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This started with Don Ringe's guest post "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe". He followed up with a more detailed account of "Horse and wheel in the early history of Indo-European", and an answer to some questions under the title "More on IE wheels and horses", and then this morning's post "Inheritance versus lexical borrowing: a case with decisive sound-change evidence".

Readers have added a large number of interesting and provocative comments and questions (110 on the original post alone). As usual, responses are often too long to fit comfortably in the comment format, and our traditional practice has been to respond in follow-up posts where interest and time permit.

Continuing that tradition, I've posted below Don's response to a comment by Etienne on Don's follow-up post on the history of the word for horse. Though the background is complex, this fragment of the conversation is quite coherent on its own.

Here's Etienne:

There is a core assumption in your posts: namely that the proto-Indo-European form in fact had the meaning "horse". But let us imagine that the original meaning was less definite, perhaps "large quadruped" or the like (the meaning "donkey" of the Armenian reflex is worthy of notice in this context). If we imagine a spread of Proto-Indo-European that took place before the domestication of the horse, it is more than plausible that the subsequent spread of domestic horses would lead to the inherited Indo-European word (*whatever its phonological form had in the meantime become in various Indo-European-speaking communities*) everywhere undergoing a process of semantic narrowing and becoming the word for "horse".

Here's a partial analogy: all Germanic languages today have a cognate of English "God" to refer to the Christian god. The original meaning of the proto-Germanic word was a non-Christian god, obviously: but if we had no knowledge of the chronology of the spread of Christianity compared to the chronology of the break-up of Proto-Germanic, we would have no way of knowing whether the proto-Germanic word (however accurately we are able to reconstruct it as far as phonology goes) referred to the Christian god or not. In like fashion, I accept the reconstruction of the phonological form of the Proto-Indo-European form of the word which in attested Indo-european languages meant "horse", but am less certain as to its original meaning in the proto-language.

Don's response:

Etienne’s point is well taken. As he undoubtedly knows, the irregularity of semantic change doesn’t allow us to reconstruct meanings with the same precision with which we can reconstruct forms. I don’t know of any positive evidence for the scenario he sketches, and a (near-)unanimous shift in so many subfamilies might be a long shot, but the point is that it can’t be excluded completely.

(The shift in the meaning of god seems less extreme to me, partly because there was an institution—the Christian church—exerting pressure in that direction for centuries, and partly because there was already a tradition of coopting the Greek and Latin polytheistic words for the monotheistic religion. The latter would have been obvious for a long time, because in parts of the western half of the (former) Empire Greco-Roman polytheism hung on till at least the late 6th c. CE; see Richard Fletcher’s book The bar­barian conversion for some eye-opening discussion.)

Also, regardless of what kind(s) of equids the PIE ‘horse’-word meant, it (or its ancestor) must surely have been applied to wild equids first; so the existence of such a word in the protolanguage really doesn’t provide evidence for the domestication of horses.

So far as I can see, the hard linguistic evidence for a relatively “shallow” date for PIE is the wheeled vehicle terminology. It’s true that Anatolian provides no good evidence for ‘wheel’ itself, but Hittite does have two inherited words for parts of the traction apparatus. The most striking is ḫissas ‘thill’ (the pole that attaches the wagon to the harness), cognate with Sanskrit īṣā́ ‘thill’. The PIE word is reconstructable as *h 2 iHsó- or *h 3 iHsó- (where “H” is any of the three “laryngeal” consonants); I’d hazard a guess that it was feminine, like the Skt. word (thus nom. sg. *h 2/3 iHsé-h 2 , etc.), since Hittite lost the feminine gender and can be expected to have remodelled the endings. The meaning is very specific and the word is not derivable from any verb root, so this is about as good as palaeolinguistic evidence gets.

But the other bit of evidence is reasonably good as well. Hittite iukan ‘yoke’ is clearly cognate with Skt. yugám, Gk. ζυγόν /sdugón/, Lat. iugum, Old English ġeoc, etc. The noun is derived from *yewg- ‘join’, but it never means just any means of joining, always specifically ‘yoke’. Moreover, its formation is unusual (though not as odd as that of ‘wheel’): though neuter o-stem nouns with zero-grade roots do appear in various daughter languages, very few are shared by a large number of sub­groups; so this is another derived noun that was probably derived only once. Now, if you really want to you can argue that these items could have been used with sleds (though in that case the PIE “homeland” should have had snowy winters; the steppes would do, but central Anatolia probably wouldn’t). But I think the natural interpretation is that these are wheeled-vehicle terms.

I think most of the evidence that can be brought to bear on the problem of the IE dispersal is actually archaeological. We need to find the best possible fit between the archaeological data, which are sometimes extensive, and relevant linguistic data, which are usually restricted. It usually turns out that you can fit quite a few different archaeo­logical scenarios to the linguistic data, but not all equally easily; and the more stretching and squeezing you have to do to make it all fit, the less likely the result is to be correct. (It has to be remembered that extrapolating into prehistory is always a probabi­listic en­deavor. Smoking guns are very rare.) I’m prepared to accept David Anthony’s hypothesis for the time being because I think it’s the most likely so far, and because he’s backed it up with a great deal of detailed archaeological evidence; I’ve never seen any­thing like that from Colin Renfrew, for instance. (Not that I’m rejecting all of Renfrew’s work—I think his work on pre-Celtic Britain is very impressive; I just think Anthony’s done better with the IE dispersal problem.) But I don’t care deeply whether Anthony turns out to be right in the long run, or about any specific conclusions; it’s the data and the methodology that matter.

[Above is by Don Ringe]

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