the Wheel and Dating PIE

[roslyn frank]

At 02:50 AM 2/5/00 EST, Joat Simeon wrote:
>Several distinct types of cloth production also dating to the 4th millenium
>-- eg., felting -- (see E.J.W. Barber, 1991, Prehistoric Textiles, Princton
>university press) also have PIE lexical references.  Thus we have *pilso,
>"felt".   There are also a number  of words relating to weaving in general.

>But PIE does _not_ have a word for the warp-weighted loom, which was
>developed in the Danube valley and spread eastwards in the Late Neolithic.
>The Greek vocabulary for this type of loom is entirely borrowed, for example;
>none in Indo-Iranian either, etc.

Could you expand on this last point?

>Hence PIE probably cannot have been spoken in an area and/or at a time when
>this technology was known.  Hence there can't have been PIE speakers in the
>Middle Danube towards the end of the Neolithic.  One more brick...

Isn't there an assumption here that all such lexical items if they once
existed in PIE would have been transmitted integrally into the daughter
languages and down to us...? And or that whatever the word was for such a
loom if it did exist, would have remained in its original semantic niche
and still mean today something like "loom"? And before reaching the
conclusion that there was no such item in the PIE lexicon, wouldn't one
need to look at the words used to refer to such looms in other languages,
i.e., in traditional cultures in other parts of the world where the similar
warp-weighted looms might still be in use or have been until recently, in
order to see the cognitive structures of the expressions used to refer to
such devices? Also, just how old are warp-weighted looms? Are you referring
to hand-held portable ones or upright stationary ones? Is there something
unique about the one invented in the Danube that would mitigate against the
independent development of similar devices in other parts of Europe, for
example?

Roz Frank