Philology: Indo-Europeans Arrived in Europe with Modern Man Philology JONATHAN SHERMAN MORRIS Wheels, Languages and Bullshit (Or How Not to Do Linguistic Archaeology)

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Contents Volume 3 / 2017 Vol.

Special Session: Languages in European Prehistory FRANCESCO BENOZZO & MARIO ALINEI 3 European Philologies: Why Their Future Lives in Their Prehistoric Past 2017 MARCEL OTTE Wendat Ethnophilology: Indo-Europeans Arrived in Europe with Modern Man Philology JONATHAN SHERMAN MORRIS Wheels, Languages and Bullshit (Or How Not To Do Linguistic Archaeology)

XAVERIO BALLESTER An International Journal Some Major Celtic Details on the Origins of Indo-European Languages on the Evolution of Languages, Cultures and Texts DANIEL LE BRIS Geolinguistic Continuities in the Celto-Atlantic Area and in Western Europe

WINFRID SCUTT Celtic in the Fleuve Manche

DAPHNE NASH BRIGGS Multilingual Coin Inscriptions and Their Context in Pre-Roman East Anglia

Articles EPHRAIM NISSAN Gad as an Ancient Semitic Theonym, and Its Lexical Cognates. With an Exploration of the Semantics of gad, and of Its Medieval Exegesis

ROSSANO DE LAURENTIIS Santafior com’è sicura (Purg. VI 111): When Local Pride May Not Be Philological

SUSAN PETRILLI Lifelong Listening to M. Bakhtin’s Word in the Context of His “Circle”. A Philological Approach by A. Ponzio Crossings FRANCESCO BENOZZO Per un’ecdotica del molteplice e del discordante: Philology il caso dei manoscritti trobadorici

Notes REMO BRACCHI Torus, The Big Bang of Life MAHMOUD SALEM ELSHEIKH The World of Islam. Historical Prejudices to Overcome (or Debtor’s Syndrome?)

Review article EPHRAIM NISSAN Jewish Vernaculars, Their Hebrew Loanwords or Code-Switching, and the Related Idiomatics

Review article ONDREJˇ BLÁHA, ROBERT DITTMANN AND LENKA ULICNÁˇ (EDS.) Knaanic Language: Structure and Historical Background (Ephraim Nissan)

ISSN 2297-2625 Peter Lang Vol. 3/2017

www.peterlang.com Contents Volume 3 / 2017 Vol.

WINFRID SCUTT Celtic in the Fleuve Manche

DAPHNE NASH BRIGGS Multilingual Coin Inscriptions and Their Context in Pre-Roman East Anglia

Articles EPHRAIM NISSAN Gad as an Ancient Semitic Theonym, and Its Lexical Cognates. With an Exploration of the Semantics of gad, and of Its Medieval Exegesis

ROSSANO DE LAURENTIIS Santafior com’è sicura (Purg. VI 111): When Local Pride May Not Be Philological

Notes REMO BRACCHI Torus, The Big Bang of Life MAHMOUD SALEM ELSHEIKH The World of Islam. Historical Prejudices to Overcome (or Debtor’s Syndrome?)

Review article EPHRAIM NISSAN Jewish Vernaculars, Their Hebrew Loanwords or Code-Switching, and the Related Idiomatics

Review article ONDREJˇ BLÁHA, ROBERT DITTMANN AND LENKA ULICNÁˇ (EDS.) Knaanic Language: Structure and Historical Background (Ephraim Nissan)

ISSN 2297-2625 Peter Lang Vol. 3/2017

www.peterlang.com Philology General Editor: Francesco Benozzo (Università di Bologna, Italy)

Editorial Board: Rossend Arques (Lexicography, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain) Xaverio Ballester (Classical Philology, Universitat de Valéncia, Spain) Francesco Benozzo (Ethnophilology, Università di Bologna, Italy) Vladimir Biti (Slavic Philology, Universität Wien, Austria) Daniela Boccassini (French and Italian Philology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada) Salwa Castelo-Branco (Ethnomusicology, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal) Mattia Cavagna (Romance Philology, Université de Louvain, Belgium) Louis-Jacques Dorais (Arctic Philology, Emeritus, Université Laval, Québec) Markus Eberl (Pre-Columbian Philology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA) Matthias Egeler (Scandinavian Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany) Keir Douglas Elam (English Literature, Università di Bologna, Italy) Andrea Fassò (Romance Philology, Università di Bologna, Italy) Inés Fernández-Ordóñez (Spanish Philology and Linguistics, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain) Fabio Foresti (Sociolinguistics, Università di Bologna, Italy) Roslyn Frank (Ethnolinguistics, Oulun Yliopistoo, Finland) Beatrice Gründler (Arabic Philology, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) Mihály Hoppál (Ethnology, Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, Budapest, Hungary) Martin Kern (East Asian Philology, Princeton University, USA) John Koch (Celtic Philology, Canolfan Uwchefrydiau Cymreig a Cheltaidd, Aberystwyth, UK) Albert Lloret (Digital Philology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA) Anna Maranini (Classical Philology, Università di Bologna, Italy) Matteo Meschiari (Cultural Anthropology, Università di Palermo, Italy) Alberto Montaner Frutos (Spanish and Semitic Philology, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain) Gonzalo Navaza (Toponimy, Universidade de Vigo, Spain) Ephraim Nissan (Historical and Computational Linguistics, London, UK) Stephen Oppenheimer (Genetics, Oxford University, UK) Marcel Otte (Prehistoric Studies, Université de Liège, Belgium) Michael Papio (Italian Philology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA) José Manuel Pedrosa Bartolomé (Oral Philology, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain) Andrea Piras (Iranian Philology, Università di Bologna, Italy) Stefano Rapisarda (Romance Philology, Università di Catania, Italy) Uta Reuster-Jahn (African Philology, Universität Hamburg, Germany) Adelaide Ricci (Paleography, Università di Pavia, Italy) Dario Seglie (Archaeology, Politecnico di Torino, Italy) Bora Cem Sevencan (Archaeology, Oulun Yliopistoo, Finland) Wayne Storey (Textual Philology, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA) Marco Veglia (Italian Literature, Università di Bologna, Italy) Francesco Vitucci (Japanese Philology, Università di Bologna, Italy) Philology An International Journal on the Evolution of Languages, Cultures and Texts

General editor: Francesco Benozzo

Volume 3 / 2017

PETER LANG Bern · Berlin · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien Editorial Address: Francesco Benozzo Università di Bologna Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne Via Cartoleria 5 I-40124 Bologna, Italy [email protected]

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ISSN 2297-2625 e-ISSN 2297-2633

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Printed in Germany Contents Volume III / 2017

Special Session: Languages in European Prehistory

Francesco Benozzo & Mario Alinei European Philologies: Why Their Future Lives in Their Prehistoric Past ��9

Marcel Otte Indo-Europeans Arrived in Europe with Modern Man...... 43

Jonathan Sherman Morris Wheels, Languages and Bullshit (Or How Not To Do Linguistic Archaeology) ��57

Xaverio Ballester Some Major Celtic Details on the Origins of Indo-European Languages ��109

Daniel Le Bris Geolinguistic Continuities in the Celto-Atlantic Area and in Western Europe ��117

Winfrid Scutt Celtic in the Fleuve Manche ��135

Daphne Nash Briggs Multilingual Coin Inscriptions and Their Context in Pre-Roman East Anglia ��149

Articles

Ephraim Nissan Gad as an Ancient Semitic Theonym, and Its Lexical Cognates. With an Exploration of the Semantics of gad, and of Its Medieval Exegesis ��169 Contents 6

Rossano De Laurentiis Santafior com’è sicura (Purg. VI 111): When Local Pride May Not Be Philological ��343

Susan Petrilli Lifelong Listening to M. Bakhtin’s Word in the Context of His “Circle”. A Philological Approach by A. Ponzio ��361

Crossings

Francesco Benozzo Per un’ecdotica del molteplice e del discordante: il caso dei manoscritti trobadorici ��395

Notes

Remo Bracchi Torus, The Big Bang of Life ��425

Mahmoud Salem Elsheikh The World of Islam. Historical Prejudices to Overcome (or Debtor’s Syndrome?)...... 429

Review article

Ephraim Nissan Jewish Vernaculars, Their Hebrew Loanwords or Code-Switching, and the Related Idiomatics ��437

Reviews

Ondřej Bláha, Robert Dittmann and Lenka Uličná (eds.) Knaanic Language: Structure and Historical Background (Ephraim Nissan) ��523 Philology, vol. 3/2017, pp. 57–108 © 2018 Jonathan Sherman Morris - DOI https://doi.org/103726/PHIL012017.3

Wheels, Languages and Bullshit (Or How Not To Do Linguistic Archaeology)

Jonathan Sherman Morris ASLIP - São Paulo, Brazil

The production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. [The bullshitter] does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose. However studiously and conscientiously the bullshitter proceeds, it remains true that he is also trying to get away with something. There is surely in his work, as in the work of the slovenly craftsman some kind of laxity which resists or eludes the demands of a disinterested and austere discipline.

Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit

Just when it appeared that the Pontic Steppe theory of Indo-European origins was about to be consigned to the dustbin of history, together with Marija Gimbutas’ reputation for her later work among all but the most ardent feminists, it was resurrected by the anthropologist, David W. An- thony, in his 2007 book The Horse, the Wheel and Language, portentously subtitled How Bronze-Aged Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Early in her career, Gimbutas had been deeply sceptical of the original theory of mounted nomads from the Pontic Steppes spreading Indo-European languages into Europe, leaving kurgan burial mounds as their signature, but towards the end of it, she cast her initial meth- odological caution to the wind and turned a male gratification fantasy about mounted Übermenschen on its head to produce a feminist fantasy in which nasty, brutish nomads from the Steppes had destroyed the peaceful, matriarchal, earth goddess worshipping Neolithic cultures of the Balkans (most notably Eisler, 1988). While the brunt of criticism directed against Gimbutas related to her tendency to see earth goddesses everywhere, there were always serious problems with the invasion aspect, such as the fact that there was nothing specifically Indo-European

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 58 Jonathan Sherman Morris about building kurgans and the invaders did not penetrate very far into Europe before they abandoned the practice, as well as evidence that the direction of flow of cultural practices was actually from the Balkans onto the Steppes (see, for example, De Moule, 2014, pp. 418–419, citing evidence by Blagoje Govedarica of ochre burials and horse-head sceptres originating in the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture and spreading eastwards). Anthony’s book is an attempt to recast the narrative yet again by re- stricting the protagonists of the Kurgan theory to the latest stage of the process described by Gimbutas, the Yamna culture of the mid- to late-4th millennium onwards, suggesting that these nomads had seduced the whole of Eurasia through their possession of vehicles and had used their resulting superiority to reduce their Eurasian neighbours to vassaldom. Anthony has rehashed his ideas in several articles since then, most recently in a 2015 article co-authored with Donald Ringe (Anthony - Ringe, 2015) a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, notorious for his rejection of long-range linguistic comparisons on the basis of spurious statistical arguments (see Ringe, 1995; 1999), which concluded that these invaders from the Pontic Steppes might not have been so nice after all, with youths raping and pillaging their neighbours in order to establish peer status, rather than seducing them with their new vehicles. In this later version, the stimulus for other peoples to learn PIE was a prehistoric compensation process. These articles nevertheless have a recurrent feature – Anthony’s in- sistence that he has found incontrovertible evidence for a late dispersion of proto-Indo-European after the invention of the wheel (i.e. no earlier than 3500 BCE) in 5 lexical items found extensively in Indo-European lan- w w guages: *k é-k l-o-s ‘wheel,’ *Hrot-ó-s ‘wheel,’ *h2/3éyH-os ‘thill,’ *h2eḱs- ‘axle’ and *wéǵh-e-ti ‘he transports (via a vehicle)’. By contrast, while Anthony also devotes much attention to horse domestication as another aspect of Indo-European expansion from a homeland on the Pontic Steppes, linguistic evidence for words linked to horse riding is conspicuously absent from his work apart from the PIE word for horse (ekwos), which evidently says nothing about horse domestication per se and may even be a borrowing (Bomhard, 2009). Anthony’s model evidently contrasts with the other major theory of Indo-European origins, that of the distinguished English archaeologist, Sir Colin Renfrew, who since his 1987 book “Archaeology and Language” has argued that the cradle of Indo-European civilisation was in fact Anatolia and that the vector for the spread of Indo-European languages had been

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Wheels, Languages and Bullshit 59 the spread of agriculture during the Neolithic, some 2–3 millennia earlier than the Pontic Steppe expansion. Renfrew had always struggled to produce linguistic evidence to support his theory, but latterly, two biologists, Russell Gray and Quentin At- kinson, who used phylogenetic methods to calculate the most plausible family tree of Indo-European languages, had concluded that the results of their model supported Renfrew’s model rather than a chalcolithic dispersal of the kind proposed by Anthony (the bête noir of Lewis and Pereltsvaig is Bouckaert et al., 2012). This effort earned them a book-length diatribe from two academics at Stanford University: Asya Pereltsvaig, a linguist specialising in syntax, and Martin Lewis, a geographer who claims to be traumatised and embittered by Cultural Marxist/Postmodernist sabotage of his own field (he has my sym- pathies on this point), both of whom are amateurs in the field of prehistory of language. Lewis and Pereltsvaig accused Gray and Atkinson of ‘scientism’, the mortal sin of publishing papers on linguistics in scientific journals, such as Nature and Science, producing a poorly characterised mathematical model which did not match the empirical facts, failing to distinguish between borrowing and genetic relationships and many other sins. This evidently raised the question of whom they supported and their answer was acritical, open-mouthed admiration for David Anthony and hardly surprisingly, Donald Ringe, on the basis of a mysterious unpublished manuscript on wheel etymologies. As I shall argue, however, their adulation of Anthony and Ringe actually does their professed heroes a disservice. Indeed, this article intends to present evidence that we are in the presence of a self-referencing and self-promoting clique of linguistic young-earth creationists, including a heavily biased linguist on a mission to keep alive the sacred flame of Indo-European exceptionalism and to deny its external relations (Ringe), a jovial bullshit merchant (Anthony) who never lets any inconvenient empirical evidence get in the way of narrative and two groupies (Lewis and Pereltsvaig) whose excessive zeal in attacking anyone who argues for an earlier date unwittingly turns the spotlight on their shabby little guild. They draw heavily on the work of other linguists, notably Andrew Garrett and Johanna Nichols, which, while more sophisticated and possibly redeemable, is equally suspect, if not downright misleading. This article may confuse readers by jumping around between their writ- ings but their stock in trade is for one author to heap up cross-references

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 60 Jonathan Sherman Morris to the other’s unsubstantiated and self-contradictory claims like so many piles of accumulated dung in a linguistic/archaeological Augean stables. I shall thus ask readers to accept that this is the price of washing it away by debunking their tendentious but above all, intellectually slipshod and incoherent efforts. If they had been transparent, open-minded and intellectually rigorous, this article would not have been necessary.

Calques debunk the late break up of PIE

Anthony posits extensive migrations on the flimsiest linguistic evidence, claiming that the absence of much of this vocabulary in Anatolian is evidence that this language family separated from early proto-Indo-European before the invention of the wheel. In his original book, Anthony had argued rather melodramatically:

The wagon vocabulary cannot have been created after PIE was dead and the daughter languages differentiated. The wagon/wheel terms do not contain the sounds that would be expected had they been created in a later daughter language and then borrowed into the others, whereas they do contain the sounds predicted if they were inherited into the daughter branches from PIE. The PIE origin of the wagon vocabulary cannot be rejected, as it consists of at least 5 classic reconstructions. If they are in fact false, then the core methods of comparative linguistics, those that determine “genetic” relatedness, would be so unreliable as to be useless and the question of Indo-European origins would be moot (Anthony, 2007, pp. 77–78).

Anthony apparently hadn’t heard of calques when he wrote this, i.e. direct translations of expressions from one language to another. In my 2008 article (Sherman Morris, 2009), I highlighted the word for ‘broadband’ in Germanic: we have breiðband in Icelandic, breëband in Afrikaans, breed- band in Dutch, breitband in German and bredbånd in Danish, etc., all showing regular sound shifts from Proto-Germanic, which is reconstructible as proto-Germanic *braiđazbanđan, albeit without this implying that proto-Germanic tribes had the Internet. Extending our broadband example, we also have banda larga in Ital- ian and Portuguese, bandă largă in Romanian, banda ancha in Spanish, banda ampla in Catalan and haut débit in French. In Slavic: širokopojasni

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Wheels, Languages and Bullshit 61 in Croatian, širokopasovni dostop in Slovene, širokopolosny in Russian, širokosmugovij in Ukranian, širokolentov in Bulgarian, širokopojasen internet in Macedonian, širokopásmové připojení in Czech, širokopásmové in Slovak and szerokopasmowych in Polish. We nevertheless have broadband in Serbian. While these examples are deliberately facetious, there is absolutely no qualitative difference between them and the kind of roots which An- thony proposes for wheels, which have a limited semantic range meaning “thing that turns/goes round/runs”. As such, they are intended to show that calque formation can generate an extraordinary diversity of expressions for an item of technology invented on a single occasion within a very restricted time frame and hence that such expressions do not allow any inferences to be drawn as to whether there was a single invention of an item of technology or multiple inventions (e.g. the French mania for coining their own neologisms, in this case ‘high flow rate’, by no means entails an independent invention). Nor do they tell us anything about the point of origin of this item. They also violate the rule of thumb according to which, the degree of lexical differentiation is a function of the age of the item. All that is required for this process to occur is a network and if anything, it shows that the more extensive the network linking speakers, the more diversity it generates, since the number of routes for dissemination is multiplied. Anthony nevertheless thinks that they do. Apply his logic on wheel etymologies to the above and you would have him arguing that proto-Ger- manic couldn’t have broken up before broadband appeared in 2000 and the French and the Slavs each invented their own versions of broadband. My article evidently had no effect, since eight years later, in 2015, Ringe and Anthony were still using the same old arguments to attack Gray and Atkinson, who had made entirely reasonable suggestions that very old borrowings could become obscured over time or that a root in a protolanguage could be borrowed independently to name a new piece of technology (Gray - Atkinson, 2005):

The Anatolian-farming hypothesis requires the diversification of PIE to have started almost three millennia before wheels were invented, so it does not appear to be consistent with the presence of shared, solidly attested cognates for words referring to wheeled vehicles in all post-Anatolian PIE branches. Gray & Atkinson’s online comments about this chronological problem suggested that because most of the wheeled-vehicle vocabulary is based on IE roots, and thus was not borrowed from a non-IE language, the separate daughter languages could have independently chosen the same PIE roots to

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 62 Jonathan Sherman Morris

designate wheels and other vehicle parts after they were invented; alternatively, the words for wheeled vehicles could have been widely borrowed after 3500 BCE and then “naturalized” within each daughter branch so that linguists could not detect the borrowing. Let us examine what these explanations require. The first suggestion, that the separate daughters chose the same roots after differentiation had occurred, requires the dispersed daughter languages to have independently selected the same five IE roots to refer to the same five newly introduced wagon parts. Gray & Atkinson (2005) suggested that it was a “natural” choice to select the verbal root *kwel-, ‘turn’ or ‘revolve,’ as the root for *kwékwlos, ‘wheel, thing that turns’ (for example); but there are at least four different verb roots that are reconstructible for PIE with the meaning ‘turn’ or ‘re- w volve’ (*k el-, *h2werg-, *wert-, *wel-), so the motivation for the specific sharing of a ‘wheel’ word based on *kwel- was not natural but cultural. Moreover, the two words for ‘wheel,’ at least, are analyzable derivatives of verb roots; hence, to make this explanation work, they would have to have survived with little enough phonological change to make identical derivations feasible, and the old derivational patterns would have to have been used - not once, but in each daughter branch in which the words survive - some three millennia after the languages had split, when wheeled vehicles and axles finally were invented. In addition, those constraints must have affected only the words that would later be used for the wheel vocabulary: Other innovations that occurred after the IE dispersal, things like spoke, iron, tin, chicken, and glass, were named differently in the dispersed daughter languages. One of the basic postulates of linguistics is that the relation between word and thing is cultural and arbitrary, as the diverse lexemes for the same referent show in this short list of things invented after the IE dispersal. But Gray & Atkinson’s (2005) solution implies that we should accept multiple parallel choices of the same roots and even the same derivatives for utterly new things in a continent-wide coincidence—but only for words that would later be employed for wheels and wagons (Anthony - Ringe, 2015, pp. 204–205).

As stated above, calques can account for all of the above phenomena and all that is required to spread calques is a network. Was there such a network in existence before the advent of the wheel? Evidently yes, as evi- denced by the spread of prestige goods such as copper and jadeite. But was it fit for purpose in linguistic terms? The word for ‘wine’, present in every Indo-European family other than Indo-Iranian, including Anatolian (Hittite wiyana, Greek oinos, Latin uinum, English wine, Russian vino, etc.), shows that it is. The phonetic stability of this word also disposes of Anthony and Ringe’s claim that there would have been too much phonetic divergence in wheel etymologies to support Renfrew’s theory. Wine cultivation has been attested in Georgia around 6000 BCE, in Iran around 5000 BCE, in the Balkans by 4500 BCE and in Sicily around 4000 BCE and is probably a very early borrowing

(e.g. Hattic windu and Akkadian inu, Hebrew yayin, Arabic yayin, OEgyp- tian wnš.t etc.), which clearly predates any wheeled technology. Indeed, to quote the seminal work on Indo-European by Ivanov and Gamkrelidze:

The fact that there are etymological links between the ‘wine’ and ‘grape’ words within each of the language groups (Indo-European, Semitic, Kartvelian) indicates the extreme antiquity of the migratory term, which must have passed from one language to another at a protolanguage level, i.e. prior to the break-up of each protolanguage into separate dialects. The formal characteristics of the PIE word for wine, with its regular ablaut grades *(e): *o: *Ø, allow us to regard this word, built according to the rules of ancient Indo-European word formation, as a native element of the Indo-European system; we can therefore give it an etymology within Indo-European (Gamkrelidze - Ivanov, 1995, pp. 558–559).

This underwrites Atkinson & Gray’s point about how borrowings, if sufficiently old, can appear to be native words. Buried in the first paragraph of the above quotation from Anthony & Ringe is the key word ‘independently’. As we can see from our wine example, one cannot argue for independence when there is clearly a pre-existing network for the spread of technologies. As such, all of their arguments about the improbability of different groups independently choosing the same roots are simply irrelevant (and factually inaccurate, since not only are there multiple roots for their wheel etymologies but these authors also entirely ignore the comparative linguistic evidence). Robert Beekes suggests that wine production could have originated on the Pontic Steppes since the vine is indigenous there. This seems unlikely on account of the archaeological dating of wine production. Further- more, while I am no expert on Caucasian languages, I note that Starostin’s proto-North Caucasian root for wine *ʒ́w[ə̆]nʔi (Proto-Avaro-Andian: *žono, Proto-Tsezian: *š(:)aj, Proto-Lak: zini, Proto-Lezghian: *č:on, Proto-West Caucasian: *sʷa(nə) bears a passing resemblance to Georgian ɤwino but that these forms are very divergent, given how similar the PIE term is to the Kartvelian form. This is not what we expect for a centre of diffusion from the Pontic Steppes. Beekes nevertheless suggests that Geor- gian borrowed its word for wine ɤwino from Armenian gini. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov believe that wine itself is an Indo-European term relating to a root *wei-/*wi- ‘weave, plait, twist’ (Gamkrelidze - Ivanov, 1995, p. 561).

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 64 Jonathan Sherman Morris

If correct, the evident linguistic conclusion would be that Anatolian languages were already in situ in Anatolia by the 6th millennium BCE. By contrast, the PIE wine word is absent from Indo-Iranian, a culture which, according to Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (p. 562), lost it because it adopted soma (whatever that was). We find a word related to ‘vine’ in Avestan vaēiti, but it tells us nothing about when proto-Indo-Iranian migrated eastwards and whether it preserved the original word for wine. Nor were there ever any lions on the Pontic Steppes but the term is present in all IE families including Anatolian (albeit with reduplication - *wolw-o-) other than Armenian and Indo-Iranian, which derive their forms from a root singho-. On this basis, a PIE term for ‘lion’ (ibidem, p. 430) *leu- can be reconstructed (although as stated, this by no means implies that there actually was a PIE word for lion)1. There is also a cognate in Kartvelian *lom-, but the term is probably an Afroasiatic borrowing (cf. Old Egyptian rw, Akkadian lābu)2. These examples seriously undermine Anthony’s linguistic arguments for migration from the Pontic Steppes. While I don’t share the anti-migration fetish prevalent among archaeologists (Pereltsvaig and Lewis are right to challenge this) and actually believe that the evidence from the Völkerwanderung period demonstrates that migrations are possible, for example in the event of adverse climate change, the lexical data proposed by Anthony is simply not up to the task of supporting the kind of migration hypotheses that he posits since he cannot distinguish between a lexical item which was lost from a language and one which was never present. It is also vulnerable to counterexamples of lexical items present in various families of IE but which were most probably absent from PIE.

1 Lewis and Pereltsvaig cite Beekes as claiming that this PIE reconstruction by Gam- krelidze and Ivanov is discredited. All Beekes actually says in his 1995 work is that the PIE word for ‘lion’ is ‘probably’ incorrectly reconstructed, but fails to explain why. In his dictionary entry, he states that he regards the word as a Semitic loan but is unable to derive it from Akkadian labbu. One wonders about the similarity between Egyptian rw and Mycenaean Greek rewo-, since Linear B did not distinguish between l and r. Could this be a borrowing via an Anatolian language? 2 Gamkrelidze & Ivanov consider that Tocharian originally had the leu- root but that its meaning shifted to ‘beast, animal’ (Tocharian A lu) after borrowing another word for ‘lion’ from Indo-Iranian (Toch A śiśäk, Toch B şecake via a protoform *ṣēnśäke). This is unlikely, since the word is also used for ‘birds’. Indeed, in his Tocharian dictionary, Douglas Adams instead derives luwo from a PIE word meaning ‘animal of the chase’.

What does this prove? That proto-Indo-Iranian broke away before proto-Anatolian, since the latter family has the PIE term for lion and wine while the former did not? Or does it prove my Leophobic Second- ary Pontic Steppe-Anatolian Sequential Dispersion theory, according to which, Anatolian speakers broke away from PIE due to the sheer mo- notonous boredom of the Steppes and moved through the Balkans to Anatolia, where they encountered lions (note that Luwian includes the root for ‘lion’). When the rump of PIE subsequently broke up because even the excitement of a slow moving, non-steerable cart was no match for the tedium of the Steppes, the non-drinking, killjoy proto-Indo-Irani- ans went east into the deserts of Central Asia and only lightened up after they discovered soma, while the remainder of PIE went on vacation to Anatolia to visit their long-lost relatives who introduced them to lions, albeit with this proving such a traumatic experience that they immediately fled to Europe and never went back. You may consider the above to be unsubstantiated ‘just-so’ balderdash, and you would be welcome to think so, but I would point out that it is no more simple-minded than the following: “they might have moved several times, perhaps by sea, from the Western Pontic steppes to south-eastern Europe to western Anatolia to Greece, making their trail hard to find” (Anthony, 2007, p. 369), which constitutes Anthony’s own double hand-waving non-explanation of how Greek spread from the ‘wrong’ side of the Pontic Steppes to Greece. Once you adopt his ‘se non è vero è ben trovato’ standard of empirical evidence based on duff linguistic archaeology you can argue for just about anything. There is another serious problem regarding Anthony & Ringe’s at- tempts to argue that the break-up of PIE could not have occurred before the invention of the wheel, in that they immediately fall into a vicious circle in which this break-up date of PIE can be pushed indefinitely into the future. Indeed, since any regional exceptions to their wheel etymologies can be dismissed as local innovations, it is perfectly possible to play devil’s advocate and claim that PIE could not have broken up before the advent of any innovation for which there are etymologies with regular phonological progressions in several daughter families of PIE: arti- chokes or apricots or angels or skyscrapers or indeed broadband come to mind, as do others for which the evidence is just as good as for Anthony’s wheel vocabulary.

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Let’s now turn to Anthony’s five “solidly established” wheel etymologies:

*wéǵh-e-ti ‘transport via a vehicle’ is a notoriously labile term (as are verbs of motion in general), and is equivalent to claiming that verbs like ‘drive’ is vehicle-specific (driving cattle? and in similar semantic vein, conduire in French, guidare in Italian and dirigir in Portuguese). Anthony finds agreement in Buck’s entry for “ride” (Buck, 1949, 10.66), which distinguishes between riding a horse and riding a vehicle, but the latter’s etymologies hardly support his point, since the only languages in which this verb specifically means ‘conveyance via vehicle’ are Avestan, Church Slavonic and Lithuanian. In Sanskrit and Latin, it can mean riding both a horse and a vehicle. In Greek, according to Buck, it means ‘be carried’, to which Buck adds “(by wagon, chariot, horses, ship, etc.)”. In Germanic, it means movement in general. If we look at the entry for weghe in Starostin’s database (‹http://starling.rinet.ru›), we find a similar vague meaning in Tocharian: ‘move, shake, be restless, wander’ and even his strongest etymologies fall apart, since the definition of Lithuanian vežti states “convey something via a wagon or sled”. Avestan also has vazaiti “travels, pulls, flies”.

*h2/3éyH-os ‘thill’: In his 2007 book, Anthony claimed that the term only existed in Anatolian, Indo-Aryan and Tocharian, although he failed to mention Avestan aēsa- ‘plough’ or to point out that the Sanskrit word īṣā́ also referred to the pole or shaft of a plough, as does Lithuanian íel- ek(š)tis. In his 2015 paper, he added Slovene ojê ‘shaft’ (Pokorny, 1959, II, p. 1673 but was nevertheless silent on the fact that this root exists in proto-Germanic *aizṓ ‘oar’, albeit with the original meaning of ‘rudder’ preserved in Old Norse. Then we have Homeric Greek oi̯ǟio-ń , meaning ‘rudder’, Protobaltic*eî-n-ā̂, which interestingly is related to Latvian ailis, aile, which can mean ‘support for hanging baskets on fish weirs’, ‘a thin pole for lamprey nets’ or a ‘roller for moving heavy objects’ (Pokorny, 1959, II, p. 167). Is it likely that these terms were all transferred from a word for a vehicle component? No.

*h2eḱs- ‘axle’ or ‘cart’ is actually the most plausible of his etymologies, with the semantic shift from ‘axle’ > ‘thing with axles’ following the example of ‘caseus formaticus’ > ‘fromage, formaggio’ – i.e. the original term would have been something like ‘vehicle with axles’ and the descriptive

3 Anthony seems finally to have read Gamkrelidze & Ivanov.

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Wheels, Languages and Bullshit 67 adjective eventually replaced the noun itself. I nevertheless wonder about the alternative meanings of ‘shoulder’ in Germanic and Latin, or ‘collar bone’ in Sanskrit – I suspect that it originally referred to a wooden roller. We also have the notion of ‘axis mundi’, embodied in the ash tree, Yggdra- sil in Germanic mythology. ‘Ash’ has a very similar root, reconstructed by

Dologopolsky as *h2eHōs. A semantic progression ‘tree’ > ‘pole’ > ‘cart’ looks far more likely than the reverse. *Hrot-ó-s ‘wheel’ is transparently derived from a root for ‘run’, as is Pokorny’s *dhregh-, which Anthony oddly fails to mention, since it is present in Greek trókhos, as well as in Armenian durgn as ‘potter’s wheel’ and in Old Irish droch as the word for ‘wheel’. I suspect that these are calques, possibly inspired by Semitic, for which there are transparent cognates meaning ‘run’, namely redu in Akkadian, or laruts/rats in Hebrew. This brings us to Anthony’s main wheel etymology: *kwé-kwl-o-s ‘wheel’. He claims (or presumably Ringe claims) in the 2015 paper that the previous four etymologies should strengthen our confidence that *kwé-kwl-o-s is a unique PIE innovation for ‘wheel’ and that what makes this an absolute certainty is the sheer improbability of such an unusual noun formation:

The scenario just sketched is already obviously improbable; the formation of the word *kwékwlos ‘wheel’ makes it more improbable still. Like many PIE nouns, this one was derived from a verb root by adding a suffix and altering the shape of the root. In this noun, the suffix is the thematic vowel *-e-~*-o- (*-e- in a few forms but *-o- in most), which is immediately followed by the case-and-number endings. Also, the root *kwel- has been reduplicated—that is, its initial consonant has been doubled and the copy is followed by the vowel *e. Finally, the root is in the “zero grade”- that is, its internal vowel has been dropped. Thus, the structure of the citation form given above, *kwé-kwl-o-s, is (reduplication + zero-grade root + thematic vowel + nomi- native singular ending). That specific formation was very unusual for nouns derived from verbs in the PIE period. For instance, in the list of reduplicated nouns in the older IE languages in Brugmann (1906, p. 129), most occur in only one daughter and are obviously post-PIE innovations; most of the few that show resemblances from daughter to daughter are not formally identical and cannot be reconstructed for PIE with any confidence. The only comparable noun in the list is *bhe-bhr-ú-s ‘beaver’; but (a) the suffix vowel *-ú- is not the thematic vowel; (b) the root *bher- is not a verb root, but an adjective root meaning ‘brown’; and (c) the status of that root is somewhat shaky-it never seems to occur without unusual suffixation or modification. In short, the formation of *kwékwlos is virtually unique in PIE. Fortson (2010, p. 130) suggests that *kwékwlos was “an expressive neologism for a new gadget,” which is a reasonable speculation. The proposal that a noun was formed from a verb in this highly unusual manner numerous times, independently, is practically impossible.

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The same argument does not apply to the other PIE lexeme for ‘wheel,’ *Hrotós, so decisively; it is an agent noun meaning ‘runner,’ which might have been coined more than once. But the first type of argument adduced above does apply: There were at h h h w least five PIE roots meaning ‘run’ (*Hret-, *dreh2-, *d reg -, *d ew-, *tek -), yet only this one appears in many daughters as the basis for a shared word meaning ‘wheel’. (Anthony - Ringe, 2015, p. 205).

Note the reference to the great Indo-Europeanist Karl Brugmann. And note the sentence: “For instance, in the list of reduplicated nouns in the older IE languages in Brugmann (1906, p. 129), most occur in only one daughter and are obviously post-PIE innovations”. Ringe’s assertion thus seems to me to be self-contradictory, since he is explicitly confirming that this is an ongoing process and hence could occur before, during and after the break-up of PIE. In fact, it’s not even clear whether Ringe or Anthony have read Brugmann’s phonological references or his more general comments on noun reduplication, since Brugmann states:

658. 2) Schwund der Labialisierung vor und hinter u. Das u ist teils uridg. u, teils erst im Urgriech. durch den benachbarten qu-Laut entstanden. [Disappearance of la- bialisation before and after u. The u arose partly PIE and partly only in proto-Greek, through the neighbouring qu sound].

This is significant since the derivation of Greek kuklos from PIE *kwé-kwl- o-s is accepted unquestionably e.g. by Beekes. It’s hard to see why, since there appears to be no other case in his dictionary (or in Starostin’s database) of evolution of initial kwe- to ku- in Greek. We would expect something like pe-plos by analogy with pelomai ‘stir, become, take place, etc.’4, or even teplos. The Greek form would nevertheless fit if a shift to ku- had already occurred in PIE, but then, you can’t derive Indo-Iranian ca- from ku-. In other words, an alternative interpretation is possible in which PIE was not so unified, either because individual groups split off while kwé-kwl-o-s was still evolving within the rump of PIE or (more likely in my view), because PIE had already differentiated into its daughter families or agglomerations of these before the advent of the vehicle wheel. Self-serving citation of Brugmann also raises another red flag for Ringe and Anthony: reduplication itself. Here is what Brugmann had to say:

w 4 The only similar case that I have been able to find is g n-eh2- > guné ‘woman’, although this is not strictly comparable, since we have colouring from the syllabic sonorant n̥.

In this way, repeated words had been fused into single forms even before the inflexion- al period of the Indo-Germanic parent language; and there is nothing to prevent our referring immediately to this oldest type of reduplication any words in the descendant languages in which the whole root is repeated; e.g. Skr. gár-gar-a-s ‘eddy’ dár-dar-ti ‘he shatters, breaks up’…..OCSl glagolū ‘noise, word’ for gol-gol-ū (I § 281, p. 224). Where, however, the reduplication is part of the structure of a simple word, full reduplication is comparatively rare. As a rule there is hardly more than a suggestion of the repetition, ‘reduplicatio mutila’ [examples] It is usually the former of the two syllables which has this abbreviated form. It is then regarded in the speaker’s consciousness as a prefix, like the adverb é, the so-called ‘augment’ and other degraded initial elements of compound words. This mode of regarding it was supported by the unreduplicated forms which usually existed side by side with it; these the speaker’s thought connected into one group (Brugmann, 1891, p. 13).

In the 1906 edition of his comparative grammar of Indo-European, Brug- mann also pointed out that most noun reduplications were derived from reduplicated verbs (ibidem, p. 126) and *kwékwlos is evidently a verbal noun (“thing that goes round and round”). In other words, Brugmann saw it as entirely unexceptional to have reduplicated and unreduplicated forms of verbal nouns existing side by side. Indeed, the presence of the latter permitted the progressive abbreviation of the former. Hence, Brugmann tells us that where its descendants exist, we would expect to find these in association with an unreduplicated form for ‘round’ or ‘go round’, which is exactly what we do find. Indeed, in the languages with the reduplicated form, Indo-Aryan, Greek and Tocharian (and Germanic, as we shall see), we also find the derivatives of the unreduplicated root *kwele-: Old Indian: carati ‘to move, go, walk, act, conduct, undertake’, Old Greek: polo-s m. ‘axle, world axis, pole, vault of the heavens, round face of a sundial, etc.’; Tokharian: A kälk-, B kalāk- (PT *kälk- ~ *kelāk-) ‘to follow’ (Adams 147); A, B käl- (PT *käl-) ‘lead, bring’ (169); A lutk-, B klutk- (PT *kl-utk-) ‘to turn’ (Starostin’s database). Furthermore, while the reduplicated form *kwé-kwl-o-s occurs in Greek kuklos, Indo-Iranian čaxra/čakra, Tocharian kukal-, Phrygian kíklen, in Germanic it is only partially attested in Old English hweogul (hweowol), hwēol (hweohl), -es n.; hweogola, -an m. ‘wheel; circular band’. All other daughter families have the unreduplicated root, including Greek pólos ‘axle’ (beside kuklos), Latin colus ‘distaff’, Baltic kelan ‘wheel’, Slavic kolo ‘wheel’, Old Irish cul ‘carriage’.

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Indeed, a consultation of Bosworth and Toller’s Anglo-Saxon dictionary (Bosworth - Toller, 1921, pp. 573–574) shows six different forms hweogul, hweowol, hweohl, hweól, hweowul, hwél, of which hweól and hweowol are the most frequent. How does hweowol arise? If it is not an independent development, then why is there no trace of it in any other Ger- manic language?5 Elsewhere in Germanic, we have Gothic hwil, Old Norse hjōl, Old Frisian hwel and Middle Low German Wiel – i.e. with no clear evidence of reduplication. A sin of which long-rangers are often accused is ‘reaching down’, i.e. claiming that the presence of words in daughter languages provides evidence for their existence in proto-languages, but Ringe and Anthony do exactly the same thing in claiming a generalised reduplication for proto-Germanic which is only partially attested in Old English and which is overshadowed by another presumably independent reduplication (and Germanic evidently has another old root for wheel *Hrot-ó-s). Now consider terms for ‘throat, neck’. We have our old friend kwel-, probably as an extension of ‘thing that turns’, both in unreduplicated form in Latin collum ‘neck’, Germanic hals ‘neck, throat’ and in reduplicated form in Baltic (Lithuanian kaklas, Latvian kakls – both meaning ‘neck’). Starostin mentions three other related roots with similar meanings: gwel-, present in Indo-Iranian (Sanskrit gala, Avestan gar-, both ‘throat neck’), Latin gula ‘maw, oesophagus’, Proto-Germanic kil-u-, kil-k-an, present in simple form as Old English ceole ‘throat’, Old Norse kjol-r ‘keel’, OHG kela ‘throat’ and reduplicated in Old Norse kjalki ‘jaws, sled’, as well as in OHG kelk ‘throat swelling’ and Old English colc ‘water filled hole, gorge’. Then we have the reduplicated PIE forms *k(w)rk(w)- ‘neck’, present in Sanskrit kr̥ka- m. ‘throat, larynx’, kr̥ḱ āṭa- n. ‘joint of the neck’ and Slavic: *kъrkъ, as well as *gwerw-, *gwerkw-, *gwergw- ‘throat, neck’, present in Sanskrit gargara- m. ‘whirlpool; churn’; Proto-Germanic *kwirkō ‘gullet, throat, strangle’ and Latin gurguliō ‘throat, trachea’.6 We also have the root *gwer-, *gur- ‘gather’, which reduplicates in Greek gargara ‘heaps, lots, plenty’, gargai̯rō ‘to swarm with’, egrgera

5 Possible evidence for an older insular Germanic? 6 Beekes thinks that Old Greek: *gwerwā > Att. (Aesch.) derē, Ark. derwa, Ion. dẹ̄rḗ, Aeol. derā ‘throat’ is problematic since it should have shifted to a b-. barathron ‘cleft, abyss’ seems to fill the gap, but he rejects this too, claiming it to be pre-Greek.

(gergena cod.) = pollá Hsch.; Latin: grex, gregis m. (/f.) ‘herd, heap, flock’ and Lithuanian gùrguolē, gurguõlē, dial. gerguolē ‘Amount, mass’. Once again, the semantic process ‘lots’ > ‘lots and lots’ is common. In the light of the above, Ringe’s idea that the unusual phonotactics of kwékwlos supports a unique innovation which accurately dates the break-up of proto-European and dismisses all rival theories is implausible, to say the least. We nevertheless have Lewis and Pereltsvaig claiming that the earth really was created in 4004 B.C. because the great Ringe says so:

Gray, Atkinson and their colleagues dismiss the reconstruction of ‘wheel’ in PNIE by arguing that the cognates in descendant languages derived independently from the verb root *kwel- ‘turn’. Although this scenario is in general possible, linguistic analysis reveals further complications. As Ringe convincingly shows, the formation of *kwé-kwl-o-s from *kwel- is unique, as it involves reduplication, a zero-grade root and a thematic vowel. According to Ringe (2006:4) “the probability that it could have been formed independently more than once is virtually nil” (Lewis - Pereltsvaig, 2015, p. 173).

They then add a footnote which (I note with amusement) entirely sabo- tages Ringe’s claim that *kwé-kwl-o-s represents a unique PIE innovation for ‘wheel’. According to Lewis and Pereltsvaig, Gray and Atkinson are wrong to argue that “cognates in descendant languages derived independently from the verb root *kwel- ‘turn’”, but they then state:

In contrast, derivatives of the non-reduplicated *kwel-, such as Old Church Slavonic kolo ‘wheel’ can indeed be independent innovations derived by productive patterns (ibidem).

Can you spot the similarity? And the inanity of this claim? *kwé-kwl-o-s is a unique linguistic event because Ringe says so…but actually the daughter languages can then invent other words for wheels, which all have the same root! We have seen that Brugmann’s point on the coexistence of unreduplicated and duplicated forms is extensively supported by the empirical evidence. It follows from this that if the unreduplicated form can be an independent innovation, so can the reduplicated one. Or conversely, that PIE had both reduplicated and unreduplicated words for wheel, undermining Ringe and Anthony’s claims about the uniqueness of *kwé-kwl-o-s in PIE.

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Note also that Lewis & Pereltsvaig’s reference to this wonderfully convincing demonstration of uniqueness refers to Donald Ringe’s unpublished 2006 manuscript entitled ‘Proto-Indo-European wheeled vehicle technology’. Presumably this manuscript exists, since they quote it so approvingly, but if it is such a fount of wisdom on wheel vocabulary, why Ringe has suppressed it and failed to mention it in the bibliography of his 2015 review article? Whatever the case, citing a clearly non-verifiable source of this kind is serious academic malpractice. Returning to Anthony, what is intriguing is how many concerns about his etymologies were flagged years earlier even by a figure sympathetic to him like Bill Darden in his 2001 article:

[For*h2/3éyH-os ‘thill] We have trouble reconstructing a concrete word here. [For *kwé-kwl-o-s] This is a clearly reconstructible PIE word, not just a root. It is a reduplicated root, which is unproductive in all the language families – not that unusual in the oldest vocabulary…One might wonder whether the original meaning of the noun were wheel or circle but the meaning wheel is firmly PIE. One possible problem for the unity of meaning is East Baltic… [For *Hrot-ó-s] In this case, we may doubt whether the nouns represent an original PIE stem.

[For *wéǵh-e-ti] Although the o-grade derivatives support the claim that this term was used for transport with wheeled vehicles before the break-up of PIE, it is clear that the vehicles in question did not have to have wheels.

All Anthony had to say about Darden’s comments on wheel vocabulary was:

The only branch that might not contain a convincing wheeled-vehicle vocabulary is Anatolian, as Bill Darden has observed (Anthony, 2007, p. 64).

As mentioned, Anatolian is a problem for Anthony’s Steppe theory, since according to him, it shares none of the above vocabulary other than *h2/3éyH- os. He resolves this by expelling them from the Pontic Steppes before the invention of the wheel. In this way, the movement of Anatolian correlates with the first Suvorovo migration into the Balkans around 4200–4000 BCE. According to him (yet more bogus linguistic archaeology), these departing migrants had no word for wheel, although that Hittite acquired one, h̬urki, which, strangely enough, is attested in PIE. Ah, yes, but….

Words for ‘wheel’ were formed from *h2werg- in Hittite and (independently) Toch- arian, but because they are not shared by other branches of the family they do not establish that wheels were known before the separation of Anatolian from the other branches (Anthony - Ringe, 2015, p. 204).

Note the word ‘independently’ here. All commentators consider that To- charian A wärkänt and Tocharian B yerkwantai are related to the Hittite word, including Jim Mallory (1997), who claims that “the agreement of Tocharian and Hittite suggests great antiquity for this word”, with ‘great antiquity’ presumably meaning before the break-up of PIE, implying that the Anatolians did have a word for wheel before they broke away, which would evidently sabotage Anthony’s theory. All commentators, that is, with one exception, who, as you’ve probably guessed, is none other than Don- ald Ringe. And where is his ‘convincing’ demonstration of independence? In his mysteriously unpublished 2006 manuscript, of course, which only Lewis and Pereltsvaig know about and which Ringe avoids mentioning. Other authors in the JIES 2001 volume point out that Anatolian could be shown to have cognates for wéǵh- (Melchert, 2001, p. 234) (Luwian wa/i-za/i ‘drive a chariot’) and possibly *kwel- (in Hittite kula ‘earring’) (Lehrman, 2001, p. 242), but that these could be independent developments, which makes it increasingly likely that Anthony is positing this early migration of Anatolians from the Pontic Steppes on the basis of a few shaky etymologies. Georgiev nevertheless describes an Anatolian substrate in Greek top- onyms detectable in the -ss- and -nd- suffixes South of Mount Pindos, but not North of it (Georgiev, 1960, pp. 285–297). If the Anatolians really did migrate down the Balkans from North to South, the last thing one would expect to find is an east-west linguistic frontier of this kind. This migration ostensibly makes the Anatolians latecomers to Anato- lia, who fell under the influence of indigenous Hattic and Hurrian speakers, but the same JIES 2001 volume contains an illuminating contribution by Margalit Finkelberg (2001), who makes a persuasive case that Linear A, attested in Crete and Mycenae, is an Anatolian language. In other words, the case for a long-standing presence of Anatolian in Western Anatolia and the Aegean (where there is no evidence for Hattic or Hurrian) looks like a strong one. Her paper is not mentioned either by Anthony or by Lewis and Pereltsvaig, even though it is hard to imagine that they were unaware of it, since it is in the same volume as the Darden paper.

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In other words, there is good evidence for a long-standing presence of Anatolian in Western Anatolia and an expansion to the West, but none for a migration from the Pontic Steppes down the Balkans.

Silence for Johanna Nichols!

By far the most egregious silence on Anthony’s (and by extension, Lewis and Pereltsvaig’s) part, however, regards the evidence from other language groups. This is no doubt par for the course, in view of the extraordinary hostility to long-range comparisons of their linguistic mentor, Donald Ringe. At the same time, there is absolutely no way that Anthony could have been unaware of such evidence, since he references the key work by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov in his bibliography (p. 622). This was cross-refer- enced by James Mallory in his 1989 work (p. 163) and states that:

For the typology of reduplication in the formation of the term for ‘wheel’ and ‘wheeled wagon’, c.f. Georgian borbal- ‘circle, wheel’ (from *brbar-, cf. br-un-av-s ‘rotates, turns’), Hebr. gilgāl, galgal ‘wheel’, Aram. galgal ‘wheel, circle’, Sum. gigir ‘war chariot’. The phonetic similarity of the Semitic and Indo-European forms is striking. Sum. gigir is phonetically not far removed from these forms, which points to historical lexical connections to be discussed below.

We evidently have a similar root and reduplication in Semitic and Kart- velian, which lie directly on a 4th millennium BCE trade route running from the Uruk culture in Mesopotamia to the Maikop culture in the North- ern Caucasus, so that the reduplication in Indo-European merely appears to be another local calque based on an external borrowing. Anthony makes it clear elsewhere in his book why he refuses to ac- knowledge such evidence:

Gamkrelidze and Ivanov have also suggested that PIE contained terms for panther, lion and elephant and for southern tree species. These animals and trees could be used to exclude a northern homeland. They also compiled an impressive list of loan words which they said were borrowed from proto-Kartvelian and the Semitic languages into PIE. These relationships suggested to them that PIE had evolved in a place where it was in close contact with both the Semitic languages and the languages of the Southern Caucasus….

But the evidence for a Caucasian or Anatolian homeland is weak. Many of the terms suggested as loans from Semitic into PIE have been rejected by other linguists. The few Semitic to PIE loan words that are widely accepted, words for items like silver and bull, might be words that were carried along trade routes far from the Sem- ites’ Near Eastern homeland. Johanna Nichols has shown from the phonology of the loans that the PIE/Proto-Kartvelian/proto-Semitic contacts were indirect – all the loan words passed through unknown intermediaries between the known three. One intermediary is required by chronology, as proto-Kartvelian is generally thought to have existed after PIE and proto-Semitic (Anthony, 2007, pp. 97–98).

Anthony goes on to say that this vocabulary borrowed into PIE through Kartvelian “therefore contained roots that belonged to some Pre-Kartvelian or Proto-Kartvelian language. This language had relations, through unrecorded intermediaries, with PIE on one side and proto-Semitic on the other.” As mentioned, his source is Johanna Nichols’ 1997 article, which raises at least one eyebrow, since she is explicitly hostile to the notion of PIE spreading from the Pontic Steppes (Nichol, 1997, 138). A full discussion of Nichols’ ideas, including her notion of spread zones, is beyond the scope of this article, even if germane. Nichols caused a stir in the 1990s by holding out the exciting possibility of a grand theory of language spread and distribution based on a few pieces of linguistic typology. On examining her evidence, however, this began to look increasingly like casuistry. In brief, Nichols views Eurasia as a giant geolinguistic pinball machine, in which any language which happens to wander into what she terms the ‘locus’ hits the jackpot and automatically spreads over a huge area. According to her, this has happened several times but the new most favoured language tends to obliterate all traces of the previous most favoured language, unless the latter has managed to expand into a ‘refuge’. As such, according to her, Kartvelian was a previous ‘most favoured language’ which spread into the Caucasus from Central Asia (ibidem), with the complete absence of Kartvelian speakers in Central Asia showing how successfully her spread zone theory works. Conversely, the Pontic Steppes is too far from the locus to be fit for purpose, so that she actually offers no support for Anthony’s model, but as seen, he is not concerned by such trivial details. Nichols’ hypothesis per se is an intriguing one, but it has to be backed up with hard evidence and hence a “Russell’s teapot” theory which assumes as a central postulate that the modus operandi of a model wipes out all of the empirical evidence for itself is deeply suspect. Furthermore, Nichols doesn’t actually prove anything about the indirect

the PIE-Kartvelian sharings seem not to have been direct borrowings. The Semit- icisms are likewise not direct borrowings from Semitic, and neither the IE nor the Kartvelian Semiticisms are obviously derived from the other. I suspect that direct borrowings among PIE, Proto-Kartvelian and/or early Semitic would have produced closer resemblances

She then claims:

If resemblant proto-forms can help pinpoint the PIE locus, later and dialect forms can shed light on the chronology and direction of language spread along the language trajectories….as an example consider English buck and its cognates. The word is found in Germanic and Celtic in the sense ‘male goat, buck’. The other IE cognates are Iranian and Armenian, and they point to a palatovelar as the second consonant: e.g. Avestan buza (for the full set, see Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1984:586–1994:501). A clear resemblant to the European forms in Nakh-Daghestanian is Nakh *bok’ ‘male goat’, not found in Daghestanian. If the Nakh form is a borrowing from IE it comes from a centum dialect (and need not be ancient), and this suggests interaction between IE dialects and Nakh-Daghestanian languages where the steppe trajectory passes north of the Caucasus.

I note en passant that Gamkrelidze and Ivanov mention Armenian buc ‘lamb’ and Sanskrit bukka- ‘male goat’7 (which are respectively arguably and definitely satem languages, undermining Nichols’ point about low time depth) and that Dolgopolsky’s entry 185 *bukEʡV ‘billy goat, ram’ provides extensive evidence for the root in Afroasiatic, suggesting that it is very old (notably since it is poorly attested in Semitic). The notion that it was borrowed into Nakh from PIE as the latter flew by the Caucasus after being launched from its Central Asian locus on an east to west trajectory thus looks extremely unlikely. In addition, her terms for ‘wine’: PIE *woin- and Semitic *wajn- or ‘bull’: PIE *tawros/*stewro-s and Semitic *tawr- look close enough to avoid the need for ‘filtering’ through another language. Our wine etymology is nevertheless hugely problematic for her theory, since as seen, Georgia is one of the homelands if not the homeland for wine production. Taking her argument at face value and assuming that when wine was invented in Georgia/Iran in the 7th/6th millennium BCE,

7 This is also attested in Sinhala bækaṭ and in Marathi bōkaḍa.

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Wheels, Languages and Bullshit 77 the proto-Indo-Europeans/Kartvelians were somewhere in Central Asia in a wine-free zone then Kartvelian would have reached the ‘locus’ and been catapulted into a ‘refuge’ in the Caucasus, where it acquired words like ɤwino for ‘wine’. She tells us that Kartvelian was not in direct contact with Semitic and thus has to explain why it did not borrow another phonolog- ically divergent word from another Caucasian language located between the proto-Kartvelians and Semitic speakers. Millennia later, it was the turn of Indo-Europeans. The one language family which, according to her, was never present in the Near East is To- charian. Indeed, the word for ‘wine’ is also absent from Indo-Iranian, as described above. This suggests a thought experiment whereby if Nichols is correct, then Tocharian should never have received this word for wine. The presence in Douglas Adams’ dictionary of Tocharian B of a word kuñi-mot for ‘wine’ thus appears to be fatal for her theory, particularly if we remember the regular sound shifts from PIE to Tocharian kwe-, gwe > ku and medial n > ñ in Tocharian (kweklos > kukal), so that the Tocharian form kuñi can be derived regularly from the Kartvelian form ɤwino or possibly Armenian gini. Did the Tocharians migrate to the Tarim basin, realise that they had run out of wine, go back to the Caucasus to fill up and then return to Xinjiang? This evidently suggests that Anthony builds his own theory on an incorrect citation of an incorrect theory and hence that he cannot simply wave away the comparative evidence for ‘wheel’.

Comparative evidence systematically ignored

One root for which there are very good Caucasian cognates is kwel. Indeed, the Italian linguist Alfredo Trombetti described the extraordinary preva- lence of the roots kwal/gwal ‘turn’ and kot/kor/kwar ‘roll, be round, wheel, curve, be curved (worm)’ in great detail as early as 1916 (Trombetti, 1920, pp. 102–108), publishing six pages of cognates in Afroasiatic, Indo-Euro- pean, Austric and for the latter in Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic, Caucasian, Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Austric and Sino-Tibetan. Words for ‘round’, ‘roll’, ‘turn’, ‘curve’ presumably predate words for ‘wheel’, given that the latter is derived from roots meaning ‘run’ or ‘turn’

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 78 Jonathan Sherman Morris or ‘goes round’. It thus seems logical to conclude that cognate reduplications in these words will serve as counterexamples to Ringe and Anthony’s claim about the uniqueness of *kwé-kwl-o-s and will test Brugmann’s point about expecting both reduplicated and unreduplicated forms. We don’t have to look very far to see Brugman vindicated and Ringe and Anthony refuted, indeed Starostin’s database gives us proto-Semitic *gwVlVl- ‘go around’, ‘roll’, ‘go in circles’, ‘round (adj.) – present in Akkadian galālu ‘round’ or *ka(r)kar-, which gives Akkadian kakkaru ‘round bread, disk’. We also have Coptic kelkōl, which is not attested in Old Egyptian but which cannot be a borrowing from Hellenic Greek kuklos either. From the same source, we have proto-Kartvelian *ḳwer- ‘round’, present in Georgian as ḳwer-, ḳweḳwer-a (both duplicated and undupli- cated) ‘round’ and Megrelian as ḳwar-; ḳwarḳwal-ia ‘round’. For Pro- to-North Caucasian, we have the reduplicated root *ḳwVrḳV ‘something round or rotating’, expressed in Proto-Nakh: *ḳurḳḳ-, Proto-Avaro-Andi- an: *ḳwarḳV-, Proto-Tsezian: *ḳuḳV-, *ḳwəḳwə-, and the unreduplicated root *gwērV ‘circle/round/roll’, giving e.g. proto-West Caucasian *k:ẃ ərə ‘ring/ wreath/roll’, which in turn has the reduplicated forms Abkhaz a-gwərgwə́n ‘wreath’ and Abaza: gwərgwər ‘ring’. There is also Proto-North Caucasian *gwɨ[l]gwə ‘round object, skull’, present in Avar gwangwara ‘skull’ and in Proto-Lak *k:wark, ‘edge; top of a round or oval object’, as well as Pro- to-Lezghian *k:u[r]k, meaning skull, occiput, crown of head, pumpkin. Then we have *kečke-rä in proto-Uralic meaning ‘round, curved’, as opposed to the unreduplicated root *kerä (e.g. Hungarian kerek ‘round’ and kerék ‘wheel’). In proto-Altaic8, Starostin reports several similar roots *k’erV ‘go around, walk around’, which interestingly is only attested in Mongolian and Tungus-Manchu, *ki̯r[i]ṓ ‘roll, churn’, *k’úlo ‘roll, turn’, as well as the reduplicated forms *kol-ki- in Proto-Mongolian meaning ‘to be restless, go round and round’, *kerge- in proto-Tungus Manchu meaning ‘circle, ring, bind into bunches, reel, bunch’. Starostin also gives plausible cognate protoforms in Sino-Tibetan: *kwrĕłH ‘roll, surround’, *k(h)ual ‘coil, surround’, *qwār ‘round’, *qwiəˉ l ‘revolve, turn round’ and *qhwăł ‘round, circle’.

8 Regardless of whether one supports the Altaic hypothesis, these roots are remarkably similar (see Starostin) and in my view, it is incumbent on those who deny this to prove that these words are borrowings.

Then we have the related Afroasiatic root *garr-/*grgr, present in Ak- kadian: garr- ‘round’, magarru ‘wheel, wagon’ and in Proto-IE *gowər-, *g'owər- ‘curved; bend, crooked’: Armenian: curr ‘crooked, bent’; Old Greek: gǖró- ‘round, bent, crooked’, gǖrˆo-s m. ‘rounding, circle, slice of tree’, Slavic: *gūrā (Serbian/Croatian gùra ‘hump’), *gūrītī, *gūrātī, Proto- Germanic: *kūran- ‘curved, crooked’ as attested in Norwegian: kūra ‘hud- dle’ and German: kauern ‘crouch’, not to mention Sanskrit *kōla ‘curved, crooked’. *krukṇa ‘curved, twisted’. We also have Basque gurpil- ‘wheel’, which is apparently a contraction of gurdi-bil. This is merely a small sample from an enormous family of words, all of which fall firmly within relatively narrow semantic fields of ‘round’, ‘go round’, ‘roll’ and which also demonstrate that there is absolutely nothing unusual about finding reduplicated and unreduplicated roots, precisely as Brugmann postulated. Can it seriously be argued that all of these terms for ‘round’, ‘turn’, ‘rotate’ present all over Eurasia and notably in Afroasiatic are borrowings from a PIE word for ‘wheel’? We can almost certainly rule out such a transmission from PIE kwel- to Semitic during the 4th to 3rd millennia BCE on phonological grounds9.

No round or rotating objects before the invention of the wheel?

There is a general consensus around Nissen’s view that the potter’s wheel first arose in Mesopotamia around 5,500 BCE (2012, p. 285) as a slow wheel, the tournette, which had evolved into a fully functional potter’s wheel by the mid-Ubaid period (around 4,500 BCE). Furthermore, wheel- thrown pots appear virtually simultaneously in level IIB of the first Neo- lithic settlement in Pakistan, Mehrgarh10. This rapid quasi-simultaneous

9 This would required the phonetic shift from kw > g, and I am informed that this would be impossible in Semitic languages of the 4th–3rd millennium BCE, such as Eblaite – personal communication by Prof. Gianni Marchesi (Assistant Professor of Assyriology, University of Bologna). 10 See, for example, Mukhtar, Ahmed – Ancient Pakistan, an archaeological history, according to which tournette-based pottery appears for the first time in level IIB and

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 80 Jonathan Sherman Morris appearance in Iraq and Pakistan is hard to argue away as a chance coincidence and the most plausible explanation is that there were already trade routes in place, whether by sea or across the Iranian plateau. There is also anecdotal evidence for stone wheel technology for moving megaliths in Sicily and Malta, probably before the end of the 6th millennium, as well as for spindle whorls used in weaving, not much later. Indeed, there are appears to be a correlation between the appearance of spindle whorls in various parts of Central Europe and the Balkans and the subsequent appearance of the wheel (Burmeister, 2004, p. 21). Hence, ‘things that go round’ or rotating technologies were, if not widespread, then not uncommon at least 1,500 years before Anthony’s wheeled steppe dwellers started their supposed expansion. Consider the vocabulary for potter’s wheel: We have durgn in Arme- nian and trókhos in Greek, rota in Latin, čakra in Sanskrit and h̬urki- in Hittite. In other words, the word for ‘vehicle wheel’ also means ‘potter’s wheel’ in all of these cases. The interesting point is that PIE is extremely poor in terms for making ceramics. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov are able to reconstruct a generic term *deigh- for ‘clay’, with extended meanings ‘wall’, ‘sculpture’, ‘dough’. This is a serious point against Anthony and Ringe, since it shows that it is by no means true that the presence of a seminal material culture like making ceramics will be documented in PIE vocabulary. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov state:

it is impossible to reconstruct with certainty a PIE term for the potter’s wheel, before immediately qualifying this in a footnote

unless we regard the IE words for ‘wheel’ […] as words for ‘pottery wheel’; both meanings are present in Hittite h̬urki. A synchronic generalisation can be established in the area of cultural typology: the presence of the potter’s wheel can be assumed in cultures which have the wheel (Childe 1954). The indubitable existence of the wheel in ancient Indo-European culture, at least by the time of the breakup, makes it likely that the potter’s wheel was also present (pp. 612–613).

Why wouldn’t they regard the IE words for ‘wheel’ as words for ‘pottery wheel’? The only ground for not doing so would be if the daughter languages had entirely different terms for ‘potter’s wheel’ and as we have seen, this is not the case.

mass-produced wheel-thrown pottery in level IIC, similar to Kili Gul Muhammad II (p. 322). Jarrige dates the start of level IIB to 5000 BCE and of level III to 4500 BCE.

It should be evident that this raises the possibility of PIE having a word or words for wheel much earlier than the end of the 4th millennium, which evidently completely undermines Anthony’s argument that the break-up of PIE must have been later than the invention of wheeled transport. He nevertheless has precisely nothing to say about this. Nor is there the least mention of potter’s wheels in Lewis & Pereltsvaig either. Instead, they quote the UCLA-based linguist Andrew Garrett in order to attack Gray & Atkinson (Lewis - Pereltsvaig, 2015, p. 173).

In the case of words for ‘wheel’, what did they originally designate if not wheels? A semantic shift from concrete ‘wheel’ to abstract ‘circle, cycle’ is plausible but the reverse shift (abstract > concrete) is unusual at best.

It all depends on what you mean by ‘abstract’. Is a word for ‘round’ or ‘turns’ abstract? There are so many counterexamples which could be cited, many involving verbal or adjectival nouns, such as ‘computer’ or ‘pacifier’, particularly given the extensive tendency in Indo-European to build specific verbs out of combinations of non-descript verbal stems and prepositions and then derive nouns from them, that is hard to understand how anyone (let alone a Russian speaker) can endorse this. Consider that other “excep- tionally rare” reduplication in PIE cited by Ringe, *bhebher ‘beaver’, which according to Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (p. 448) “preserves an original meaning ‘brown’ or ‘shiny’” in some of the dialects which lack it in the meaning ‘beaver’. Idem for the PIE khas- ‘hare’, meaning ‘grey’ (ibidem, p. 440). Presumably the shift from a colour to an actual animal represents this “unusual” abstract-to-concrete shift.

Wholesale violation of the uniformitarian principle

The uniformitarian principle was first applied to linguistics by William Dwight Whitney in 1867 and not by Donald Ringe in 2002, as Lewis and Pereltsvaig (p. 162)11 appear to think. Whitney formulated this as follows:

11 Note Lewis and Pereltsvaig’s claim on p. 21 of their book that the most important Indo-Europeanist after “Bopp, Rask, Jacob and Willhelm Grimm and others put the study of historical linguistics on a sound scientific basis” was Max Müller (sic), who

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There is no way in which its unknown past can be investigated, except by the careful study of its living present and recorded past, and the extension and application to re- mote conditions of laws and principles deduced by that study (Whitney, 1867, p. 24).

Labov elaborated this principle in his 1972 book:

The forces operating to produce linguistic change today are of the same kind and order of magnitude as those which operated five or ten thousand years ago (Labov, 1972, p. 275).

The documentary evidence for Indo-European languages evidently appears at different time depths, with Anatolian, Greek and arguably Indo-Iranian attested as early as the early to mid-second millennium BCE, with others only written down for the first time in the modern era. The above principle nevertheless suggests that the latter languages, unrecorded until recently, are just as old. There is no evidence in the historical record, however, for the emergence of a new IE daughter family. As soon as written evidence becomes available, they are all fully differentiated from each other. There is thus nothing comparable to biology, in which we can look at fish, amphibians, reptiles and birds and infer the evolutionary processes which link them, even if extant species have all branched from a common trunk rather than representing a straight line of descent. All we have for such languages is a series of vague and unproven hypotheses based on apparent affinities (e.g. that Baltic and Slavic or Celtic and Italic may originally have formed a single language group). Indeed, if this were otherwise, we would expect to find multiple IE language families in India and Pakistan. We do indeed find some highly divergent Dardic languages, but there is no question that they are members of the Indo-Aryan language family. If we therefore take the uniformitarian principle at face value, the recorded evidence provides absolutely no support for the notion that divergent language families, such Baltic, Slavic, Germanic and Italic, could have emerged from PIE in 500–1,000 years. Surprisingly, this is precisely what David Anthony claims in his 2007 book (p. 82).

ostensibly contributed little or nothing to philology. Perhaps they have an unpublished manuscript by him as well.

early Proto-Indo-European (partly preserved in Tocharian) was spoken between 4000 and 3500 BCE; and late Proto-Indo-European (the source of Italic and Celtic with the wagon/ wheel vocabulary) was spoken about 3500–3000 BCE. Pre-Ger- manic split away from the western edge of late Proto-Indo-European dialects about 3300 BCE, and Pre-Greek split away about 2500 BCE, probably from a different set of dialects. Pre-Baltic split away from Pre-Slavic and other northwestern dialects about 2500 BCE. Pre-Indo-Iranian developed from a northeastern set of dialects between 2500 and 2200 BCE. Now that the target is fixed in time, we can solve the old and bitter debate about where Proto-Indo-European was spoken.

As the archaeological evidence shows, there is little chance that his steppe dwellers could have developed a critical mass for a wholesale invasion of Europe (whether cultural or military) before well into the third millennium BCE, so that in his model, we have hyperaccelerated differentiation of daughter families during this millennium and very little thereafter. It seems self-evident that in order to uphold the uniformitarian principle (and this, it should be remembered, is merely a working hypothesis, not an established empirical rule), the only intellectually tenable position is to argue for a much greater time depth than Anthony allows with his Kurgan hypothesis. It is therefore most surprising to see Lewis and Pereltsvaig claim the precise opposite: i.e. that Renfrew and Atkinson & Gray, who argue for a much greater time depth, which would have given more time for PIE to differentiate into its daughter families, are actually violating this principle. What are their grounds for this counterintuitive assertion? Apparently, more acritical support for the 2006 paper by Andrew Garrett (2006), a professor of linguistics at UCLA, which, according to them, is backed by “similar” arguments in Darden’s 2001 paper and…in Anthony’s 2007 book. To dispose of this latter point first, the only thing similar about Darden’s paper is that he rejects Renfrew’s theory, but his argument is based entirely on linguistic archaeology, not on any attempt to measure linguistic change. Garrett, on the other hand, argues that far from emerging by a progressive process of fission from a proto-language (e.g. PIE > proto-Celto-Italic > proto-Celtic and proto-Italic), the various daughter families converged with the loss of intermediate dialects. This nevertheless appears to beg the question as to how this greater linguistic diversity was created in the first place (if we posit that no common parent e.g. to Celtic and Italic ever existed), presumably with a much faster rate of change in order to produce all of these

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 84 Jonathan Sherman Morris divergent dialects, on account of the linguistic archaeological constraints he imposes on them. Garrett has a point to the extent that we may observe the emergence of world systems in which the dialect of the hegemonic centre becomes dominant over the others, as is the case for Latin with regard to the other Italic languages, such as Faliscan, Oscan or Umbrian or Attic Greek with regard to the other Greek dialects, but, it should be stressed, this argument applies to the members of individual language families, not between language families. Languages may evidently borrow words and even morphological structures, but is Flemish any less Germanic than Swedish despite having been spoken in a non-Germanic state for centuries? While English is something of an extreme case of hybridisation between two branches of Germanic and French, would anyone seriously argue that it is anything other than a Germanic language? In addition, the presence of linguistic frontiers, such as the Romance/Germanic border broadly running along the Rhine and through the Alps, which has been in place for two millennia without the emergence of any intermediate languages, would seem to suggest that once a given language has become an attractor for its neighbouring dialects, its hegemony is permanently consolidated. If he were correct, we would expect this process to repeat itself with the continuous formation of Mischsprachen offsetting the ongoing process of fissuring into dialects. All we can conclude from this is that his theory posits different phases of evolution from PIE, with very different behaviour in each phase, with this militating against the Uniformitarian Principle. While the quality of Garrett’s sophistry raises him to an intellectual level above that of Anthony or Lewis and Pereltsvaig (which is not much of a compliment) it is nevertheless sophistry, in that he takes a few highly conserved lexical items, such as numerals and the endings of the present tense of the verb’ to be’ and passes them off as markers for language change in general, arguing that because the phonetic change between what he calls Proto-Nuclear Indo-European and Proto-Greek is smaller than the change between Proto-Greek and Modern Greek, then the interval between PNIE and Proto-Greek must be shorter than the interval between Proto-Greek and Modern Greek.12

12 This point about how selective data distorts dates is highlighted by Lewis and Perel- stvaig in a citation of April McMahon on p. 101 of their book – although in their looking-glass world, it becomes a point in support of Garrett, not one against.

There are nevertheless several serious problems with his proposals: Firstly, there is the obvious point that morphological or lexical change within a language is not necessarily a good proxy for differentiationbetween languages. An evident counterexample would be Spanish and Portuguese, which are sufficiently morphologically similar to give the impression (e.g. using glottochronology) that they are mere dialects which separated from a proto-language only a few centuries ago, but for which there is good evidence that they were already differentiated dialects by the end of the Roman empire, since they represented different constellations of Latin dialects originating in Italy. In other words, apparent change is not necessarily real change and may appear relatively suddenly when a mixture of dialects is transplanted into a new context and then becomes the local standard. Secondly, it is not clear that this method can even be applied to lexical change to generate objective (as opposed to subjective) results. For example, there has been no change between glōssa ‘tongue’ between Ancient Greek and Modern Greek, but Beekes derives the term from glōgh-s meaning ‘point’. What then are we measuring, phonetic change or semantic change? And how do we quantify these? In other cases, we may be able to reconstruct multiple roots in PIE by extrapolating regular sound changes, but may not be sure what they actually mean. Or if we find a root in the proto-language which is not present in PIE, like ‘blood’ in proto-Germanic, then how do we date it in the absence of any deep lexical evidence? It should be clear from this that avoiding such issues by choosing terms with extensive cognates (and hence for which a single PIE form is reconstructible) will merely introduce bias which confuses conservatism with shallow time depth. Thirdly, there is the general issue of reconstructions. These have tended in the past to be distorted, usually because the linguists doing the reconstruction elected a known language as a proto-language (witness the dra- matic shifts in reconstructions which occurred in the 19th century when it was realised that Sanskrit was not an Ursprache and later when Hittite was deciphered). Indeed, no matter how good the triangulation of daughter languages, there is always a possibility that a new Indo-European language could undermine this model13 and there is no shortage of undocumented or underdocumented Indo-European languages.

13 A point lost on Anthony, who argued in his 2007 book that “Sumerian and Egyptian are not, in themselves, real languages; they only refer to real languages. Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European is not so different from cuneiform Sumerian” (p. 86).

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In addition, where a change has occurred across most or all of the daughter languages, it will tend to cause a ‘refraction’ effect, whereby the proto-form appears to be closer to the daughter languages, with the divergent forms dismissed as sui generis outliers. Clearly, dates inferred from such reconstructions will be unreliable. Fourthly, some of Garrett’s reconstructions, such as proto-Italic ‘five’ *kweŋkwe appear to be unsound. He reconstructs proto-Italic *peŋkwe, which presumably means that all daughter languages in Italic should reflect this p > kw shift. Hence, how does he explain Oscan pompe-, Umbrian pumpe?14 Is this homoplasy? Or borrowing? There is also the inverse phonological change in the reconstructed form for PIE is *kwetwores, which becomes Latin quattuor but with petora in Oscan and petur- in Umbrian. We then have patru in Romanian and battor in Sardinian. Again, is this homoplasy or inherited vocabulary from Oscan? Without clear answers, it is impossible to make any coherent inferences about rates of linguistic change, but linguists with an inherent anti-long-range bias invaria- bly yield to the temptation to indulge in ad hoc revisionism, explaining everything away as an independent innovation and ignoring the point that textual evidence is inherently unreliable as a guide to the earliest date for an innovation15. Evidently, there are no grounds for claiming that there is more or less phonetic change between PNIE and say Latin than there is between Latin and the modern Romance languages without good data for the Italic sister languages of Latin. We can observe cases like Umbrian, with its eccentric forms like tuf- and trif- for ‘two’ and ‘three’, but Italic is a rare case where such data is available and even here, it is not necessarily complete. As mentioned, the world-system effect will tend to obscure variation in the daughter languages of PIE (as opposed to the granddaughter languages). It is also easy to think of counterexamples, such as ‘one’ in Indo- Iranian, which Rosenfelder reconstructs as *aiwas. There is no evidence for this form in Indo-Aryan, since we already have Sanskrit éka, which is highly divergent, and which is also extensively present in Iranian.

14 Data taken from Mark Rosenfelder’s numerals on ‹www.zompist.com›. 15 See, for example, Sherman Morris, 2011, in which I show that apparent innovations which only appear in late Egyptian must have been present in the spoken language since the earliest dynasties, based on correspondences with Afroasiatic and notably Chadic.

Fifthly, there is an enormous latitude in rates of phonetic change between individual words and between daughter languages, so that by se- lectively basing an argument on evidence from only one (quite divergent) language (as Garrett does by comparing Waigali with proto-Indo-Iranian) he introduces a systematic bias. Consider the word for water in the Ro- mance languages, where Latin aquā is largely conserved in Italian acqua, but has changed enormously in French eau and could even reflect an Oscan borrowing in Sardinian abba.

Lexical evidence and phylogenetic methods

As mentioned, Lewis and Pereltsvaig attack Gray and Atkinson’s phylogenetic approach, accusing them of several fallacies: 1. Failure to distinguish innovations from retentions, 2. Exclusive dependence on the lexical level, which is intrinsically unreliable, 3. Inadequate identification of borrowings, 4. Procedural issues – essentially that judgments of what constitutes cognacy may fall victim to subjective distortions, albeit without really de- constructing the inner workings of the model. I would agree with their criticisms on points 1 and 3, but on point 2, they are at pains to pour as much opprobrium on lexical evidence as possible and while they are indeed correct in observing that lexicostatics is bedev- illed by problems such as coding for multiple synonyms, informal versus formal speech, etc., it nevertheless seems to me that other morphological and syntactical forms of analysis are, far from being the remedy they claim, no better and possibly worse. They also miss the rather obvious point that innovations can often be distinguished from retentions by comparison with other language families. For example, we can demonstrate that German fünf is more conservative than English five on account of its retention of the conserved n in Latin quinque, Greek pente, etc. (which, by extension, allows us to reconstruct the PIE form), rather than because it obeys some phonological universal. In the same way, we can see that all of the Romance languages have innovated in their word for ‘liver’ (e.g. French foie, Italian fegato) relative to Latin jecor because of cognate forms for the latter in Greek, Sanskrit, etc. Lexical evidence would actually be able to identify a particularly close relationship between English and Frisian through shared

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 88 Jonathan Sherman Morris vocabulary such as ‘leaf’ (W. Frisian leaf), ‘skin’ (N. Frisian skan, schan) and ‘rope’ (Saterland Frisian roop, N. Frisian: Wiringhiirder ruup, Frasch ruup), which are absent from other West (and North) Germanic languages, although admittedly, lexical evidence only establishes a working hypothesis of genetic relatedness, not objective proof. Given their dislike of lexical evidence, I wonder if we can expect an equally scathing critique by them of another attempt to use phylogenetic methods: the 2015 paper by none other than Andrew Garrett (Chang - Chathcart - Hall - Garrett, 2015), which claims that Atkinson and Gray’s model can be modified to support the Pontic Steppe hypothesis. In brief, he excludes loans and argues that many words in daughter languages are not attested in parent languages, or are not attested as internal borrowings and must thus be explained by semantic drift rather than by a phantom unattested presence. He provides a series of examples drawn from Vedic Sanskrit and Latin. In fact, Garrett indulges in yet more sophistry and misleading claims. If we inspect his Figure 1 (ibidem, p. 199), which shows the family tree derived from his revised model, we see that the Romance languages do not begin to differentiate until 1000 CE. Spanish/Portuguese do not seem to separate from Italian/French until about 1200 CE and Portuguese only separates from Spanish well after 1500 CE16. By the same token, Kashmi- ri diverges from the other Indo-Aryan languages at around 200–300 CE, with another split around 500 CE into Romani/Sinhala and the remainder. Romani then diverges from Sinhala around 600 CE – This point alone should cast instant suspicion on his model! Garrett claims that Latin had no slang in its basic vocabulary (“there is no evidence for significant basic vocabulary differences [due to social variation]”) “due to the levelling process of enormous geographical and social mobility until 300 CE” (ibidem, p. 206). As such, according to him, all social classes used the same basic vocabulary until well after the end of the Roman Empire, but gradually a kind of linguistic collective uncon- scious exerted itself, which caused them to make the same semantic developments, albeit independently of each other: ōs thus supposedly shifted to bucca, ignis to focus, cutis to pellis or from omnis to totus (hardly a good example, since it is still alive and well in Italian ogni).

16 In the absence of hard figures, I am merely ‘eyeballing’ his graph.

This is misleading for a number of reasons. Firstly, it assumes that paucity of data is the same as absence of data. Relatively little textual evidence for spoken Latin survives for the 2nd to 8th centuries and what does is often filtered through the redrafting of manuscripts at a much later date or is recorded in the 8th century Reichenau glosses. Consider, for example, another area, ancient Roman cuisine, and how little material there is available: Apicius’ De Re Coquinaria, Columella’s Res Rustica, Petronius’ description of Trimalchio’s feast in the Satyricon but virtually nothing by any author alive after 100 CE. Apicius’ book is nevertheless revealing in that while he lived during the reign of Tiberius, his manuscript was recompiled during the 5th century, with some recipes added in Vulgar Latin. These show, for example, the replacement of fer- vere by bullire (‘bubble’ > ‘boil’), of jecur by ficatus (‘liver’) of edere by manducare (‘eat’) and the interchangeable use of focus (a foco and in foco)17 and ignis for ‘fire’. We can also use phonetic dating (worked out in great detail at least for French by such figures as Straka and Zink (see Sherman Morris, 2008; 2009) and supported e.g. by the early 4th century data in the Appendix Probi) to show that regional phonological divergence was driven by a dialectal inheritance and was consolidated as early as the 1st–2nd centuries CE due to fertility crises and subsequent epidemics, which had seriously adverse effects on mobility. Indeed, Garrett is essentially arguing that since ‘skin’ and ‘mouth’ are standard terms in English, no-one would use synonyms and that extensively understood paraphrases for ‘skin’ such as “I’ll tan your hide”, “save one’s hide”, or for ‘mouth’ such as “shove this down your face/throat/ mush/trap” can’t exist, when, in reality, they have been attested in English since the 17th and 18th/19th centuries respectively. By contrast, his claims about homoplasy immediately fall apart18 when faced with a language group which preserves its intermediate stages. “Vul- gar Sanskrits” i.e. the various Prakrits and Palis, which date back at least to the 3rd century BCE and portray the speech of particular social groups, are very well documented and hence provide a much more faithful portrayal of

17 Different versions appear to have different numbering, but a foco is under Conditum paradoxum, in foco and bulliunt under Ofellae aprogineo more, manducare under Omentata ita fiunt. 18 The authority, albeit which does not allow detailed linguistic dating, is Turner, 1962– 1966. References are given by entry number in his dictionary.

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‘slang’ and ‘cant’ than is the case for Latin. Indeed, it is simply disingenu- ous to omit them. Hence according to Garrett, Vedic sarp- ‘crawl, creep’ → Hindi sāp ‘snake’ represents the manifestation of a generalised and late semantic drift process. This is evidently nonsense, since the word already meant ‘snake’ in the Rig Veda (Turner, 1962–1966, 13271). Indeed, a cursory look at Turner’s dictonary reveals that:

Vedic caks- ‘see’→ Bengali cok(h) ‘eye’ – already present in Pali and Prakrit cakkhu ‘eye’ (ibidem, 4560). Vedic pád- ‘foot’ → Bengali pā ‘leg’ – already present in the Rig Veda as ‘foot or leg of inanimate object’ (ibidem, 8056). Vedic nábhas- ‘cloud’ → Kashmiri nab ‘sky’ – already present in the Rig Veda as ‘heaven and earth’, in Pali as ‘cloud, sky’ (ibidem, 6955d).

My own work includes a full analysis of Swadesh lists for Greek and Old Egyptian and provides abundant evidence that internal borrowings tend to cluster at an early stage in language evolution. Merely by way of example, the following are internal borrowings for which the Classical Greek word shifted to the Modern Greek word, which are attested before the Hellenis- tic period (Sherman Morris, 2010; 2011):

Dog: κύον > σκύλος, B3.61 – σκύλαξ ‘whelp, puppy’ – already with meaning of ‘dog’ in Plato’s Republic 375a; Fire: πῦρ > φωτιά πῦρά maintained in the sense of a bonfire. φωτιά < φῶς, φωτός < Attic contraction of φάος, used in sense of ‘light of a fire’ in Odyssey 18.317, Aeschylus; Hair: τρίχες > μαλλιά Semantic development of μαλλιά from ‘lock of wool’ to ‘lock of hair’ already in Euripides ‘Bacchae’ – line 105; Leg: σκέλος > πόδι B4.35 – Liddell & Scott state that πούς was used in the sense of ‘leg plus foot’ as early as Homer – Iliad 23.772, Odyssey, 4.149, with σκέλος meaning ‘leg’ but also ‘thigh, ham’, (related to σκολιός– crooked) – C.978, and cognate with Old English sceolh ‘what is crooked’.

Garrett’s model also produces results which are seriously at odds with Lewis and Pereltsvaig’s own arguments that Romani is a key exhibit in

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Wheels, Languages and Bullshit 91 their argument against deep dates (Lewis - Pereltsvaig, 2015, p. 97)19, such as suggesting that Romani is most closely related to Sinhala and that the two languages split apart in 500 CE. Elu Prakrit already shows signs of differentiation into Sinhala in Sri Lanka at least as early as 300 BCE, so unless they admit that Romani migrated to Europe via Sri Lanka, they have to posit a similar early date for Romani, as indeed Gray and Atkinson did20. Garrett also included the following footnote in his 2006 paper:

Thus Latin ignis ‘fire’ has been replaced by reflexes of Latin focus ‘hearth’ throughout Romance, and archaic Sanskrit hanti ‘kills’ has been replaced by reflexes of a younger Sanskrit form mārayati throughout Indo-Aryan. This process especially targets words of IE antiquity, which are more often irregular and therefore prone to replacement. This pattern creates the illusion of a slower rate of change in the internal histories of modern branches: it seems in retrospect (say) that Latin focus replaced an IE word for ‘fire’ in the prehistory of Latin and not later in Romance. Because the overall rates of change posited in Gray & Atkinson’s model are based on apparent rate of change in modern branches with known histories, the overall rates of change assumed will be too slow. Over the evolution from PIE to Proto-Italic, Proto-Indo-Iranian, etc., the time depth calculated will thus be too long. I cannot assess the precise effects of this bias, but to speculate, if 5 per cent of the data is like focus a ‘true’ average lexical retention rate of 80 per cent over 1000 years will instead look like 85 per cent; this is equivalent to 23 per cent retention over 9000 years, while an 80 per cent rate is equivalent to a similar figure (26 per cent) over 6000 years. Precisely this 3000- year difference distinguishes the first-agriculturalists and secondary-products models (Garrett, 2006, p. 101, n. 6).

As we have seen, Garrett introduces deliberate bias into his dates which does not even reflect the empirical evidence, but leaving this aside, let us deconstruct the above to show just how wrong-headed it is. Some words in say Latin, such as ignis or jecur evidently disappear without trace in the daughter Romance languages. Gray and Atkinson make the common-sense point that such examples will indeed distort dates, but that this distortion will underestimate the true dates. Frankly, it is not entirely clear to me how this will affect a phylogenetic model which merely codes data on a binary basis without including dates, but

19 I am not making any claims here about dates, merely that Garrett’s data is seriously at odds with their arguments. 20 I would not claim to have done sufficient due diligence on Romani to have a definitive view, but suspect that Lewis and Pereltsvaig are confusing dialectal differentiation (with conservation of archaic features) with departure from India and are attaching way too much importance to grammatical gender.

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 92 Jonathan Sherman Morris by way of a thought experiment, imagine that we have a situation in the Romance languages in which the only changes between proto-Italic, Latin and modern Romance are 10 cases of wholesale replacement of ‘ignis’ > ‘focus’ or ‘jecur’ > ‘ficatus’type between 0 and 500 CE. We thus consider a proto-Italic Swadesh list full of PIE-derived terms from say 1000 BCE, an Augustan Swadesh list from 0 CE which still retains them, a Vulgar Apuleian (based on the 5th century Vulgar Latin text of Apuleius) Swadesh list from 500 CE and a modern Italian Swadesh list from 2000 CE (the dates are deliberately oversimplified for ease of calculation). If we measure lexical change between proto-Italic and modern Italian, we have 10% change in 3000 years, or 3.4% per millennium, which is independent of the date of the the ignis > focus shift, albeit which depends on our knowing the start and end-points of the process. However, if we measure interim rates, e.g. between Vulgar Apuleian and modern Italian, we will have no changes over 1500 years – so we have a lexical replacement rate of 0%. If we instead measure between Augustan and modern Italian, we will have a lexical replacement rate of 10% in 2000 years or about 5.1% per millennium. But by the same token, the lexical rate of change between proto-Italic and Augustan Latin will be zero and the lexical rate of change between proto-Italic and Vulgar Apuleian will be 10% change in 1500 years or some 6.8% per millennium. Or if you take a three-period model, then the rate of change between proto-Italic and Augustan Latin is zero, between Augustan and Late Apuleian Latin is 19% per millennium and between Late Apuleian Latin and modern Italian is zero again. Now what happens if you introduce the artificial bias, as Garrett does, by assuming that the ‘ignis’ > ‘focus’ or ‘jecur’ > ‘ficatus’changes actually occurred in 1000 CE. For a 2-period model, you then have a rate of zero between proto-Italic and 1000 CE and a rate of 10% between 1000CE and modern Italian, or for a 3-period model, zero between proto-Italic and Augustan Latin, zero between Augustan Latin and 1000 CE and 10% between 1000 CE and modern Italian. What should be clear from the above is that a) you can only work out the true rate of change between a grandmother and a granddaughter language if you already have the date for the grandmother language, b) none of the rates calculated from subintervals of this interval match this ‘true’ rate of change, c) if you move the dates of lexical change forward for one interval in order to speed up its rate of change, you merely slow down the rate of change in the previous interval correspondingly. In this way,

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Wheels, Languages and Bullshit 93 by postulating that the solution to the problem of distortion created by projecting backwards the rate of change of a subinterval is to modify this rate of change and project this new rate backwards, Garrett unwittingly replicates the error of which he accuses Gray and Atkinson. Indeed, he is essentially arguing that if you cut a pizza into smaller slices, then you end up with less pizza than if you cut it into bigger slices. Despite the sophistication of Garrett’s model, its results do not appear to be substantially different from the glottochronological dates which are generally regarded as unreliable. Nor could they be, since unless one posits and justifies non-linear behaviour in individual language families, binary coding of data will tend to give similar results regardless of methodology. Unfortunately, while glottochronology is rejected in a positive sense (e.g. almost all linguists accept that the fact that it shows Portuguese and Spanish diverging in the 16th–17th century shows that it is useless), it is accepted by linguists such as Anthony and Pereltsvaig and Lewis in a negative sense in order to rule out higher dates for the divergence of PIE, when it should be clear that if it doesn’t work for a ‘positive’ date then it won’t work for a ‘negative’ date either. It thus seems to me that the only conclusion that can be drawn from the above is that phylogenetic models can be used to prove any hypothesis given appropriate tweaking of the model. By way of a thought experiment, I would invite Gray and Atkinson or Garrett to rerun their models moving their daughter branch dates back by 500–1,000 years. As mentioned in my articles, there is extensive evidence from the early modern period that the varieties of hegemonic languages which spread into colonies (e.g. English into North America and Australia, Portuguese into Brazil, Latin into Gaul and Iberia) were heavily dialectalised and “pre-differentiated”. My suspicion is that this would give a date consistent with the Palaeolithic Conti- nuity Theory (cf. ‹www.continuitas.org›)21, although it evidently woudn’t prove the PCT since ultimately, it is merely a model. Garrett’s non-demonstration is nevertheless what Lewis and Pereltsvaig want to hear, so that in their view, his self-confessed back of the envelope

21 I put this point to the Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster at a lunch in 2009 and his tentative answer was that in his model for the Germanic languages, shifting the break- up date for proto-Germanic back by a millennium would multiply the base date by a factor of 2.

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 94 Jonathan Sherman Morris calculation (“I cannot assess the precise effects of this bias, but to speculate…”) is “clearly sufficient to add up to the 3,000-year timing difference between the emergence of PIE in the Anatolian model and the Steppe hypotheses” (Lewis - Pereltsvaig, 2015, p. 101). Yet another example of Lewis and Pereltsvaig’s stock in trade of attacking their opponents’ claims only to replace them with even more erro- neous claims of their own is their account of Romanian in the subsequent section on “Problematic Calibration Points”. There is an admirably clear exposition of the early history of Romani- an in André Du Nay’s seminal 1977 book, The Early History of the Ruma- nian Language, available on line22, which pointed out that a) there was no good archaeological evidence for continuous Roman occupation North of the Danube, b) there were notable similarities in borrowed Latin vocabulary between Romanian and Albanian, c) there was shared vocabulary/phonology between Romanian and Italian dialects, notably of Friuli and Southern Italy. Indeed, Du Nay (1977, p. 161) explained that a major point against a continuous presence in Dacia is the almost complete absence of any identi- fiable old Germanic vocabulary in Romanian, for the evident reason that Romanised Daco-Romans fled south of the Danube in the later Roman empire in order to stay out of the way of marauding Huns and Goths. Lewis and Pereltsvaig nevertheless state that “The presence of words of Germanic (specifically, Gothic),….origins in Eastern Romance languages, particularly Romanian, is often cited as another argument for the emergence of Eastern Romance in the Balkans and not in (former) Dacia” (Lewis - Pereltsvaig, 2015, p. 103). Cited by whom? Their bibliography only refers to a generic country survey from 1970. Gray and Atkinson calibrate the separation of Romanian from the re- maining Romance languages at 270 CE, the date of the Roman withdrawal from Dacia. Are they correct? Probably not, since languages have a prehistory and an afterlife. Lewis and Pereltsvaig attack them on the ground that Romanian itself lacks the degree of dialectal differentiation that one

22 Not to mention Sala, 2005.

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Wheels, Languages and Bullshit 95 would expect from continuous occupation and hence that it must evidently have developed elsewhere – i.e. due south of the current area occupied by Romanian and North of the Jireček line (defined as the linguistic frontier running through the Balkans between Greek and Latin). Their point about Romanian developing outside of Dacia is correct, but just because it didn’t develop there doesn’t mean that it isn’t old. Indeed, Romanian arose within a Latin speaking continuum which in Roman times stretched from Italy to Thrace and within which a Balkan Latin subfamily emerged and differentiated into related but divergent languages (particularly in phonetic terms) (i.e. Aromanian, Istro-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian). The deep differentiation exists, albeit outside Romania. Lewis and Pereltsvaig grudgingly admit that “distinctive dialectal features began to emerge in this area as early as the 2nd century CE”, but then claim the “the date of separation of Romanian and its Romance sisters must be later, indeed perhaps much later than 270 CE” and that “More solid if still indirect evidence in support of the later arrival theory can be pieced together based on the findings of Romanian dialectology”. On the contrary, there are good reasons for presuming that proto- Romanian began to differentiate well before the end of the Roman empire, as is attested by the sound changes dated in Du Nay and the presence of wave theory effects consistent with an initial expansion, followed by iso- lation, most notably old Latin words which are present in Romanian and Spanish/Portuguese but not in Italian French (e.g. Romanian mai înalt, Portuguese mais alto ‘higher’; Romanian fierbe, Portuguese ferver ‘boil’, also conserved in Pugliese ferve; Romanian umār, Portuguese ombro ‘shoulder’), not to mention highly conservative words like ied ‘billy goat’, a retention of Latin haedus, which is only preserved in Sardinian edu and Corsican eghiu (Rohlfs, 1954, maps 3, 8, 25, 44). This is tantamount to arguing that because American English only arrived in North America in the 17th century and all Americans can understand each other without difficulty, it only began to differentiate from the other dialects of proto-Germanic etc. around this date and that while the variety of the proto-Germanic koine spoken in England under the Tudors and written down by Shakespeare had distinctive regional features which made it unintelligible to other late proto-Germanic speakers in 17th century Holland, Germany and Scandinavia, it had to cross the Atlantic in order to become the language known as American. I therefore hope that they will be able to understand this article, given that it is written in late Insular

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Proto-Germanic, or perhaps what David Anthony might term, “so late we thought you’d got lost and gone home Usatovian”, as is explained below.

“The Ancestor of English”

Anthony’s 2007 book included a section (pp. 358–359) with the momen- tous title: The Ancestor of English: The Origin and Spread of the Usatovo Dialect. Indeed, he stated:

Western Indo-European languages might well have remained confined to scattered islands across eastern and central Europe until after 2000 BCE, as Mallory has suggested. Nevertheless, the movements into the East Carpathians and up the Danube valley occurred in the right sequence, at the right time, and in the right directions to be connected with the detachment of Pre-Italic, Pre-Celtic, and Pre-Germanic - the branch that ultimately gave birth to English.

This title might seem to suggest that Anthony was about to reveal hard empirical evidence that the Usatovo dialect was indeed the ancestor of English, as opposed to the ancestor of Swahili, Klingon or Machine Code. Anthony was nevertheless at pains to point out that such a demonstration fell outside the scope of his book:

I do not attempt to follow what happened after the initial migrations of these groups; my effort is just to understand the development and the first dispersal of speakers of PIE and along the way, to investigate the influence of technological innovations in transportation - horseback riding, wheeled vehicles and chariots – in the opening of the Eurasian steppes (ibidem, p. 133).

In 2008, Anthony nevertheless published a 50-page paper entitled A New Approach to Language and Archaeology: The Usatovo Culture and the Separation of Pre-Germanic in which he suggested that the Usatovo culture might indeed lie at the root of the separation of pre-Germanic:

The Proto-Indo-European dialects that would ultimately form the root of Pre-Germanic might have spread up the Dniester from the Usatovo culture through a nested series of patrons and clients, eventually being spoken in some of the late TRB communities between the upper Dniester and the Vistula.

This might have suggested to the reader without detailed knowledge of the archaeology of chalcolithic Europe that the purpose of this 50-page paper was to present empirical evidence for the relationship between the Usa- tovo culture and the separation of pre-Germanic, but this was a layman’s misapprehension:

Convincing archaeological evidence for a migration from any of the stronger Proto- Indo-European homelands into the North European Plain at the beginning of the Corded Ware period has not been found. The northwestern group therefore constitutes one of the hardest knots in the tangle of problems that continues to separate archaeological from linguistic evidence.

Hence, it might be true, but there was no evidence for it. In his 2015 paper, he relaxed his 2007 stance:

After that [the separation of Tocharian from PIE], a cluster of western European branches separated to the west, into the Danube valley on the south side of the Car- pathians with the Yamnaya migration up the Danube about 3100–2800 BCE, and into southern Poland on the northern side of the Carpathians with the expansions of the Usatovo and the Tripolye C2 cultures about 3300–3000 BCE (Ecsedy 1994, Mallory 1998, Klochko & Kośko 2009, Heyd 2011, Anthony 2013). These last separations match the proposal that the ancestors of Italic and Celtic (and perhaps pre-Germanic) could have separated in a rather complex phase of migrations and language spreads (Anthony - Ringe, 2015, p. 210).

His views had evidently arrived at the more nuanced position that proto- Germanic might be included in a proposal which might be true. What about Greek? Unfortunately, Anthony had no idea how his Pon- tic Steppe dwellers got to Greece, but this wasn’t in his job description either:

The people who imported Greek or proto-Greek into Greece might have moved several times, perhaps by sea, from the Western Pontic steps to south-eastern Europe to western Anatolia to Greece, making their trail hard to find. The EH IIs/III transition about 2400–2200 BC has long been seen as a time of radical change in Greece, when new people might have arrived, but the resolution of this problem is outside the scope of this book (Anthony, 2007, p. 369).

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The archaeological evidence for the Steppe theory (or lack of it)

Anthony claims that

The recent prehistoric archaeology of the steppes has been published in obscure journals and books, in languages understood by relatively few Western archaeologists and in a narrative form that often reminds Western archaeologists of the old “pots are people” archaeology of fifty years ago. I have tried to understand this literature for twenty-five years with limited success, but I can say that Soviet and post-Soviet archaeology is not a simple repetition of any phase of Western archaeology; it has its own unique history and guiding assumptions (ibidem, p. 18).

The main language with which Anthony unsuccessfully struggles appears to be German, which happens to be the language of an “obscure” encyclo- paedic work on the origin of the wheel Rad und Wagen [Wheel and Wagon] which accompanied an exhibition at the Landesmuseum in Oldenburg, or- ganised in 2004 by Stefan Burmeister and Mamoun Hansa and which contains nearly 40 papers on the prehistory of wheels and wagons covering most of the globe and focusing on Eurasia in particular. This book wasn’t even mentioned in Horse, Wheel and Language despite appearing 3 years earlier (indeed, when the book was published, Anthony’s bibliography was at least 5 years out of date), although he does reference this work in his later papers in his usual misleading fashion:

The invention of the wheel-and-axle principle, which first made wagons and carts possible, is solidly dated by radiocarbon after 4000–3500 BCE, a very well-studied external fact (Bakker et al., 1999, Fansa & Burmeister 2004, Anthony 2007). This external fact ties late PIE to a real-world date after wheeled vehicles were invented, that is, after 4000–3500 BCE (Anthony - Ringe, 2015, pp. 200–201).

In fact, many articles in this volume and the subsequent work of its con- tributors undermine Anthony’s steppe hypothesis model. The following is merely a brief selection:

A key contribution to this volume is by Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, possibly the most authoritative source on the Indus Valley, who pointed out that “the first wheeled vehicles were developed in an alluvial region, only this happened in the Indus Valley, not in Central Asia” (p. 89). Indeed, he references terracotta models of carts dating back

to 3500–3300 BCE, up to a millennium before Anthony’s date for the separation of proto-Indo-Iranian.

Kenoyer clarified his views in his 2009 paper:

For example, Parpola’s recent article on carts and wheels assumes that there is only one point of origin for these technologies and that the earliest wheeled vehicles were invented in the Tripolye culture in the Ukraine, dated circa 4000–3400 BC (Parpola 2008). Based on David Anthony’s date for wheeled vehicles in the Pontic- Caspian region closer to around 3500 BCE, he argues that the European wheel technology was “transmitted to the Near East from the Tripolye culture via the Caucasus, where the Pontic-Caspian and Near Eastern cultural spheres encountered each other during the fourth millennium BC” (Parpola 2008). To suggest that the technology of carts and wheels was transferred from the Pontic-Caspian region to the Indus Valley via Mesopotamia or Central Asia is not supported by any concrete archaeological evidence. There is in fact no reason to assume a single point of origin for this technology and it is more likely that it originated in many different regions as the need arose. Eventual exchanges between regions may have resulted in the dominance of linguistic terms, but linguistic commonality does not provide evidence for the diffusion of technology (Kenoyer, 2009).

Hence, whenever Anthony’s Indo-Iranians appeared in the Indus Valley, the locals had already been using wheeled technology for centuries, if not millennia, but he has nothing to say about this. The work also contains Jan Albert Bakker’s (1981) paper, linking the invention of the wheel to other developments, such as the plough, the yoke and castration of cattle, as well as the use of their traction power. Bakker cites Dinu’s 1981 paper as evidence for clay models of wheels from the 5th millennium. There is also Joseph Maran’s (2003) paper, which places a high probability on wagon-shaped cups from Western Hungary dating back to the early 4th millennium23 representing actual vehicles. Most important is Burmeister’s own paper in the Rad und Wagen volume, dating wooden tracks on the moors of Northern Germany as far back as the early 5th millennium. Burmeister argues that necessity was not necessarily the mother of invention for wheeled vehicles, which are more likely to have served a ceremonial purpose or to have been a status

23 Although it is a scattered find, a Boleráz-period date [i.e. 3700–3500 BCE] is very likely due to the engraved herringbone decoration, which corresponds to that on the beaker from Boglárlelle], in Maran, pp. 265–282.

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 100 Jonathan Sherman Morris symbol. 4-wheeled wagons were thus originally prestige objects, either for religious processions or as markers of social status and their technology would thus have diffused through interregional networks for luxury goods, dating back at least to the 5th millennium, already in place for trade in prestige items, such as arsenical copper, flint and jadeite. According to Burmeister, owners of wagons would nevertheless have been quick to realise that their secular use could bring great benefits to their owners for transporting harvests or the large amounts of fodder need- ed to keep cattle alive within a settlement through the winter (about 1 met- ric tonne per animal, with the archaeological remains showing that they did confine their cattle during the winter). Indeed, as he points out in his 2012 paper these wooden tracks connect fields and represent an expedient for bringing otherwise inaccessible land into service. Evidently, this would have served as a potentially large multiplier of wealth or a social stratifi- cation factor and would have been a self-fuelling process, since the ability to exploit this development depends on having trained cattle to pull carts, which meant that these animals were not available as a food resource, hence those farmers with herds of subcritical size would not have been able to exploit this new opportunity. As Burmeister further argues, a number of factors militate against an invasion by wheeled nomads as initially suggested by Anthony. Firstly, the fact that the finds in Western Europe predate those on the Pontic Steppes and use different technologies (rotating axles in the Alpine finds), secondly, the absence of a road network and thirdly, the fact that four-wheeled carts existed for millennia before they became steerable and were thus restricted to a local context. Again, this is not necessarily a problem on the Steppes themselves, but the wagon technology which spread over the Steppes at the end of the 4th millennium would have been practically useless for pene- trating very far into Europe until very late in the 3rd millennium, by which time, it offered no great technological advantage. The dynamics of what actually occurred on the Steppes are eluci- dated by another paper in the Rad und Wagen book by Viktor Trifonov, who states unequivocally that wagons first appear in the Maikop culture of the Northern Caucasus. This is clearly a culture whose elite had grown rich supplying precious stones to the city states of Mesopotamia, notably Uruk, and which derived its ceramic, megalithic and presumably, vehicle technology from the South. This civilisation lasted for about 500 years between 3700 BCE and 3200 BCE, before collapsing. Furthermore, wagon

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Wheels, Languages and Bullshit 101 technology only began to spread onto the Steppes at the very end of this period. As Trifonov states in his conclusion:

Erst am Ende des 4. Jts. v. Chr. erhält der Wagen in der vorkaukasischen Steppe Eingang in den Grabbrauch der Jamnaja- und der Novotitarovskaja-Kultur. [Only at the end of the 4th millennium BCE did the wagon of the pre-Caucasian Steppe enter the burial practices of the Yamnaya and the Novotitarovskaya cultures] (p. 174).

The next paper by Aleksander Gej (2001) points out that the Novoti- tarovskaja culture certainly liked its wagons, indeed, the number of graves with wagons increased exponentially relative to the Maikop culture from a handful to several hundred. This culture nevertheless produced the same model of 4-wheeled vehicle until the Catacomb Grave culture of the 2nd millennium BCE, with Gej pointing out that there was no evidence for a steering mechanism even at this late stage. This seems to me to be a fatal flaw in Anthony’s theory, since, as Burmeister points out, an unsteerable wagon would have been confined to a steppe envi- ronment. As soon as it attempted to expand into a densely forested area, it would have collided with the nearest tree. Anthony’s steppe dwellers may thus have had plenty of wagons, but none of them were fit for the grand purpose of spreading Indo-European languages and instead were probably popular more as mobile homes suitable only for the Steppe itself. It should be noted that in his 2007 book, Anthony, 2007, p. 132, cites Gej’s 2001 paper in great detail but fails to even mention the issue of steerability (indeed, the issue of steerability is completely absent from his book). The above suggests that his bronze age riders only shaped the modern world in that they were the ancestors of the trailer park, johnny-come-latelys to a Eurasia through which key vehicle and other technologies had already disseminated for the simple reason that it had already been networked to lesser or greater degrees for millennia. In 2012, the Turkish archaeologist Mesut Alp announced that he had found a stone model of a wagon in eastern Anatolia (Kiziltepe) dating back to the mid-6th millennium BCE. Such a finding, if confirmed, would sink Anthony’s Pontic Steppe model. Unsurprisingly, Anthony doesn’t mention this, but Lewis and Pereltsvaig go straight into full denial mode (Lewis - Pereltsvaig, 2015, pp. 178–179), denouncing it as sensationalism

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 102 Jonathan Sherman Morris and pointing out that the other dates at the site are much later. They may be correct about this, but the point is that Anthony, Ringe, Garrett and company are one authenticated discovery away from a funeral for their late expansion theory, since it would clearly demonstrate that key technologies had diffused from Anatolia at a much earlier date than the Yamna culture. As early as 1995, Anthony had claimed with a certain bathos:

I have not proposed that the wheeled vehicle technology originated in the PIE homeland, a position that has been attributed to me by Häusler. I have proposed only that most of the IE vocabulary for wheeled vehicles originated in PIE.

We have seen that this need not be true, but even if it is, there is no evidence for assuming that the original semantic fields of these words coincided with or were restricted to wheeled vehicles. As a closing point, it should be considered the historical record is richest in the Near East and Egypt, Greece and Western Europe. It bears witness to a constant stream of ‘barbarians’ across the limes in search of land, booty, etc., often because they had even more uncivilised barbarians from further east snapping at their heels. How good were the Sea Peoples, the Cimbri, the Teutones, the Goths, the Huns, the Alans, the Vandals, the Vikings, the Magyars or the Lombards at replacing the language of the natives? Or even Turks and Saracens with a level of civilisation equal or superior to the local population. The answer is not very, except where they were able to penetrate into a depopulated or thinly populated area, such as the Pannonian plain or post-Roman England. In this way, any theory like the Steppe theory has to start from demographic considerations. If we look at the Roman Empire, by the time it ended, it had become so decadent that ‘barbarians’ were in charge of its military machine, but this had virtually no effect in terms of language displacement, even if there are detectable borrowings. Anthony appears to realise that the wheels have come off his vehicle theory and makes some off-the-cuff comments about how In- do-European languages could have spread through an open elite process, but provides no evidence for it beyond the usual flimsy arguments based on linguistic archaeology. The wholesale violation of the Uniformitarian Principle is thus a key premise for Anthony’s theory, if indeed it can be called a theory at all. Sifting through Anthony’s kitchen midden of archaeological non-sequiturs and trivia, the only postulates of his “New approach to archaeology and language” that are robust appear to be: a) people in England and the US

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Wheels, Languages and Bullshit 103 speak English, b) English is one of many related Indo-European languages which cover most of Eurasia, c) these languages all descend from a common ancestor and therefore must have developed from it somehow, somewhere and at some point in the past, probably in Eurasia, d) these languages have a series of shared words for wheels, as well as for other things, e) if wheel technology wasn’t responsible for the spread of these languages then something else definitely was, f) assuming that the original homeland of the ancestral language was quite small, the fact that the area now covered by Indo-European languages is bigger suggests that there was an expansion of this ancestral language from its original homeland, g) if you start from the ancestral homeland, wherever it is and move in the direction of England, you will eventually arrive in England, h) English has no word for ‘wheel’ apart from the word ‘wheel’. He will no doubt contin- ue to regurgitate his paper in one form or another with pretty pictures of wheel etymologies and it wouldn’t surprise me to see him cite this one as supporting evidence.

“Conclusion: what is at stake in the Indo-European debate”?

Lewis and Pereltsvaig end their book with the above title, claiming that it is no less than a mortal struggle between rationalism and empiricism. According to them, this is a game which must be played under gentlemen’s rules, with empiricists accepting the need for a conceptual framework, if only provisional, and rationalists accepting the need to abandon their theories when they are refuted by the empirical evidence. In their view, Gray and Atkinson should be ‘shouted down’24 as a bad case of pathological rationalism, an ‘intellectual disorder’ because they talk up their own work. Frankly, there is little evidence of good faith in their book, which shills for figures such as Anthony, Ringe and Garrett, who push theories based on poor scholarship and misinformation, and they descend into self-righteous ranting against anyone who disagrees with them.

24 The words of another anti-long-ranger, Lyle Campbell in his review of Joseph Greenberg’s book Language in the Americas.

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 104 Jonathan Sherman Morris

In particular, they simply fail to grasp how the scientific process actually works. While they are correct that Atkinson and Gray are seriously over- confident, my impression is that only linguistically challenged geneticists regard their work as anything more than glorified glottochronology or as a definitive proof of Renfrew’s theory. It’s just a model. No more and no less. While the initial results of ancient DNA might appear to be putting the genetic wind in their sails, the proponents of a Steppe theory shouldn’t be celebrating just yet. If we consider young countries such as the United States or Brazil, we find a massive divergence between genes and languages, since these countries are open to all comers, albeit on condition of acceptance of a pre-existing cultural standard, which includes the national language. The same was true of the Roman empire, as witnessed by the increasing diversity of origins of its emperors after the end of the 1st century CE. As such, there is the very real risk that geneticists may succeed in mapping gene flows in exquisite detail but in linguistic terms, their efforts may be in vain. They are thus fighting an uphill struggle to make their results matter. Which models does the genetic evidence support? In the 1990s, when the best available evidence was classical blood groups and the dominant figure was Cavalli-Sforza, the favoured model was Colin Renfrew’s. Then, when non-recombinant DNA evidence accumulated (e.g. Sykes and Rich- ards, Underhill), the data favoured palaeolithic continuity. Now that the technology for sequencing ancient DNA is available, the preliminary data appears to favour a late expansion hypothesis. Genetics has thus backed 3 diametrically opposed theories in 20 years and has changed its mind completely with each new breakthrough in DNA sequencing. We shouldn’t be surprised to see geneticists talking up their own work with a “this time it’s different” claim and should hence be deeply sceptical about the new evidence from ancient DNA representing the final word on Indo-Europe- an origins. What nevertheless seems certain is that the scientific process, which is no more or less than the constant testing and rejection of theories which don’t fit the empirical evidence, is in rude health. As such, Gray and Atkinson’s attempt to adapt their phylogenetic models to direct processing of linguistic data is perfectly legitimate. It is also perfectly legitimate to deconstruct their models and reject their conclusions. To paraphrase Warren Buffett, in the short-term, science is a voting machine, but in the long-term, it is a weighing machine. As such, Lewis and Pereltsvaig’s claims that they are warriors for the truth

Philology, vol. 3/2017 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Wheels, Languages and Bullshit 105 leading the charge against scientism are simply pretentious and the efforts by them, Ringe and Anthony, pernicious, insofar as they mislead uninformed non-linguists and the media into believing they have a consolidated theory. As this article has nevertheless attempted to show, the amateurish nature of Lewis and Pereltsvaig’s book does unwittingly pull aside the curtain on the Wizard of Usatovo’s theory, confirming that it is based on nothing more than wishful thinking, biased interpretation of data and on incoherent and often self-contradictory arguments.

With thanks to Mark Kenoyer, Stefan Burmeister and Gianni Marchesi.

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