In a message dated 12/15/99 3:07:15 AM Mountain Standard Time,
gpiotr@... writes:
<< 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.
-- also plows, weaving, one metal, etc. It's a late-Neolithic/Copper Age
vocabulary.
Take "axle", for instance, *aks
We've got Latin 'axis', OE 'eax', Old Prussian 'assis', Old Church Slavonic
'osi', Mycenaean 'aksonos', Sanskrit 'aksa'.
Sure, the word probably derives from "shoulder joint", as the word for wagon
derives from 'convey'.
But what's the likelihood of nearly every sub-family from Ireland to the Tien
Shan independently deriving a word for "axle" from it, if the phenomenon
wasn't of PIE age?
Once is coincidence, twice is happenstance, the third time it's enemy action.
Or take "wheel", *roto: Irish 'roth', Latin 'rota', Old High German 'rad',
Lithuanian 'ratas', Albanian 'rreth', Sanskrit 'ratha' (and 'ratharyati', for
'rides in a chariot').
Then we've got: *kwekulo, "wheel".
ON 'hvel', Avestan 'caxra', Sanskrit 'cakra' (or the Tocharian word for
'wagon' which is derived from *kwekulo, by the same obvious formation through
which the slang English term for automobile is 'wheels'.)
Or another word for wheel, *hwergh; there we have Hittite 'hukri', Tocharian
A 'warkant', which suggests great antiquity for this word, and the Tocharian
terms for 'wheelrim, felloe' which are also derived from this word.
Again, it's extremely unlikely that language-families as separated in time
and space as Anatolian and Tocharian, or Celtic and Indo-Iranian, would use
the _same_ source to identify a _new_ artifact.