From: Tavi
Message: 69736
Date: 2012-06-02
>As farming wasn't inventing by IE-speaking people, this can't be inherited but it must be a loanword from the language of Neolithic farmers, possibly Semitic *X\VruT- 'to till, to plough' < Afrasian *X\VrVts^- 'to till land' (Militarev). A bit joking, Alinei compares the diffusion of the word 'plough' to the one of 'car' in modern times.
> > > There're been various attempts to date "PIE" based on words for horse
> > > and wheeled vehicles, which are technological innovations like the ard.
> > > Unfortunately, these attempts are intrinsically fallacious, because
> > > these kind of words are mostly *Wanderwörter* from other languages
> > > (the ones spoken by the inventors of these things).
> >
> > Since *h2arh3-trom has clear IE deverbative structure, it is hardly likely to be a Wanderwort from outside IE. When the heavy wheeled plough was developed (apparently in Rhaetia), it was the noun 'plough' which spread as an unanalyzable Wanderwort, not the verb 'to plough' as a basis for new deverbatives in the borrowing languages.
>
> The Hittite form (which lacks the *-trom suffix) means "to rip open". Several other languages either lack the *-trom suffix or have in non-exclusively. The root is missing from Indo-Iranian and Albanian. All this suggests that while the root was inherited the semantics were changed after the Anatolian split.
>