Octaviano wrote:sangi39 wrote:Octaviano wrote:
The protoform corresponding to the Hittite word was reconstructed by Mallory & Adams (2007) as *H2/3rºgi- 'wheel'. Alwin Kloekhorst, in his Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon reconstructs *H2urg-i and relates it to Sanksrit varj- 'to turn around' and Latin vergere 'to incline'.
This evidence invalidates one of the postulates of Jörg's Europic hypothesis, namely Anatolian and "classical" PIE shared the lexicon relative to wheel and wheeled vehicles.
Technically this only invalidates the idea that Anatolian and other IE branches have a both have words for "wheel" derived from *H
2/3rºgi-.
But Anatolian has no other 'wheel' words.
sangi39 wrote:To invalidate the claim of PIE, in this case defined as the most recent common ancestor of IE languages, lacking wheel-related terms we would have to show that the Anatolian branch of IE and a (non-Tocharian) branch of IE have no cognates related to wheels and wheeled vehicles and even if we then find this to be the case the strongest conclusion possible is that no words which may have existed survived in both branches, i.e. lack of cross-branch cognates does not definitively lack of that word in the proto-language, merely that evidence of it does not exist.
I'm affraid your view is the same of some traditional IE-ists who were unable to recognize the "archaicity" of Anatolian, and thus thought that features like the masculine/feminine gender found in other IE languages were "lost" in Anatolian. Linguistic evidence points in the other direction, that is, than the common ancestor of Anatolian and the other IE languages is actually older than "classical" PIE and hadn't developed grammatical cathegories like masc./fem. gender.
The common lexicon for wheel and wheled vehicles (which includes for example the word
*kWekWlo- 'wheel') developed AFTER the splitting of Anatolian.
I'm actually not doubting the fact *kwekwlo- developed after Anatolian became a distinct branch. Looking at the regional variation across the late PIE words for "wheel" which includes the words *kwekwlom, *kwokwlos, *kwolos and *kwelos (derived from *kwel- "to turn") indicate that the word for wheel in these branches derived from regional derivations from the same root before the division of "mid" PIE, defined here as the most recent common ancestor of non-Anatolian IE languages.
My major thing is, though, that what people determine as chronologically distinct variants of PIE, i.e. PIE, PIE after the branching of Anatolian, PIE after the branching of Tocharian, etc. I generally think of in terms of regional dialects of the same language spoken by a generally culturally and technologically uniform group. That is to say, although we cannot reconstruct a single word for "wheel" in PIE, we can reconstruct regional PIE words which generally fit into accepting PIE phonology, phonotactics and morphology, indicating that the wheel was known before PIE branches began to become mutually unintelligble.
Personally I find the view of dialectal variation much more... natural... than the typical view of IE development, especially where PIE itself is concerned. For example, in England we have at least 5 different words for "sports footwear" (pump, plimpsole, trainer, etc.) which have no shared etymology, yet it's clear that the English poken in those regions is still English and we clearly all know what the footwear is and what it's for. It may be entirely possible, then, that at some point, PIE had a number of regional dialects, all of which knew what a wheel was and what it was for, but which had different words for "wheel" derived from different sources before these dialects became mutually unintelligble.
Granted I'm using a modern example to back up an idea about a reconstructed language, but there are more examples of such phenomena across a number of different languages dealing with concepts and objects familiar to the speakers of those languages. Lack of shared etymology doesn't necessarily negate the idea that speakers of that community don't have internally derived words for those concepts. Obviously we can't suggest that every single IE branch was a distinct PIE dialect. Overall I'd say there were around 3, maybe 4, major PIE dialects which existed before mutual intelligibility was lost and maybe 6 as mutual intelligibility was being lost with 2 existing at the earliest dialectal stage divided between the pronunciation of the plosives, i.e. with or without aspiration but in a way which was not phonemic and did not impact upon mutual intelligibility.
Coming full circle, though, this idea does lend support to your hypothesis of regional borrowings. If we assume that all PIE people, regardless of geographical location, understood what a wheel was and what is was for, etc. but did not have a shared etymology for their regional words for "wheel" then we could say one of several things. We could suggest that a lack of a shared etymology indicates that the concept or object was not a native innovation and thus some of the terms were borrowed from the source of the innovation. We could equally suggest that the innovation was an internal one but that it occurred after the development of the regional dialects but instead of borrowing the term, regional dialects developed, internally, their own term. We could also suggest that the innovation was external and that the term was borrowed into one dialect but other dialects used internal derivational processes instead of other borrowings.
Each one of those processes is as likely as the other, IMO. Overall, though, I do not support your various hypotheses. Personally I feel that PIE, at the time just before mutual intelligibility began to disappear, that the IE community was Neolithic and use of the wheel existed. A non-dialectal PIE may indeed have been Mesolithich, though, as is suggested by the lack of cross-branch cognates dealing with the wheel and agriculture between Anatolian and non-Anatolian branches. However, I personally feel that, even if the terms were borrowed, they were not borrowed from PVC or PNC but would more likely have been borrowed from some Afro-Asiatic language instead, possibly some language falling along the timeline from PAA to Proto-Semitic.
The adoption/development of agriculture at the time of dialectal PIE would also have aided in its pread across Eurasia, possibly leading to further internal innovations initiated by non-IE locals in more distant areas, furthering the loss of mutual intelligibility or, possibly, even being one factor in the way the loss of mutual intelligibility happened. IMO, for example, Armenian, Germanic, Italic, Hellenic and Indo-Iranian all derive from one dialectal group while Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Celtic, Anatolian and Tocharian belong to the other early dialectal group. At this point lexical items could still belong to both dialects but did not necessarily exist in every smaller community. That is to say, we may see lexical items in two languages which do not belong to the same phonological group in PIE.
On the note of grammatical gender, from what I've read and placed in terms of what I assume, PIE before loss of mutual intelligibility, therefore including the Anatolian dialect of PIE, had an animacy distinction which developed into masculine vs. feminine vs. neuter in non-Anatolian dialects but was retained in the Anatolian branch. As far as I've read, masculine vs. feminine is not an accepted distinction in early PIE anymore because of the discovery of languages like Hittite. I don't know a single IE researcher who would even suggest that masculine vs. feminine was the original nominal classification system of PIE so why even bring it up?
