Re: Dates of IE and A-A

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Tavi" <oalexandre@...> wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@> wrote:
> >
> > > PIE has only a few words related to agriculture, domestication, and
> metals which, IMO, points to a late paleolithic/early neolithic date. So
> 7-8k BC seems reasonable.
> >
> > What do we mean by "the date of PIE"? 7-8k BCE is much too early for
> the diaspora. If memory serves, Sherratt dates the appearance of
> (ritual?) ard-marks under European barrows to 3500, give or take a
> century. The diaspora must have followed the ard (i.e. light plough),
> *h2arh3-trom. This is what makes 3-4k BCE reasonable for the breakup of
> PIE.
> >
> There're been various attempts to date "PIE" based on words for horse
> and wheeled vehicles, which are technological innovations like the ard.
> Unfortunately, these attempts are intrinsically fallacious, because
> these kind of words are mostly *Wanderwörter* from other languages
> (the ones spoken by the inventors of these things).

Since *h2arh3-trom has clear IE deverbative structure, it is hardly likely to be a Wanderwort from outside IE. When the heavy wheeled plough was developed (apparently in Rhaetia), it was the noun 'plough' which spread as an unanalyzable Wanderwort, not the verb 'to plough' as a basis for new deverbatives in the borrowing languages.

> > Of course, if you belong to the Super Mario Brothers, there was no
> breakup, no diaspora, and everybody was polite to everybody else until
> Romulus slew Remus over a perceived insult.
> >
> You remind me of a cartoon quoted by Renfrew where Caesar's soldiers
> were drinking beer and smoking cigarrettes at a café. Hint: these
> things were introduced at a later date but yet they've got common words
> in Romance languages.

Colin Renfrew is much closer to Super Mario Alinei than I am. My whole stock in trade is linguistic stratification. The Super Mario doctrine holds that there was only one pre-Roman substrate (at least in IE-speaking Western Europe), hence no stratification of Gaulish on Ligurian or whatever. It is remarkable how well this doctrine fits with the ideology of the Northern Italian separatist movement, whose mantra is "Roma Padrona e Ladrona" or something. But then, scholars never allow themselves to be sullied by political ideology, do they?

Speaking of smoking, I have never been convinced that Spanish <cigarro> 'cigar' comes from an unidentified New World source. I find it more plausible that it was extracted from dialectal (or unidentified Ibero-Romance) *cigarrote 'big cicada', from *cigarra 'cicada', continuing Ibero-Latin *cicarra (from Lat. <cicada> normalized to the more common Ib. ending *-arra). The semantics may be compared to obsolete English <roach> 'cigarette', surviving among potheads as <roach clip> 'alligator clip used to hold a marijuana joint'. Apparently a rolled smoking product was likened to a hard-shelled large bug by smokers (presumably under the influence of whatever was being smoked).

DGK