--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> -
> The list was intended to be seen as evidence for borrowing. Otherwise
> one would be claiming that people knew agriculture at the time of the
> earliest language splits, which is obviously not true.
>
>
> Torsten
>
I see. By "earliest language splits" are you referring to the splits
that led to the various branches of IE, or are you referring to a
possible split that led to IE on one hand and Semitic (and maybe
Kartvelian, Uralic, Yeniseian, etc.) on the other? I'm still a
little confused: if agriculture in the Fertile Crescent began around
9500 BC according to Wiki, then you are saying that the split between
IE and Semitic/etc. occurred before this? Or are the word
correspondences between Semitic/etc. and IE purely the result of
borrowing, and there was no split between these, they are completely
unrelated (and therefore the earliest splits you refer to were
intra-IE splits, and occurred before knowledge of agriculture,
possibly explaining the lack of correspondence of agricultural terms
between Indo-Iranian and western IE languages)? And if you _are_
referring to the intra-IE splits, how early did these splits occur?
And when did Indo-Europeans acquire agriculture? Who taught it to
them? And what people are the source of the common agricultural
vocabulary in (at least western) IE? Is it the Semites? Perhaps there
is a chronology of language development and agricultural development
on the Internet?
These questions may seem pointless, too many, and maybe confusing -- I
just want to be informed and satisfy my curiosity so that I can fully
understand these aspects of IE history. I don't think I will be able
to do this by scanning the archives, since they are often about
specific words rather than general IE history.
Andrew