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

At 3:48:22 AM on Tuesday, January 13, 2009, Richard
Wordingham wrote:

> --- 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.

Technically that's a matter of pre-history, not history.
More to the point, I think that it's clear from what
precedes it that the last sentence actually means
'consequences for subsequent history'.

Brian