the Wheel and Dating PIE

[Rick Mc Callister]

	It's certainly possible for a word to be borrowed into all the IE
languages; especially if it represents a radically new technology or trendy
commodity.
	International words still crop up from time to time and enter most
if not all branches of IE [and other families]; e.g. banana, coffee,
tobacco, computer, telephone, tea [cha/chai/chay is cognate, of course]
	I agree that if there are regular reflexes, then the word would
have borrowed either during a period of unity OR during a period of
adjacent dialects in the same sense that Romance is [or recently was --due
to standardization]
	This begs the question of how long IE languages existed as a chain
of dialects.
	If Romance could have persisted for roughly 2000 years as a chain
of dialects, how long could IE have remained in that state?

[snip]

>Absolutely not.  If PIE had already dispersed into separate languages or
>speech areas, then there is absolutely no reason to assume that a word
>borrowed into one end of the Indo-European region into one dialect/language
>would necessarily spread throughout all the languages in the family.  The
>ONLY way to account for the very existence of the word in nearly every
>branch of Indo-European (Indo-Iranian, Hellenic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic,
>Italic, and Tocharian) is that the word was borrowed when PIE was still a
>unity.  Unless the word was borrowed when PIE was a unity, then there is no
>other way to account for this widespread occurrence in the family, whether
>or not specific sound changes had or had not occurred yet.  If the word only
>existed in, say, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, and Tocharian, then the borrowing
>is quite likely one that only penetrated the eastern end of PIE.  The same
>would be true on the western end of PIE if the word only existed in Celtic,
>Germanic and Italic.  However, since *kwelos has reflexes throughout
>Indo-European, and the sound changes that have affected it in each of the
>daughters are completely regular, the only logical assumption that we can
>make is that the word was borrowed when PIE was still a unity.  Any other
>assumption requires a leap of faith and violates the principle of Occam's
>Razor.

[snip]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701