“Indo-European” words for horse and wheel could be wonderworters (Language Log)

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Another cat is out of the comparative linguists' bag. Two key

reconstructed words for horse and wheel upon which the

entire " mainstream " view of " Indo-European " homeland and hence the

Indolgoical reconstruction of India's history is based, may not have

been inherited from the original tongue but borrowed from one dialect

to another (wonderworters) as they kept breaking up but remained in

closed contact. This would invalidate the whole " traditional "

chronology of Indo European linguistics.

As it turns out, the reconstructed IE word for horse *é & #7729;wos which

supposedly lead to Sanskrit asvas ignores Lithuanian asva meaning

mare and Armenian es meaning donkey. Moreover, the Armenian word for

horse is derived from Sanskrit hayah.

1. The Armenian word for 'horse' is & #1393; & #1387; /dzi/, gen.

& #1393; & #1387; & #1400; & #1397; /dzioy/;

Meillet says it's related to Sanskrit haya & #7717; (Language hat, 2009,

Language Log, Jan 13, retrieved on 2/22/09)

To make matters worse the French equs type of words for horse may

have been borrowed rather than inherited from proto-Italic

" Actually, the most telling sign that French words such as " équine,

équestre " (the latter is first attested in 1355, the former before

1502, incidentally) are borrowed rather than inherited from Latin is

the intervocalic /k/: in Spanish and Portuguese Latin intervocalic

stops were voiced (cf. YEGUA in Spanish, from EQUA), whereas in

French these stops were first voiced, then turned to fricatives and

entirely deleted if they were non-labial: indeed Latin EQUA became

IVE in Old French (with only the labial part of the labiovelar

consonant surviving), a word which survived dialectally until

recently (Etiene, 2009, Language Log, Jan 11, retrieved on 2/22/09 "

1. " What about the other, arguably more normal word for horse

(Welsh: ceffyl, Irish: capall, Latin: caballus, French: cheval,

Romanian: cal, etc), so detested by the Latin purists? And I'm

slightly sceptical about the Gaulish " Epo- " : to the best of my

(albeit very limited) knowledge, it only occurs initially in three-

element personal names (viz Eposognatos and Eporedorix), which leaves

it open to easy reinterpretation as patronymic (cf

Welsh " ap " , " epilion " ) + two-element names. The other instances of

equus-type words in Celtic seem to be in a high or specialist

register. Could a case therefore be made for the ceffyl-type word

being the genuine Celtic one, with the equus-type word being a loan-

word (presumably from an Italic language)? (James D., 2009, Language

Log, Jan 10, retrieved on 2/22/09). "

In summary, reconstructionist are not even sure if the word *ekwos

even existed in PIE and if it did, what it may have meant. It could

have meant a quadraped, mare, donkey or a horse; wild or domesticated

is another issue!

" I would agree with your (David Marjanovi & #263; ) point if the only

possible assumption was that all branches of Indo-European other than

Armenian had shifted the meaning from " donkey/large quadruped "

to " horse " independently of one another: but a contact explanation is

possible, whereby this semantic innovation began in one branch of

Indo-European and thence spread to other branches (perhaps with the

spread of domesticated horses), without different reflexes of *EQUOS

being actually borrowed from one branch to the next of course. It was

Leonard Bloomfield who pointed out that a careless linguist might

reconstruct a proto-Algonquian word for " whiskey " , which in all

Algonquian languages is a compound of the words " fire " and " water " ,

each of which is inherited from proto-Algonquian: the innovation,

whereby the two words are compounded with the meaning " whiskey " , is

of course a post-proto-Algonquian innovation, which involved a spread

of new meanings rather than new forms: and unfortunately, in

comparative and historical linguistics, whereas the regularity of

sound change allows us to weed out inherited from borrowed *forms*,

there is no way to weed out inherited from borrowed *meaning*

(Etiene, 2009, Language Log, Jan 12, retrieved on 2/22/09) "

" There is a core assumption in your (Don Ringe's) 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 (Etiene, 2009, J Language Log, Jan 11, retrieved on

2/22/09 "

Indo European linguists appeal to archaeological evidence to resolve

the controversy about *ekwos. Certain archaeological cultures like

Afanasievo who show some evidence of horse use (not necessarily

domestication) are equated with PIE speakers!!!

PIE word for wheel is PIE *kwékwlo-s is reconstructed without using

corresponding words from Anatolian and Tocharian that do not have the

same form.

" " The Hittite word for `wheel' is & #7723; & #363;rkis, and it resembles Tocharian

A wärkänt and Tocharian B yerkwantai (oblique case; the nominative is

not attested) enough to make us want to derive them from the same

inherited root. The obvious choice is the ancestor of Vedic Sanskrit

vr & #805;j- `twist' (aorist 3sg. injunctive várk, subjunctive várjati,

etc.), and it's straightforward to reconstruct a PIE root *h2werg-

`turn' (Don Ringe 2009, Language Log, Jan 10, retrieved on 2/22/09). "

So there is no reason to assume that PIE broke up after wheel or

wheeled transportation was invented or horse was domesticated.

Dramatically, both *h2werg and *kwékwlo-s type of words for wheel

are present in Sanskrit!

" So, I sum up: it is possible that " horse " and " wheel " are

Wanderwörter, but it's not the most parsimonious option, and it

wouldn't matter much anyway. OK, thanks. :-) (David Marjanovi & #263;, 2009,

Language Log , Jan 11, retrieved on 2/22/09). "

Professor Don Ringe a prominent Indo-European linguists admits that

reconstruction of a proto-Indo-European " language is unreliable.

" This raises a methodological point that we can no longer avoid. Is

there any difference between a word which is reconstructable for a

protolanguage and a word which spread from dialect to dialect of the

protolanguage as it was breaking up? As usual, it depends on the

individual case. If the real-world separation of the daughters was

genuinely abrupt—that is, one group picked up and moved within a

generation or so, and subsequent contacts were infrequent and brief—

then there is a clear difference between the two scenarios. But most

disintegrations of speech communities don't happen like that;

dialects remain in contact as they diverge, continuing to trade

linguistic material until some event finally makes them lose touch

altogether. (The best discussion of these processes is Ross 1997.)

In such cases the " protolanguage " which we reconstruct is most

unlikely to correspond to a single, completely uniform dialect that

existed in the real world before its speaking population became large

enough to exhibit significant linguistic diversity; it almost

inevitably corresponds to a dialectally diversified speech community,

still unified but no longer uniform, simply because we can't tell the

difference between words and grammatical forms which had been in the

language for generations and those which had arrived very recently.

It is also likely that our reconstruction will be temporally " out of

focus " , including some inherited words and forms which were no longer

characteristic of all the dialects and some new words and forms which

were still spread¬ing from dialect to dialect. There are good

reasons to suspect that our reconstruction of PIE is like that (Don

Ringe 2009, Language Log, Jan 10, retrieved on 2/22/09). "

M. Kelkar