Re: Odp: Odp: The date of PIE.

junk

I agree it's not impossible that tooi and touw are resembling each other by accident, but more likely they are related. And in that case we may expect that everywhere in Europe where we find the corded ware (=pots decorated by cords) and the dervied bell beakers the bearers of these cultures spoke PIE because the time and the space fit perfectly. The touw=tooi argument is a confirmation of some of the ideas Gimbutas and other people who already years ago provided arguments to believe that the beaker peoples could be identified with the western branch of PIE. The last decades there is consensus on when and how the beaker peopled migrated into N+W Europe. A.Sherrat (in The Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe ed.B.Cunliffe, Oxford UP, pp.167-201 & 244-276) says that the first archaeological evidence for ornamentation using cords is on the Pontic steppes, where horses were domesticated about 4000 BC. At Dereivka on the Dniepr pots with cord impressions were found, and it was from the Kurgan or Pit Grave culture in this region that about 3000 BC the corded beakers spread over the N-European Plain, to southern Scandinavia and to the Baltic region and Russia. Sherrat gives several very nice maps on these migrations. About 2800 BD they had reached the Rhine delta where they changed into bell beakers. About 2500 BC the bell beaker had reached S-France (via the Rhone valley) where it split into an Iberian and an Italian branch.

Marc

Dutch etymological diccionaries leave little doubt that (all?) words on -ooi and -ouw have the same etymology, eg, Etymologisch Woordenboek Van Dale: "de verbindingen ooi en ouw wisselden afhankelijk van de oorspronkelijke vervoeging; vgl. naast Gotisch taujan de verleden tijd tawido, zoals in gouw, Gooi e.d." (translation: "the combinations ooi and ouw varied according to the original conjugation; cf. Gothic taujan with the past tense tawido, as in gouw, Gooi and such"). IMO this makes the connection touw-tooi rather certain. If we take touw (PIE *deu??) 'rope, cord, string' as the original meaning, the other meanings could be derived (eg, 'to spin': the cords ca.3000 BC in the Pontic area were made of hemp; or the verb touwen 'finishing leather'). The decoration with a cord was the last thing that had to be done before the pot (beaker) was finished (before baking), so tooien 'to decorate' was easily derived from the word for 'touw', as if you said in English "I still have to cord the pot [and then it's finished]", cf. voltooien means 'to finish', rather different from tooien).

It's certainly generally true that words in -ooi and -ouw are etymologically equivalent, but this need not be true of an odd individual case. What I'm suggesting is that historical development has produced a pair of apparent equivalents. Homonymy often arises in a that way. To quote a comparable case, in English meadow = mead (an area of grassland, not honey wine) and shadow = shade (historically different declensional forms of the same nouns), but it does not follow that, e.g. mallow = male. The two mead words, by the way, are spelt and pronounced the same but have very different histories and did not become identical before late Middle English. I'm not saying that your connection is evidently wrong, but that it may be impossible to verify.