Anatolians

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>>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.

But sheep had hair.  The root for "wool" applies to all kinds of
"animal hair".

>>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.

But I can.  I gave a couple of clear cases of a semantic
development "stick" > "plough".

>>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.

Not so obvious if you know something about Hittite vocabulary.

>>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.

Why?  The facts are that the Mitanni played an important part in
the introduction of horse-drawn chariotry to Anatolia and used
Indo-Iranian technical vocabulary to talk about it.  We have two
clear cases of a Hittite/Sanskrit isogloss related to chariotry,
and an apparently satem word for horse in Luwian.

>>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 point is PIE had words for round and turning things (*Hwer-,
*kwel- etc.) long before the wheel was invented or vehicles drawn
by oxen and later horses came into use.  But it only had so much
words that could be pressed into service.  Hittite and Tocharian
opted for *Hwer-K-, others for *kwe-kwel- (cf. the exact same
procedure in Sumerian gi-gir, from gir "to turn, to roll"), which
in turn may have been borrowed at a later stage by Tocharian to
denote "wagon" (Toch A. kuka"l, B. kukale).

That's the whole problem with linguistic palaeontology.  Words
undergo reasonably predictable semantic shifts when geographical
locales change ("salmon", "beech/oak", "robin") or when new
technologies are invented ("animal hair" > "wool", "stick" >
"plough", "to join" > "yoke") and such words may be borrowed or
calqued by neighbouring languages as the technology expands,
further confusing the picture (especially if the languages are
closely related to begin with).

By a curious coincidence, I had just acquired Blench/Spriggs
"Archaeology and Language II", containing an article by Kathrin
S. Krell: "Gimbutas' Kurgan-PIE homeland hypothesis: a linguistic
critique".  I've not yet had the time to read it in depth, but I
note one of the conclusions (based on arguments similar to the
ones I gave in the preceding paragraph) is: "The old, pliable
crutch of linguistic palaeontology should certainly be abandoned,
at least until the theoretical uses and limitations of the PIE
lexicon have been more precisely defined".

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam