the Wheel and Dating PIE

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 1/10/00 10:21:08 PM, sarima at friesen.net replied:

<<So, the presence of all of the normal sound changes in the word for wheel
in all of the branches of IE rules out a time of origin after those sound
changes had occurred.  >>

I wrote:
(In some cases, they have even been conformed after the fact
to the local sound rules.)

The reply:
<<Only idiosyncratically, and thus certainly never in *all* of the divergent
languages.  It might have been retrofitted in one or two branches of IE,
but having such a  rare event occurring independently in *all* branches is
unreasonable in the extreme.>>

Remember that I offered two ways for the word for "wheel" to spread across a
already existing IE diversity.  The first was as a technological innovation.
The second was as a preexisting word adapted to a new meaning.

With regard to the way the word would have altered if it were imported with
the technology -

Technology can create and carry its own vocabulary, of course.  (I was amazed
to hear the word 'plinth' being used by a builder the other day.)  "Learned
words" are adapted to the phonotactics of the language but only so much -
something being <legal> in English still does have some connection to <lex,
legis>.  So we do in fact see at least some consistent "retrofitting" with
words like 'theatre' and 'coffee/kava.' and 'telephone.'  And the words for
wheel in IE languages are not as consistent or wide-spread as any of these
examples - which might suggest diverse origins and no original word.

But there is also the "technical innovation' that is a cultural innovation.
You reminded me of something Sean Crist wrote awhile ago  (Fri, 30 Jul 1999
10:23:36 -0400) that struck me -

<<...there are recent loan words [in Japanese] (e.g. tiishatsu "T-shirt")...>>

I would love to compare T-shirt as it has been "accepted" into languages that
are nearer or farther from English and see if the pattern did not approximate
the kind of changes 'wheel" underwent.

Also, post hoc sound changes make sense when a system is being introduced -
which I have reason to think would have accompanied the wheeled vehicle and
wheel-making.  Such systems will give a nod to pre-existing sound differences
between languages - especially when there is an awareness of the differences
- as in: " For example, when British missionaries introduced the root pask-
'Easter' (from Latin pascha), the Irish changed it to casc- in order to
conform to the correspondence between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic established by
sound changes that had been completed centuries before (compare Thurneysen
1980: 570-72 on the phenomenon; also Schmidt 1993 on the relative dating)."

Finally there is the matter of about half of IE apparently not using
*kwelos/*kolos (fl. Buck) at all as the source of its word for wheel.  So
that the predicted sound changes extend as far as I can see only to some IE
language families - particularly German and Slavic - and agreeing with Buck I
don't think Greek is one of them.  (And when you have at least two words for
wheel you don't have strictly speaking the singularity that necessarily
suggests pre-divergence unity - compare the word for 'wool' e.g., which
demonstrably would be older than the word for wheel.)

Which brings me back to what I think is the more convincing explanation -
that diverse PIE speakers used a pre-existing word to describe the wheel.
Which I'd like to address in another message.

<<Of course in many ways "horse" is a better basis than "wheel".  But in the
final analysis one cannot depend on any *single* word.  One must use an
extended portion of the technical vocabulary.>>

And I'd like to address 'horse' too.  And I hope at least that I'm suggesting
that the theory that PIE can be dated by such vocabulary is not entirely
leakproof - even to those who have been convinced by such methods in the past.

Regards,
Steve Long