Re: Odp: joatsimeo-Loan Words

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 579
Date: 1999-12-15

 
----- Original Message -----
From: JoatSimeon@...
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 1999 8:06 AM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: Odp: joatsimeo-Loan Words

In a message dated 12/14/99 11:58:19 PM Mountain Standard Time, 
gpiotr@... writes:

<< Secondly, the agreement for 'wagon' is very different from that for 
'three', 'mother', 'foot' or 'sky' 

-- not really.  *ueghnos gives "wagon" in Old Irish (fen), Welsh (gwain), Old 
Norse (vagn).  

The derivatives of *ueghitlom mean "vehicle" in Latin (vehiculum), Sanskrit 
(vahitram), while *uoghos yields wagon or chariot in Slavic (OCS vozu), 
Mycenaean (wokos) etc.
That's my point. You have the same ROOT, but various WORDS. For THREE we have a very precise reconstruction: masculine *trejes, neuter *tri:, and so on. They actually meant 'three'. For WAGON we have morphologically analysable nouns, all going back to the verb *weghe- which meant 'carry, convey', not 'wagon'. The derivation patterns involved are highly productive (*woghos is the simplest type of deverbative noun, like *tomos, *loghos from *tem-, *legh-; *-trom is a well known instrumental suffix, attached to scores of verb bases, etc.) not only in PIE but also in its daughters -- the "proto-branch" languages. There is nothing in their structure to guarantee that they are indeed PIE as opposed to area- or branch-specific. You could say that the existence of *weghe- implies wheeled vehicles anyway, but that's questionable since the verb means 'convey' in a more general sense; in Sanskrit, e.g., it is often used of rivers; note also the pretty wide semantic range of (w)okhos in Greek (including, e.g., 'harbour').
 
The PIE status of wagon, wheel, axle, etc., are quite firm.  

Which is to be expected, since PIE is a language of the late-Neolithic 
period, 4th millenium BCE.
Well, the the latter is an inference from the former, not an independently established fact. The horse-wheel-and-wagon vocabulary is the keystone of most attemps to date PIE. But what about Anatolian? It's got no IE wagon, wheel or axle words.
 
My best regards,
 
Piotr