The Iceman's Berries

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/5/2001 2:55:01 AM, acnasvers at hotmail.com writes:
<< I don't think any serious objections have been presented to the thesis that
PIE-speakers didn't know the yew.  >>

Actually what becomes fairly apparent is that if "PIE-speakers" did know
about the yew, there would be no way of telling.

The exercise of looking into the real history of these plants and animals is
worthwhile, but not because it provides any flash answers about PIE.  What it
does do is take one beyond cognates and into the language itself and what
these people were actually talking about.  The simplistic connections that
are used to trace many of these words - like "yew" and "red deer" - very
quickly disappear.

<<As I mentioned before, "yew" itself has ancient congeners only in Celtic
and Germanic, plausibly derived from PIE *eiw- 'berry'.>>

This statement gives me pause.  Is any one on this list who is uncomfortable
with the idea that its plausible that yew comes from PIE *eiw- 'berry'?

I watched the "Iceman" feature on the Discovery channel the other day.  He's
the fellow if you recall who got caught up crossing the Alps back in @ 3200BC
and provided us with the "oldest mummy" from prehistory.  He was found just a
short distance south of the Italy-Austrian border.

The iceman was dressed in a cloak woven from an unspecified bark and carried
a yew bow and arrows.  The bow and arrows apparently were not functional, not
being finished.  There were actually also a dozen types of trees represented
on his person.

He was from the south but the arrowheads and firestone he carried were made
from flint whose provenance placed them 300 miles to the north - on the other
side of the Alps from his home, in southern Germany.  And he had all kinds of
other stuff with him or on him.  A bearskin cap and bearskin as the soles of
his shoes.  (You can tell bears were already in trouble at that point.)
Items made from leather that apparently were from both domesticates and
non-domesticates.

He also carried an axe with a copper axehead.  They show the Iceman and his
buddies smelting the copper with a skin bellows and pouring it into a pretty
nifty two-piece stone mold, carved inside to the split shape of the axehead,
strapped with leather tongs.  Looked like a lot of work for a small village
for such a project and my guess was that it was really something they picked
up from the same trade routes that brought the flint.  One might even suspect
that the yew bow - not yet notched by the user - and arrows may also have
been "store bought."

The Iceman also had a nice sized pouch completely full of dried berries.

In the reenactment and the commentary, they spent a bit of time on the
berries.  They show the Iceman and his folk harvesting the berries and a
British academic makes the point that these berries are quite tart unless
they are soaked and dried.

What amazed me was how bright red these berries were on the boughs these
reenactors were carrying.  And they even show a big bush or a small tree with
the same bright summer(?) berries on them.  And the Brit comes on and talks
about how, despite the domesticated grains they were growing, these people
would have depended on the "sloe" to round out their nutritional needs.

Two different members of this list wrote to me that they had never even heard
of the fallow deer before they saw the word on the list.  I imagine many
would have the same reaction to the "sloe."

Looking into the yew, of course, I've discovered that its "red berries" are
hardly unique, that they only appear for a short time on only some trees and
therefore are pretty much less prominent feature than the red berries on the
hawthorn (edible) and the holly (highly toxic), as well as a number of other
trees and bushes of the region -- all of which would have been more common
than the yew, and that would have included the Iceman's favorite, the sloe.

Given all this, it becomes difficult to see why its particularly plausible
that yew comes from PIE *eiw- 'berry' - except that the yew is one of
hundreds of trees and bushes that produce "berries."

No doubt it would be convenient phonologically to have yew < PIE *eiw-
'berry'.  But I think that is where the problem may be.  The history of the
yew name and the yew tree and its place in European history is both more
intricate and interesting than this, and the more you know about it, the less
likely the connection becomes.

And rather than confirming something about the IE homeland, the yew probably
demonstrates how much interchange there was between IE languages after
dispersal and how much a mistake it might be to rely on superficial history
to support a dubious paleolinguistics.  I hope to have more on this soon.

Regards,
Steve Long