From: Jörg Rhiemeier
Message: 70539
Date: 2012-12-09
On Saturday 08 December 2012 22:50:55 Tavi wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
> wrote:
> [...]
> > Certainly, the current model of PIE is not the final word!
> > The question remains, however, how radical a revision will turn
> > out to be necessary. It seems certain, at least, that one has
> > to distinguish between Early and Late PIE (Adrados's "PIE II"
> > and "PIE III"), with Early PIE being the common ancstor of
> > Anatolian and Late PIE, and Late PIE being the common ancestor
> > of the non-Anatolian IE languages. But I am repeating myself.
>
> Yes, this is a possible scenario, but I think it's more likely that "PIE
> III" or "Kurganic" was spoken by Kurgans, i.e. the Steppe People, who
> imposed it upon the autochtonous population of the Northern
> Balkans-Lower Danube area, whose language was something like "PIE II".
What exactly do you mean here? That "PIE III" and "PIE II" were
utterly different, unrelated languages? Nonsense. The Anatolian
languages are clearly related to the rest of IE. Or do you think
that Anatolian is from an earlier, "pre-Kurgan" wave of expansion
that went first to the Lower Danube region and then into Anatolia?
That is not dismissed easily, but it seems that at least some of
the wheeled-vehicle terminology is Early PIE, which would rule out
a breakup of Early PIE before 4500 BC, when the "Kurgan" migrations
seem to have begun. (Of course, there is no single "Kurgan culture",
the same way as there is no single "Megalithic culture"; kurgans
are just a particular type of burial characteristic of several
different Neolithic and Early Bronze Age cultures of eastern
Europe.)
> This way, the IE family would be the result of a *creolization* process
> between two different languages.
Late PIE and the ancient IE languages do not look like creoles!
Name me a creole in which *every verb is irregular*. The Late
PIE verb is so complex that the notion of a "regular verb" does
not apply. Creoles usually have very simple and regular
morphologies, so this is almost certainly not what has happened.
> [...]
>
> > That may be the case. Recall also that smithing was a rather
> > recent innovation in PIE times - the word cannot be earlier
> > than the introduction of metals to PIE society! Perhaps the
> > word is a loanword from a non-IE people of the Ancient Near
> > East from whom the Indo-Europeans learned metallurgy.
>
> Somebody suggested a Hurrian origin. Anyway, the word isn't "PIE" (i.e.
> Kurganic) at all, but seemingly a loanword into some prehistoric IE
> language(s).
Maybe. But Richard Wordingham wrote:
> The earliest known metal-working was found in Serbia -
> metal-working might be an IE invention!
I do not think that PIE was spoken in the Lower Danube region,
but the language in that region may have been related to IE (if
the language of the Linearbandkeramik culture was related to IE,
as the Old European Hydronymy *seems* to indicate, one would
expect another related language in the Lower Danube region as
well!). If metalworking was invented in the Lower Danube region,
the IE metalworking terminology may have been borrowed from that
language (the /a/-vocalism of a root such as *dhabh- fits this
hypothesis nicely!).
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