From: Marc Verhaegen
Message: 160
Date: 1999-11-03
Mark wrote: ... Mallory questions the IEness of the Corded Ware
horizon, albeit inexplicitly. This is not to say this horizon did not speak a
language related to IE, only that no traces of these langauges remain (except
perhaps as the substratum in Germanic). ...
The Dutch words touw and tooi have the same etymology (just as gouw and Gooi, which both mean 'district', or just as ooi, Latin oui- and English ewe, which all mean '(female) sheep'). But their meaning is quite different: touw (German Tau) means 'cord' and tooi 'ornament'. They are related to the weak verbs tooien 'to decorate', voltooien 'to complete', Gothic taujan 'to complete, to make', and runic ek hlewagastir holtijar horna tawido on the Gallehus gold horn of Jutland ad 400 'I ... decorated (this) horn' (e.g., De Vries, 1979; Todd, 1994). Weak verbs in Germanic frequently derived from nouns by -i/j-, or -ian/jan in the infinitive (PIE suffix -ei/i- already made denominativa, see Beekes, 1990; De Vries, 1982). Proto-Germanic taujan thus meant 'to use a cord' and more specifically 'to finish by decorating with a cord'. Later, when the link with a cord got lost, the meaning generalised to 'to decorate' or 'to complete' as in Dutch (vol)tooien (whence tooi).
I knew this curious difference in meaning between tooi and touw ('ornament' and 'cord'), when I read Sherrat. He says the first archaeological evidence for ornamentation using cords is on the Pontic steppes, where horses were domesticated about 4000 BC(Sherrat, 1994a). At Dereivka on the Dniepr, eg, pots were finished with cord impressions. It was from the Kurgan or Pit Grave culture in this region that about 3000 BC the Corded Ware culture spread over the North European Plain, to southern Scandinavia and to the Baltic region and Russia (Sherrat, 1994a,b). About 2500 BC, the Bell-beaker culture, a variant of the Corded Ware beakers in the Rhine delta, spread over most of western Europe as far as Scotland, Portugal and Sicily (Sherrat, 1994b). IMO all this strongly suggests that the bearers of the corded ware spoke a language ancestral to Germanic, ie, PIE. The geography of the migrations of the beakers (and of the beaker 'peoples'?) that Sherrat described suggested to me that the corded ware could have been Germanic and probably also Balto-Slavic, and the bell beakers nicely coincide with Celto-Italic.
Alexander Stolbov commented on these ideas: When reading about Dutch words touw and tooi, I recollected a Russian verb davit' (the root dav-), which means 'to press, to squeeze, to stamp, to emboss'. This word is common in all Slavic languages. To say the truth, in Russian I know only one derivative of this root, which has a hint of a rope: udavit' 'to strangle, to hang' - not so close to decorating! On the other hand, davit' is the ideal mediator between touw and tooi : cord - pressing - ornament , isn't it?
IMO this suggest that the beaker or corded ware peoples spoke a language ancestral to Germanic and Balto-Slavic, ie, PIE. The geographic distribution of the corded ware +-coincides with that of Balto-Slavic. The geographical distribution of Celto-Italic and of the bell beakers seem to suggest that the bell beaker people also spoke PIE. Could this be confirmed by linguistic data? More specifically, do you know whether there are common innovations in Balto-Slavic, Germanic and Celto-Italic that are absent in the other IE languages?
Marc
(Germanic must have had a very strong substrate influence (more than Balto-Slavic and Celto-Italic?), probably by the megalithic builders in southern Scandinavia about 2000 BC (Gritter 1993), and they adopted a lot of maritime terms, even every-day words like drink, drive, sea, soul and broad.)