the Wheel and Dating PIE

[roslyn frank]

At 07:01 PM 1/28/00 -0800, Stanley Friesen wrote:

>At 02:55 AM 1/22/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

>>In a message dated 1/22/00 12:12:34 AM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>><<If it was borrowed into PIE while PIE is still united, that dates the era
>>of PIE unity.  And if it was borrowed later, it wouldn't show the
>>characteristic sound-shifts of the daughter languages... and it does.
>>Therefore if it was borrowed, it was borrowed into unified PIE.>>

>>Excuse me, but what are the dates on those specific sound changes you are
>>talking about?  And what makes you think they occurred immediately after PIE
>>was disunited?

>At least *some* of the individual sound changes must have occurred by the
>break up of the unity, by *definition*.  As long as there were no
>differences between the speech in the different areas, PIE was still *by*
>*definition* united.

Then does the IE model posit that PIE, understood here as an actual unified
linguistic system, was a linguistic isolate? It would seem that the model
would have to do this. Otherwise one would be confronted with a simulation
of linguistic prehistory in which PIE could be viewed as merely one member
of a language family existing at that point in time. Stated differently,
although I haven't heard this point discussed on the list, a cladistic
model requires the end point to coincide with a linguistic system that is
viewed as a total linguistic isolate. And even if PIE were posited as an
isolate, would one not have to propose that, nonetheless, the
proto-language, too, would have had the full characteristics of a human
language, with the likelihood of suppletions, irregularities and substrata.
And I believe that it is this latter point that creates problems. How does
the model guarantee that the ultimate origin of the "common vocabulary"
should not be traced back, for example, to the substrata that PIE, if
understood as a natural language, must have had?

>And the simple observed facts are that languages cannot spread beyond the
>range of daily contact for very long without diverging, at least within two
>or three centuries.  For a pre-modern language to have been spread over a
>large part of Europe without local divergence for *millennia* is just not
>possible.  (And millennia of non-divergence is what would be required for
>the PIE speakers to have spread during the neolithic revolution and still
>have the observed unity of Bronze age vocabulary)

Hence, are we to understand PIE as a convenient shorthand for a set of
sharted characteristics or as a term standing for a reified linguistic
system spoken in prehistory? And if it is understood as the second,
according to the model, how long did it just tread water? Stated
differently, if one chooses the second version, then one must ask how long
the unified (undifferentiated) linguistic system, as portrayed by the
reconstructions, go unchanged. Languages do change. Are we to assume that
PIE was different? It seems to me that this is a very slippery aspect of a
cladistic modeling of the data.

On the other hand, if we choose the first alternative, that PIE is a
convenient shorthand, it acts like a frame in a moving picture: a
convenient way of portraying a stop-action of events that are otherwise
inevitably in motion.

>>This has been brought up before a long time ago.  The identifiable sound
>>changes in the *kwelos group are prehistoric.  The amount of time that lapsed
>>between the end of PIE unity and the time those sound changes took effect is
>>undetermined, except that they all occured before attested records.

>True, for any given *specific* word, this objection is meaningful.  But the
>vocabulary placing PIE in the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age consists
>of more than just one word, indeed more than just a few words.

Could you (you'all) list, say, ten vocabulary items, excluding verbs, that
are considered most representative of the PIE lexicon that you are talking
about. And as an aside, are there explict criteria set forth that determine
which items are most representative. I'm speaking of crtieria along the
lines of those that have been suggested by Larry Trask (and debated by
many) concerning the selection of items in Pre-Basque. I would be most
interested in knowing if such criteria have been debated and/or laid out
explicitly at some point in the past. For example, how many language groups
must the item be attested in for it to quality? I assume, for example, that
identifying cognates/reflexes of the same item in Sanskrit and Celtic would
be sufficient for the item to qualify? Or is the bar set higher for these
PIE items, e.g., that the item must be attested in Sanskrit, Germanic and
Celtic or Hittite, Slavic and Romance, etc.

For example, just glancing over the entries in Buck, it would seem that
there isn't as much uniformity for "wheel" across IE languages, as there is
for, say, "cart" which shows up most IE languages (obviously with the help
of Latin).

Thanks,
Roz