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PtahandSuns t1_jbd8c1o wrote

Reply to comment by OMightyMartian in Humans Started Riding Horses 5,000 Years Ago, New Evidence Suggests by Magister_Xehanort

Wouldn’t it be the other way around though? In your example of night didn’t they have night before axles, so why did night change so much? Wouldn’t it make sense that one group came up with the technology traveled around and told people about it and not enough time has gone by to adapt those words into something by other groups yet?

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PaulJazof t1_jbdkkne wrote

In linguistic terms the word 'night' didn't change a lot between indo european languages.

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Tyg13 t1_jbdsv27 wrote

The Proto-Indo-European words for axle and horse are reconstructed as *h₂eḱs and *h₂éḱwos, so I'm not sure you can make a strong argument that *nókʷts (night) changed more than them.

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BabyJesusFTW t1_jbdcvlo wrote

Maybe because night is a period of time vs an animal? Night has many phases as well vs horse is horse?

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iLynux t1_jbdjtxs wrote

Night is so ubiquitous on Earth that it's no surprise there are thousands of different words for it across cultures and even within language families.

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Rocktopod t1_jbee6yx wrote

That's the opposite point to what the other comment was saying.

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iLynux t1_jbfoa18 wrote

What I meant was, everyone on Earth knew about night, and would've been using language to describe it, regardless of what people thousands of miles away call it. Horses were not everywhere on Earth, and so the first people to encounter and domesticate them kinda got dibs on what they were called.

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thewerdy t1_jbllrvw wrote

The change in the words isn't the important part - tracing the changes through time is how we arrive at the original PIE word. The important part is that the words were conserved throughout the daughter languages which indicates that the original PIE speakers had words for them and the were used enough and important enough to be passed down from the generations. A lot of really common words in IE languages can be traced back all the way to the hypothesized mother tongue simply because they are commonly used words. The fact that there are tons of preserved words relating to horses, chariots, and wagons tell us that the original PIE speakers likely used them a lot.

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