--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@...> wrote:
>
> > In all likelihood, the Greek word must have been borrowed from another
> > language.
>
> Yes, a P-Illyrian language, as I have been arguing for years, with Tarentine <-ikkos> borrowed from Messapic (a Q-Ill. lg.). But the Illyrian forms as well as Lusitanian *iccos (the basis of <Iccona> = Gallo-Latin <Epona>) regularly reflect *h1ek^wos and provide no basis for assigning the word to a post-PIE superstrate.
>
I agree with the first part, but not with the second. IMHO,
*h1ek´w-o- doesn't belong to PIE but to the language I call "Pontic". And comparative data suggests this is a Caucasian loanword correlated to the domestication of the animal in the Pontic-Caspian steppes.
The problem lies in the incorrect identification of "Pontic" as the protolanguage of the IE family (i.e. PIE), when it's only a superstrate reflecting the Chalcolithic-Bronze Age expansion of the "Steppe People". In my model, the real PIE was spoken many millenia before, in the Upper Palaeolithic, and by the Mesolithic it was already fragmented into several paleo-varieties (a term I myself adapted from Villar), which due to language replacement processes superimposed in a varying degree to form the historically attested IE languages.
Thus the lexicon reconstructed as "PIE" (aprox. 2,000 roots) is actually a mix of "Pontic" and several other paleo-varieties, including Neolithic loanwords and Wanderwörter.