Re: Odp: Odp: Odp: The date of PIE.

junk

Piotr, Gerry, Sacha, Mark & others,

Something on the archeology of the corded beakers (Sherrat in Cunliffe). They started in Ukraine & went north & west ca.3000 BC & reached the Rhine delta ca.2800 BC. Here we find both corded ware & (slightly later) bell beakers, and archeologists think the/some corded beakers changed into bell beakers (they didn't use cords any more for decoration but perhaps leathery strings - cf. use for driving horses? first hempen cords, later leather?). Somewhat later we find bell beakers in the British Isles and along the Rhone valley, where ca.2500 BC they split in S-France to Iberia (even Portugal) & Italia (even Sicily). The beaker areas mostly overlap where Balto-Slavic, Germanic & Celto-Italic was spoken. AFAIK the Germanics went ca.1000 BC from Scandinavia south, at a time when the Celts were already occupying most of C-Europe. There seems to be a strong overlap of the regions where bell beakers were found & where (early) Celtic was spoken.

If Dutch touw & tooi had the same etymology (in Holland tooi is still pronounced /to.wj/), this suggests a cord (touw) was used for decoration (tooi). Decoration of what? The most likely candidate is of course the beakers of the corded ware culture ca.3000-2500 BC (I read somewhere that also in SE-Asia there was a culture that used cords to decorate pots some 2000 BC or so, but I don't think those people spoke IE). That means that the ancestor then of Dutch belonged to the corded ware culture. At that time this was PIE or proto-Germanic. If we don't believe that the early Germanics (broad sense) occupied all places where corded ware or its offshoot bell-bekers has been found, ie, half of Europe, it must have been an earlier stage, ie, PIE or probably the western branch of it. It's also possible that not all regions with corded or bell beakers spoke PIE or proto-Germanic, and that (in parts of this area, eg, W-Europe) only the corded pots were distributed, not the people who worked in the corded style. Also possible is that the proto-Germanics were already in N-Europe when the corded ware arrived, took over the cording technology & created a new word (taujan) to describe pot cording. Another possibility is that only the proto-Germanics were the bearers of the beaker cultures, but in that case, the areas with corded ware must later have changed from Germanic to Celtic (W) and Balto-Slavic (E-Europe). That's not impossible: the regions were Celtic was spoken once are now speaking Romance and other IE languages.

Another problem is the RUKI rule. It's certainly possible that a region were Balto-Slavic was spoken took over a peculiar pronunciation fashion (RUKI+s) from the "homeland" when the Aryan ancestors were still there (after all, Slavic is still spoken in Ukraine). At that time (ca.2500 BC?) the languages were still in contact & mutually intelligible, and we see comparable "waves" of change at other places & times (I'm thinking of the High German consonant shift that spread to parts of Belgium; or of the Dutch-Flemish dialects that were different from the beginning, when the Germanic tribes settled there, but underwent common innovations later (eg, "Frisians" took over "Franconian" standards)). That would explain why Baltic has a weaker RUKI rule than Slavic.

--Marc

I agree it's not impossible that tooi and touw are resembling each other by accident, but more likely they are related.

Dear Mark, [please: Marc with c --if only to discern from Mark Odegard --MV]

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.

MV: Piotr, thank you very much for your linguistic comments. Some questions:

What does the double ** mean?

*deuk means 'pull', isn't it?

IMO the question is not: was 'cord'>'finish' general for PIE? but: was 'cord'>'decoration' general for PIE (or at least the western branch)? --Marc

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 beakers had reached S-France (via the Rhone valley) where they split into an Iberian and an Italian branch. --Marc

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

MV: Well, if the bell beaker people did not speak (Italo)Celtic, what (IE?) language did they speak? If the corded ware peoples spoke proto-Germanic (touw argument) & came in an area where IE languages were already present, that means that PIE must have had earlier offshoots (older than Germanic). Isn't that a bit unlikely? It's generally believed that Germanic was one of the earliest offshoots (IMO proto-Gemanic only underwent stronger substrate influences).

Don't you think the "Old Eur.hydronomy" was pre-IE, and that the IEs took over the river names that were already present in the regions they entered? Of course it's possible that not only the corded ware people but also the bell beaker peoples spoke proto-Germanic (or Germano-Balto-Slavic??), and that this was later replaced by Celtic & Italic. Did the "Old Eur.hydronomy" extend unto what is now N-Germany or Poland? It's always possible that only Germanic & Balto-Slavic adopted a substrate fashion of merging *a and *o? That both Germanic & Balto-Slavic (no other IE language groups?) show merging of *a and *o suggests they lived in lcose contact (just as the RUKI rule suggests Slavic & Aryan lived in close contact).

I agree the identification bell-beakers & Celto-Italic is even less obvious than corded-ware & Germanic(Balto-Slavic). --Marc