.  Maize
is corn in American English and prairie dogs are not dogs and groundhogs are
not hogs.  And yes there were salmon or something that could be called salmon
just about everywhere.

<<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?

Saying that PIE speakers were familiar with agriculture is actually saying a
lot.  Those words are often enough reconstructed back to PIE - why would a
small, warlike elite on horses off the steppes need to teach a continent full
of farmers a whole new set of words for farming? Especially since those
steppe types don't appear to have known that much about any thing more than
horse and sheep breeding and nothing about the kind of farming that was done
in central and western Europe?

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

I don't think so.  I think you mean <ekwos>.  Which is not the only word for
horse and didn't even necessarily always mean horse.

<<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.>>

Yeah, well.  What's unreasonable about all that is that most of Europe
appears to never have been exposed to those horse-riding war-like elitists.
"Kurgan" barely puts a dent in central Europe and never reaches western
Europe.  Near the Danube and up in Poland, it seems your war-like elite
abandon their horses for sheep and take over over-salinized fields abandoned
centuries before by the earlier population.  Since there is no evidence of
either horse-back riding or chariots in most of Europe before 1800BC, this
elite is either charging around in horse-drawn ox-carts or dragging their
steeds behind them.  Meanwhile, "the farming population of Europe" has
already mastered traction enough to build megalith graves for whomever their
non-heros were, mastered metal making and produced formidable metal axes and
equally formidiable obsidian spear and arrow-heads, begun by 3800BC to
fortify encampments and make war on one another in the west, already built
what Zwiebel called the largest buildings in the world at the time,
apparently generated sufficient surpluses to create an elite of their own and
bury them accordingly - but not in the kurgan-style, have a pretty well
developed trade network across Europe and into the Near East where they may
have been exposed to Gilgamesh style war-like elitists as well as the wheel -
which they also apparently introduced to their eastern neighbors.  And
increase the population of Europe by as much as100 times depending on the
location.

The neolithic population of Europe probably had a richer language - certainly
in terms of a wide variety of technical areas, including metalurgy, farming,
sea-going, building, vehicle construction, animal husbandry and tool and
weapon making - than any culture that appears on the European Steppes before
2000BC.  Most of these items appear in IE languages with no sign of a
substrate or with signs of importation from the Near East.  My best guess is
that if any elite did come off the steppes, they went the way of most elites,
they were swallowed up.

Also as Lehmann points, Gimbutas' theory suffers from a lack of available
personnel.  There were just too few with too little - the steppes are
underpopulated and underarmed before 2000BC.  A big difference from the Turks
and Maygars.

>> 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.

I was being sarcastic in the above text.  The scenario - a Gimbutian one - is
ludicrous.

Regards,
Steve Long



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