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

[Gábor Sándi]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

----- Original Message -----
From: Stanley Friesen <sarima at friesen.net>
Sent: Saturday, 25 March, 2000 11:16 AM

At 06:31 PM 3/24/00 +0530, Gabor Sandi 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.

[From GS]

Mallory and Adams do talk at length about the gepgraphical spread of the
beech in Europe since the last Ice Age, with the information taken in part,
presumably, from Friedrich. Unfortunately, the information on the map in
Mallory and Adams does not correspond very well to what is written in the
text - but, in any case, it is clear that aside from a corner of the Crimea,
the beech was absent from the north Pontic area during the 5th-4th millennia
BC, and therefore from the PIE core area as defined by Gimbutas and Mallory.

>> 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').

I don't understand why the speakers of PIE (or of a later IE language) at
some stage couldn't have used normal derivational processes for this
development, without any reference to another language. After all, they
domesticated the horse (even Renfrew would probably admit that the horse was
domesticated by IE speakers).

This is a quibble, but 'television' is hardly Latin. It is a "barbaric"
combination of the Greek prefix "tele-" (far) and the Latinate
English/French "vision" (presumably borrowed during the Renaissance). The
Latin word was "visio", with all other cases formed on the stem vision-.

Suppose the English word didn't exist: what would the Germans have called
"television"? There are not that many semantic alternatives to "Fernsehen",
are there?

Cordially,
Gabor Sandi  g_sandi at hotmail.com