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

Gábor Sándi g_sandi at hotmail.com
Fri Mar 24 13:01:41 UTC 2000


----- Original Message -----
From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Sent: Friday, 17 March, 2000 1:50 PM

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

>> 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)

In a message dated 3/23/2000, X99Lynx at aol.com replied:

> 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 (3/24/00) replies:

Horses were present in northern, western and eastern Europe in neolithic
times, but were absent in the Balkans and on the Italian peninsula. They
were absent completely, unless you can offer me archaeological data to the
contrary. Getting around in those times was very difficult, and knowledge of
distant animals (and distant could have meant as little as 100 miles)
unlikely. This is my belief, of course you may think whatever you wish. In
any case, horses such as they existed in northern Europe were small, not
very remarkable animals, how could a well-characterized word like *ekwos
with a definite meaning survive for thousands of years among the supposed IE
inhabitants of Italy?

The analogy with lions is, in my view, false. Writing about and pictures of
lions had circulated in Europe widely since Roman times. In addition, feudal
kings often had them in their courts and sent them to each other as gifts -
if my memory serves me well, lions and tigers are offered as gifts at the
beginning of the Chanson de Roland. Has anyone found a single statuette or
picture of a horse from anywhere in Italy ca. 3500 BC?

> 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.

Since the evidence you offer is, according to yourself, outdated, why I
should I spend any time looking at it?

> 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.

What is my own idea of the PIE homeland? I said that I favour Gimbutas's,
but I am willing to look at Renfrew's, especially if I consider his latest
modifications.

What evidence of wild horses can you offer between the middle Ukraine and
Italy around 4300 BC? Draw a straight line: where? In the Carpathian basin?
In the northern Balkans? In the Alps?

According to my readings, wild horses were widespread at the time on the
North European plain: roughly today's Benelux, northern Germany, Poland and
further east. Small pony-like animals, the topic of everyday conversation
among peasants in Tuscany, according to you.

> 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.

See above for my comments. Contacts with northern Europe notwithstanding, I
don't believe that the horse was known in Italy at the time in any way. I
guess we'll just have to disagree.

> <<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 am talking about good fits and less good ones. I know that names for
animals and plants can be changed, lost and transferred. In fact, some of
the biological data do not provide good evidence for the Kurgan hypothesis:
if *bhbgos meant "beech", it is curious that the beech tree is absent from
the north Pontic area (see the map accompanying the headword BEECH in
Mallory and Adams). So make it a late wandering-word - which is how I would
explain the *ekwos word, were I to advocate Renfrew's theory. Unlike you, I
don't accuse those I disagree with of advocating pure fantasy.

> <<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?

Why shouldn't they? When people switch languages, they may adopt the words
of the new language, whether they mean "mother" or "yoke". Of course, they
may also keep some of the old words from the substratum language - French
has a number of agricultural terms from Gaulish, even though there were
perfectly good Latin terms for the concepts.

How do you know what those old steppe types knew about? If you can believe
that Italian peasants had a word for ponies living thousands of kilometres
away, why could the Kurgan people not know about yokes and plows?

> <<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 on earth did it mean?

In my view, if Gimbutas is right, *ekwos meaning 'horse' was part of PIE. If
Renfrew is right, the word either did not exist in PIE, or it was a
nominalized form of an adjective *H3okus or the like, meaning 'fast'. When
this nominalized form was applied to the horse later on, it became a
technical word that was widely borrowed from one IE language to another.

> <<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.

You made your point. The first Kurgan conquests could have been like my
initial scenario, followed by the combined strength of civilizations with
the Kurgan elite and "Old European" peasanty. Lots of holes even there in
the argument, but there are plenty of holes in Renfrew as well. There are
some (like Makkay, I believe) who don't believe that the LBK people are in
any way derived from the Balkan neolithic - there is little direct evidence.
And if Vinca is IE, but LBK isn't, how did IE spread so wide?

> 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,

Now wait a minute - the megalith builders are pretty much restricted to the
Atlantic seabord. Their supposed mastery of traction could hardly be
projected to provide defence against Kurgans in Central Europe.

> 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.

It's the Magyars, thank you. I have some figures, though not at hand, on how
few Magyars there might have been when they (we?) came through the
Carpathians in 895. They had a pretty good military organization, excellent
fighting skills and a belief in their own abilities and in their right to
conquer whatever territory they chose. Like the British and French in North
America, and the Iberians in Latin America later on, all of them seriously
outnumbered by the native Americans.

>>> 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.

I don't think that Renfrew is ludicrous - just less likely, that's all.
Name-calling is not necessarily a good scientific practice.

All the best,
Gabor



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