From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 157
Date: 1999-11-02
----- Original Message -----From: markodegard@...Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 1999 8:56 PMSubject: [cybalist] The date of PIE.From the literature, there seems to be a consensus that it is not possible to place PIE unity before 4,000 BCE. The most commonly cited evidence lies in the words for wheels and wheeled vehicles, which (1) archaeology forbids quite nearly anyone anywhere before this time, and (2) that these words in no way give any evidence of having been passed from one IE language to another but are inherited directly by each IE language from the common ancestor.(1) Carts and wheels were certainly known to the neolithic Funnel Beaker (TRB) culture of northern Europe (well before Corded Ware). There is a well-preserved cart rut below a TRB megalithic tomb at Flintbeck (Germany), dated at 2800-2700 BC, and there is a TRB pot with wagon motifs from Bronocice (Poland), dated at 2610-2440 BC. The central European attestation of carts is thus older than the Uruk wagon pictographs, once taken to be the oldest evidence of wheeled transport. European archaeology gives us fresh surprises every year and the dates given above may soon be pushed back. Does this make the TRB people Indo-European? Their culture has often been described as resulting from a fusion of Danubian (Linear Pottery) and autochthonous (mesolithic) elements, but their carts seem older than any Pontic vehicles.(2) Each IE language? If you mean *kwe-kwl-o- 'wheel', it is attested in Germanic, Tocharian, Indo-Iranian and Greek. The Slavic equivalent seems to go back to *kwol-es-, a related stem but certainly not the same word; the root vowel is of unknown but probably secondary origin, as the normal vocalism of -es stems is /e/. Old Prussian has kelan, apparently < *kwel-o-m. Other branches have unrelated words for 'wheel'. The well-attested PIE root *kwel- meant 'go round', hence various derived nouns meaning "something round, wheel, circle, etc." As the name refers to the shape of such objects, not to their function, the meaning need not be "cartwheel"; nor is it anywhere restricted to wainwright terminology (well, in Tocharian A/B kukäl/kokale means 'wagon'). A common word for 'wagon' is simply non-existent; there are only different transparent derivatives of the verb *wegh-e- 'convey', which could easily arise independently in the individual dialects.I do not wish to insinuate that linguistic palaeontology cannot be used to correlate IE origins with archaeological findings, but only to point out that this type of evidence is much weaker than routinely assumed. Productive derivatives such as thematic deverbative nouns, in particular, are of limited testimonial value, since they almost inevitably appear in different languages as a result of parallel development, producing an illusion of being well-established inherited lexical items.
Another oft-cited piece of evidence is that PIE apparently had only one word for metal (undoubtedly copper) and that the breakup of PIE occured before additional metal words appear in the daughter language (a distinct word for gold seems to have individually developed in the daughter languages before copper and bronze are clearly distinguished).*xajes- is not too widespread either, but its characteristic form and apparently non-derived character make it a much more reliable witness than *kwekwlo- or *wogho-. By contrast, the presence of similar 'silver' words in a few branches does not mean much, since those words are adjectival and participial formations derived from *xarg- 'shine > shining white' -- an obvious candidate if you want a name for silver. Though arguing from the absence of a common term is a potentially dangerous procedure (e.g. the reconstructed PIE has words for 'mead' and 'honey', but not for 'bee'; it has 'cattle' and 'suck' words, but no word for 'milk'; it has a word for 'twenty', but none for 'twelve', etc.), the lack of other metal names only suggests a pre-Bronze-Age date for the dispersal of PIE dialects. Native copper was occasionally used in neolithic cultures. Raw copper objects from Rudna Glava (Serbia) date back to ca. 4000 BC (bronze technology was already well developed in Thailand at that time!). This means that IE "metallurgy" is compatible with virtually any dispersal date as long as the latter's neolithic.
As I said, this is mostly personal speculation. At the very least, I'm just thinking out loud. I'd like to think I'm conversing, having 'bull sessions', where one talks out what one is thinking about. This is the only way you reach really valid conclusions.
I'm enjoying this exchange very much, too!
Piotr Gasiorowski