Re: Ice age, plate tectonics and PIE

"S.Kalyanaraman" (Sun Mar 16, 2003) wrote:
<<I am getting a little disappointed. I thought PIE will have answers for the
problems I am wrestling with: i.e. lexemes of flora and fauna of periods
prior to chalcolithic.>>

Europeans came to America and promptly called the European "red deer" an
"elk" and the European "elk" a moose. Add to that there is evidence that
"moose" was actually a Native American word for a white tail deer. Today,
Americans use the word "corn" exclusively for "maize" and rarely use the word
"maize" which Europeans use for "corn", remembering that "corn" means "grain"
in general in European English, and that "John Barleycorn" stands for
alcohol. This happened in the course of the last 300 odd years.

Why would you think we would have any good idea what the flora and fauna
words from as much as 6000 + years ago or more -- 3000+ years before any
writing or other evidence -- meant? Or whether those words even were spoken
3000+ years before there was any written evidence of them?

Standard words for flora and fauna may well be a relatively modern invention.
Common names in North America, for new-found flora particularly, are
demonstrably irregular, local and capable of extreme semantic drift. There
is no reason to think your pre-chalcolithic names would not be even more
impossible to accurately reconstruct. The regularity you see probably is the
result of much later learned "corrections" and standardization that came with
writing.

Steve Long