Hittite <hurkis>/wheel

[Richard M. Alderson III]

On Mon, 14 Feb 2000, Steve Long (X99Lynx at aol.com) wrote:

> The often repeated position was that "the wheel word" had to have entered PIE
> before it split up, because the word was univeral among IE languages.

There is a misunderstanding here.  It was never claimed that the "wheel word"
was the one and only word for "wheel" in the protolanguage; rather, the claim
is that the word that comes down to us in English as _wheel_ was present in the
protolanguage, because where it *does* occur in various daughter languages, the
form in which it occurs is always developmentally regular.

The same thing is true for all four words so far adduced with respect to the
concept "wheel".

> Pointing out that those SPECIFIC sound changes do not date PIE dispersal and
> that those sound changes could have occurred long after dispersal should not
> have been a surprise.

I'm afraid you have it backwards:  Those specific sound changes *do* date PIE
dispersal, and could not have occurred late, so the wheel must have been known
prior to dispersal.  Period.

> It may strike some readers as obvious that FOUR wheel words WILL NOT support
> "the wheel word" as the way to date PIE.

Not the way you have mistakenly understood the phrase "the wheel word", no, but
as I noted above, no one meant what you thought they meant with that phrase.

[ moderator snip ]

> how could this assertion that the wheel can postively and absolutely date PIE
> go unanswered so often?  (Check the archive list - I found it asserted at
> least13 times!!! without contradiction.)  With the intellectual firepower
> that plainly shows up on this list all the time, how could it be repeated so
> often without someone at least questioning it or noting the difficulties?

There is only a contradiction when one misunderstands the phrase "the wheel
word" as meaning "the one and only word for _wheel_ in PIE", rather than as
"the word for _wheel_ that comes down to us, _mutatis mutandis_, in English
with that meaning".

I hope I have cleared this up enough that we can move on.

								Rich Alderson