Dating the final IE unity

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: <JoatSimeon at aol.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 05, 2000 8:27 AM

[snip]
> There's a broad overlap in the 4 PIE words for wheel:

> 1. *kwekwlom -- Germanic, Phrygian, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Tocharian,
> Balto-slavic, and closely related terms in Celtic

> This probably referred to the wheels in a two-wheeled cart, given the dual
> form in Old Irish ('cul', from *kwolo via *kwolos).  "The two roundy-roundy
> things".

> 2. *Hwergh -- Tocharian, Hittite

> 3. *dhroghos -- Celtic, Greek, Armenian

> 4. *roto -- Celtic, Latin, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Indo-Iranian,
> and possibly Tocharian.

> So while none of the 4 occurs in all the groups -- one wouldn't expect that,
> eh? -- every single one occurs in at least _two_ of the groups.  Eg.,
> Tocharian and Hittite share cognates derived from *hwergh, Tocharian has
> derivatives of *kwekwlom and possibly *roto, etc.

> They're all fairly transparent, too:  "the round thing", "the thing that goes
> round and round", "the runner", and so forth.

> This is what you'd expect if proto-Indo-European speakers invented the wheel,
> by the way -- otherwise there should be at least one loan-word for "wheel",
> one that isn't resolvable into a PIE root.

[Ed Selleslagh]

Why? This is based on the hypothesis that some IE speakers would have preferred
to use a foreign word over a descriptive IE word, if they hadn't invented the
wheel. And that's just a hypothesis, although not an unlikely one.

But that's not the problem here (BTW I tend to believe that IE speakers
invented the wheel) in the ungoing discussion. The question is whether the IE
words used indicate that the wheel was invented before PIE split up. I would
say they don't: otherwise all or most groups would have used the same word
(quod non), quite the contrary: they all use a limited number of existing
simple descriptive words any moron in any language group might have thought of,
and not even the same ones. (Looks a bit like the "original" names invented for
the 'roundabouts' and 'flyovers' that are so popular among UK traffic
planners).

In other words, I find it unlikely that the spread of IE and the spread of the
(probably IE) wheel technology need any synchronism to explain the observed
facts. The languages (and the four most obvious descriptive words for wheel and
chariot) could have spread long before the wheel. That would explain the
groupwise use of different terms (plus carry-over through diffusion,
Sprachbund,...from one group to the neighboring ones, leading to re-convergence
in more limited IE areas).

I'm afraid this isn't very different from the hotly contested link between the
spread of agriculture and IE languages.

Ed Selleslagh.