From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 180
Date: 1999-11-05
----- Original Message -----From: Marc VerhaegenSent: Friday, November 05, 1999 7:43 AMSubject: [cybalist] Re: Odp: Odp: The date of PIE.I agree it's not impossible that tooi and touw are resembling each other by accident, but more likely they are related.Dear Mark,In case you should think my criticism isn't constructive, I have found some additional evidence IN SUPPORT of your hypothesis. The Oxford English Dictionary reports tow as a potter's term, meaning 'to smooth the surface of a clay vessel by rubbing it with a length of cord'. This seems to be the hitherto missing semantic link. The OED offers no etymology, just quotations, but it is quite clearly a subspecies of the etymon tow=finish off rather than tow=drag. The existence of this term makes it more likely that tow=flax etc. is connected with tow=finish off, despite certain phonological problems: OE tawian < *tawo:j- and to:w do not match very well; one must assume that they are both derived from a Germanic base (certainly a noun) unattested in English, preferably a stem like *tawa-, which would mean (rather conjecturally) 'string, cord'. (Don't confuse this with the attested OE tawa 'tool' < *taw-an-, a weak deverbal noun, semantically the name of an instrument, derived from tawian.) Such a hypothetical noun COULD go back to PIE **dowo- or the like, on the condition that you find anything reasonably like it outside Germanic (e.g. a verb root like **deu- 'twist? bind?' -- or anything to do with cord) to prove that using cord for such a purpose was an IE speciality. Otherwise no arguments based on the derivation 'cord' > 'finish off' may hold generally for Indo-European. I've never seen any such forms but the line seems worth pursuing. You've got me interested in the matter and perhaps other Cybalist members will be able to help.
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.I'm pretty sure the bearers of the Corded Ware and Bell Beaker cultures were linguistically Indo-European or at least predominantly so. I'm equally sure, given the wide horizons of those cultures and their chronology, that they already spoke strongly differentiated IE languages rather than uniform PIE. For linguistic reasons I'd be reluctant to associate the Bell Beakers with Italo-Celtic. The Bell Beaker area coincides significantly, in my opinion, with that of the so-called Old European hydronymy (including the British Isles), and the language of the latter doesn't look like Celtic or Italo-Celtic at all. It shows, for example, an unconditional merger of *a and *o as in Germanic or Balto-Slavic -- an areal peculiarity which affected neither Italic nor Celtic.Piotr