Renfrew and IE Overlords

[rohan.oberoi at cornell.edu]

Dear Steve,

The lag time on this list is so bad that I can't call up what you
originally wrote, so my last letter may well not have been "in the
context of your post"; if so I do apologise.

[ Moderator's apology:
  I am sorry for the recent lapses in the posting frequency.  I believe that
  everything is now fully under control again, and that we can look forward
  to a timely, working list for the foreseeable future.
  --rma ]

The consensus between 1987 and now can I think be fairly demonstrated
from the literature to be in favour of defining the earliest and
latest bounds of probable PIE dispersal, referring to 2500BC as "no
later than", and varying on the other end between 3000 and 4500 BC.

(I personally find Renfrew's analysis of the literature unconvincing,
but that may be just me.  To prove that historical linguistics is
built upon faulty assumptions about archaeology requires going through
the latest literature to demonstrate that linguists are not regularly
revisiting their assumptions, as they should.  How does quoting
Friedrich 1970 or Gimbutas 1960 prove that?)

The upper bound is obviously what you have trouble with.  Anthony's
1991 JIES article based his 3300BC on what he termed the dates of the
earliest indisputable evidence for wheeled vehicles in Europe,
combined with these arguments for reconstructing wheeled vehicles (not
just circles or spheres or balls) to PIE.  Since I have a para from
it, let me quote it here:

"...linguistic studies that have never been seriously challenged
(Specht 1944:99-103) suggest that the final period of PIE unity can be
firmly dated on the basis of shared PIE terms for wheeled vehicles.
At least five word roots related to wheeled vehicles can be safely
assigned to the PIE lexicon.  These common roots occur across all of
the major IE language stocks, from Celtic to Tocharian.  Words based
on these roots in the daughter IE languages have retained their
specific references to "wheel"...; "axle"...; "thill" or yoke pole...;
and "wagon"...  Most of the roots are demonstrably IE, meaning that
most of this vocabulary was created within the IE community.  ...
Moreover, the thematically inflected stems that characterize this
entire group of terms identify them as relatively late additions to
the PIE vocabulary, words that were created not long before the
dispersal of IE speakers (Lehmann 1990:13).  These terms form a
semantic field in which the documented phonetic and semantic
regularities are so pervasive throughout the IE languages that it is
virtually certain that late PIE speakers were familiar with wheeled
vehicles (Anthony and Wailes 1988)."

You may disagree with that sort of argument, but I don't think you can
reasonably attack it as based on circular assumptions.

Of course, "articles" in my last post should have been "words".

Regards,
Rohan.