Fallow Deer/A Closer Look

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 5/19/01 9:51:53 PM Mountain Daylight Time, X99Lynx at aol.com
writes:

> It seems to me that the fundamental flaw in most of these animal names is the
> assumption that they held a single meaning for as much as 3000 years among
> peoples who had no writing, no picture books, no schools, no biology
> departments and no encyclopedias.

-- why not, when they're supposedly in the same place observing the same
animals?

When you consider that PIE-speakers used their *uksen (oxen), under a *yukom
(yoke) to pull their *weghom (waggon) home from the ceremony where they
*hwedh (wed) their brides, it isn't surprising at all.  Those are all around
5000 years old as of now.

Our first recorded Anatolian, Greek and Indo-Iranian sources are themselves
around 3000 years old and 3000 years nearer the ur-language; if these
languages started in Anatolia and spread east and west, they existed in an
environment with many common faunal elements.

One would expect cognate terms for that fauna in those languages.  Not for
all of them, but for many of the principle ones.

Why would Anatolian, Greek, and Indo-Iranian, etc., all have different,
non-cognate terms for "fallow deer" and "lion", etc., if they all
continuously (and from the origins of PIE) existed in an environment where
these animals were common?  As they were, in Anatolia, Greece, the Balkans,
and the Iranian plateau?

We have unambiguous PIE terms for "horse", "cow", "wolf", and so forth.
Vocabulary loss for large mammals in the early IE languages is quite slow --
particularly for non-predators.

Therefore it's a good rough check to see which areas have animals which don't
produce PIE cognates.

Those which don't are _consistently_ those which describe southern,
Mediterranean species.

If the IE languages started in the Anatolia-Mediterranean area, and spread
north, they should _have_ a set of cognates for southern fauna and _lack_ a
set of cognates for northern fauna -- that is, the separate IE languages in
the north should have come up with separate, new words for the northern
animals as they came into contact with them.

Instead, we have exactly the reverse:  the IE languages have a _common_
lexicon for the northern fauna, and the IE languages of the Mediterranean and
Asia have _separate_ terms for the southern fauna -- while sharing the terms
for animals common to both zones.  Celts and Iranians had cognate terms for
"wolf": but Iranians and Anatolians had different, non-cognate words for
"lion".

This is precisely what one would expect if the PIE-speakers lived in an
environment _with_ wolves and _without_ lions.