Re: Horse and Wheel in the Early History of Indo-European

From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 62475
Date: 2009-01-13

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Daniel J. Milton" <dmilt1896@...> wrote:
>
> Don't miss Don Ringe's posting on Language Log:
> http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=994#more-994

There he writes:

"But once again this doesn't make much difference for our
reconstructions of palaeocultures. Whether the reconstructable PIE
word for `horse' was already in the common ancestor of all the IE
languages in, say, 4200 BCE or spread through a rapidly diversifying
IE dialect continuum around 3700 BCE can't be expected to have any
impact on subsequent prehistoric and historical developments. In this
case, at least, a degree of detail too fine for linguists to recover
is also too fine to have any consequences for history."

I disagree with the last. It is strongly connected with why there
should be such a rapidly diversifying continuum.

Richard.