The Single *PIE Village Theory

[Douglas G Kilday]

Steve Long (28 Jun 2001) wrote:

>What's interesting in this and the quote above [from DGK's postings] is the
>notion that *PIE is
>being located in a single village.

>Is this the current thinking on the geographic distribution of *PIE during
>the time it was *PIE (as against Pre-PIE or PIE in the process of breaking
>up)?

>Does anyone on the list have a problem with this view?  Mallory talks about
>the territorial size needed for PIE but I seem to remember it was a bit
>larger than one village.

I don't believe I stated or implied that my examples of the "same tribe" or
"village like Mayberry" were intended to represent the entire PIE-speaking
population at any time. They were directed at one of your earlier comments
to the effect that "what you and I call trees in the next valley" might be
different. The expression "next valley" indicates that "you" and "I" in your
comment belong to the same immediate community, not to different tribes from
opposite ends of PIE-land.

>In any case, my problem with this, with regard to the history of the yew word
>is simple.  What happens when the village/tribe splits up and a part moves to
>a new location, not far away, and there are yew trees there?  They still speak
>the same language, but now some of them have the yew (and yew word) and some
>don't?  Does this mean that the next extension out of the original village
>could discover the yew on its own and give it even another name?  And so
>forth?  So that by the time we hit the first 20 IE speaking villages, most
>coming from the yewless core, we could have twenty different names for the
>yew?

This is an extreme case of what I originally argued: that PIE-speakers were
unfamiliar with Taxus baccata, so there were several "discoveries" of the
tree by successive migrations from the yewless core into western Europe,
yielding the observed pattern of diversity in names. Again, I don't recall
saying that these migrations were undertaken by single villages; they were
more likely Magyar-style eruptions.

>I think that what would happen - as the yew proved useful for different
>purposes - is that trade words would develop that traveled not with the
>language but with the products and processes.  So even after *PIE split up,
>there would still be new common words to be shared by the newly distinct
>languages, perhaps even before the particular sound changes that occurred
>later in the yew word(s).

I don't disagree. In fact, PIE-speakers may well have had a word denoting
'yew-wood' or 'bow-wood' obtained by trade, and quite possibly this was
*takso-. But the sight of living yew-trees would have been a novelty for the
migrants, demanding a new word. For northern groups, this was *eiwo-, which
I regard as IE 'berry-tree', competing in the west with pre-IE *ebur-. Greek
has <mi~los> (unless you have found an objection); I don't know whether it's
IE or not. Latin <taxus> for the _tree_ may represent supersession of an
earlier *axus 'yew-tree' by a derivative of the inherited word for
'yew-wood' (cf. West Romance reflexes of Lat. <ro:bur>, not <quercus>, for
'oak-tree'). The form *axus is continued by Mod. Venetic <asso>, Swiss Fr.
<asse>, with accreted article in Tusc. <nasso>, Lomb. & Piem. <nass>.

>In fact, the functionality of language demands a little more than connecting a
>word to a tree, since that is plainly not how language works at this level.
>The members of a pre-literate village share names and give names on an
>as-needed basis and functionality may give different names to the same object
>or the same name to different objects as is necessary.  To do otherwise would
>be dysfunctional.  Specialists only need to know specialized knowledge such as
>specific tree terms and to have it otherwise would be a misallocation of
>resources.  If we all had to learn the exact meaning of all plant and
>plant-related words in English, we'd spend many years doing nothing else.

It wouldn't take many years to learn _common_ phytonyms, which is what this
whole discussion is about, and you know it. On the one hand you argue for
the communality of words through trade, on the other for a chaotic lexical
situation at the village-level. I'll tell you what. If you can show me a
recognized PIE tree with a European naming pattern comparable to that of
Taxus baccata, I'll publicly admit that my efforts to use yews for the IE
homeland problem were in vain.

DGK