the Wheel and Dating PIE

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>How do you know that the SPECIFIC sound changes in the wheel word happened
>at the time of dispersal?

-- both the sound-changes and the dispersal are _processes_, not specific
datable events.  The -process- of dispersal and the -process- of
sound-changes are the _same thing_, functionally.

"At the time of dispersal" is meaningless.  It would have to be _during_ the
time of dispersal.  Which is also the time when the sound-changes must, by
definition, have started.

That's how language-change works.  As contact decreases in frequency due to
distance, uniformity decreases and isogloss boundaries appear.

What we can say about the _words_ (plural) for 'wheel' and the parts of the
wheel and for vehicles and travel by vehicle, is that the words date to a
time before the changes which characterize the daughter languages (which
_define_ them) had advanced very far.

Or to put it another way, they arose during a time when interdialect
communication was still common and rapid.

>And how do you know the wheel was not introduced in the intervening period?

-- the words all have PIE roots; "round thing", "shoulder-joint", "neck".

They're not loan terminology at all; they developed from parts of the
original language.  And the probability of _all or most_ of the subsequent
languages using the _same_ roots to describe a _new_ technology is somewhere
between zip and nothing.

>Here's the chronology.  PIE disperses.  The sound changes you see in the wheel
>word have not occurred yet.  The wheel word is introduced to most of the
>daughters.  Then afterwards the sound changes occur.

-- well, in that case, the dispersal can't have gone very far, can it?

You're playing games with the definition of "PIE" and "dispersal" -- this is
what is known as "saving the hypothesis".