Anatolians

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>that "wool" didn't exist in the vocabulary even in pre-Neolithic times.

-- sheep didn't develop wool, as we know it, until well after domestication.
Use of wool as a fabric is comparatively late -- well after the beginning of
the neolithic.

>The plough was also used since the very beginning of the Neolithic,

-- no, nyet, not true.  Not unless you redefine "plough" to suit the argument
and include wooden shovels and digging sticks.  No animal traction, no plow.
The ard, the earliest true plow, is 4th millenium BCE (same period as wheeled
vehicles) and this is well-attested achaeological fact.

>That leaves only "yoke", with the undoubted Hittite reflex <yukan> as a
>possible candidate for being a late Neolithic innovation.

-- this is a rather drastic case of attacking the evidence rather than trying
to work with it.  Evidence primary, hypothesis secondary, please.

>but there is a Luwian attestation: asuwa.  This looks very much like an Indo-
>Iranian borrowing (Skt. as'va < PIE *ek^wos), were it not for the fact that
>Luwian "dog" is

-- the obvious, parsimonious explanation is that the Anatolian languages used
ordinary IE terminology for the horse.

>yielded a treatise on horses, containing a number of words of Indo-Iranian
>origin, written by a Mitannian called Kikkuli).

-- and the English terminology for formal riding is largely French and Spanish
in origin, although English-speakers have been riding horses as long as
there's been an English language (or proto-Germanic, come to that).
Meaningless.

>Hittite cognates (Hittite "wheel" is not *kwekwlo- or *rotHo- but
><hurki>, related only to Tocharian <wa"rka"nt> "circle, wheel"),

-- and having cognates in Tocharian and Hittite is about as secure a way to
put a word into the PIE category as I can think of.  Two unrelated IE language
families widely separated in time and space -- what do you want, an egg in
your beer?

The only plausible argument for that is that this is an archaic term, since
both Tocharian and Anatolian separated from PIE early.

>"shaft" and "harness" when Hittite doesn't even share its basic kinship
>terminology with Indo-European and has a different word for "four".

-- excuse me, but kinship terminology has some bearing on horse harness
technology?  Run that one by me again?