Re: laguage of bird names ?= Old European

> > Kuhn also notes that oldest PIE words for cattle raising and
> > agriculture (Viehzucht und Ackerbau, to avoid terminological
> > confusion) have almost no /a/'s, whereas the names of younger
> > domesticated animals, ie goat, goose, duck and chicken, is full
> > of /a/'s. According to Gimbutas, the kurgan/corded ware culture
> > overran Europe in several waves, the first ones only

incompletely; so

> > if assume the last wave did not spread from the former wave, but
> > overran it completely (and then some), then the river names would

be

> > Pre-PIE loanwords in (western) PIE.
>
> Goats were domesticated before cattle, at roughly the same time as

sheep and

> pigs, i.e. ca. 8000 BC. They were kept in Europe from the earliest

Neolithic

> times, so in what sense are they "younger"?

First, all these questions should really be directed at Hans Kuhn (b.
1899), since those are his words (Besprechung von Hans Krahe: Unsere
ältesten Flussnamen, in 'Kleine Schriften'). I'll try to save his
reputation, though. W.r.to goats, their name may have been
transmitted the same way as the Old European river names, ie. an IE
invasion borrowed it from an earlier IE invasion.

>As for "almost no /a/'s" in the
> vocabulary of farming, how about some of the most important terms,

such as,

> *h2ag^-e/o- 'drive (animals), lead', *h2ag^ro- 'field' and *h2arh3-

'till'??

>

Kuhn's words. I guess it shows these terms arrived at the same time
as the words for goats etc were borrowed.

Some argue that *ag-r^o- is a derivation of *ag^- 'drive', or
perhaps 'to shepherd' (and therefore derivative, and later). You'd
have to move goats around too. (BTW, there's Latin <gero> too, which
makes it look like a "bird word" too).

Torsten