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

[Stanley Friesen]

At 06:31 PM 3/24/00 +0530, Gábor Sándi wrote:
>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).

Does this take into account changed distributions of the tree in ancient
times?  The climate has changed substantially since circa 4000 BCE.  Tree
distributions will have changed.

>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.

It would have to be loan-translation, to account for the phonetic facts.
(As in, e.g. German 'Fernsehen' from Anglicized Latin 'television').

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