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Part of
Language Dispersal Beyond Farming
Edited by Martine Robbeets and Alexander Savelyev
[Not in series 215] 2017
► pp. 291–311

Chapter 13
Milk and the Indo-Europeans

| Université de Limoges and Institut Universitaire de France
| Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
| Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique

Recent evidence from archaeology and ancient DNA converge to indicate that the Yamnaya culture, often regarded as the bearer of the Proto-Indo-European language, underwent a strong population expansion in the late 4th and early 3rd millennia BCE. It suggests that the underlying reason for that expansion might be the then unique capacity to digest animal milk in adulthood. We examine the early Indo-European milk-related vocabulary to confirm the special role of animal milk in Indo-European expansions. We show that Proto-Indo-European did not have a specialized root for ‘to milk’ and argue that the IE root *h2melg̑- ‘to milk’ is secondary and post-Anatolian. We take this innovation as an indication of the novelty of animal milking in early Indo-European society. Together with a detailed study of language-specific innovations in this semantic field, we conclude that the ability to digest milk played an important role in boosting Proto-Indo-European demography.

Keywords: Indo-European, etymology, DNA, archaeology, Yamnaya culture
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.The archaeological and genetic background
  • 2.Linguistic and philological evidence on the place of milk among Indo-Europeans
    • 2.1Indo-European words for ‘to milk’
      • 2.1.1Hittite
      • 2.1.2The Core IE root *h 2 melg̑- ‘to milk’
      • 2.1.3Excursus: Indo-Iranian *dʰau̯gʰ- ‘to milk; to give milk (of a cow)’
    • 2.2Indo-European words for ‘milk’ derived from ‘to milk’
      • 2.2.1Other innovative forms for ‘milk’: Gr. γάλα n. and OArm. kat‘n.
      • 2.2.2Other innovative forms for ‘milk’: Lat. lac, lactis n.
      • 2.2.3A new etymology for IE *h2melg̑- ‘to milk’
    • 2.3Greek and Latin textual evidence for milk-drinking among Indo-European “barbarians”
      • 2.3.1Homer and Homeric scholia
      • 2.3.2Hesiodus
      • 2.3.3Hippocrates
      • 2.3.4Herodotus: The Massagetae and the Scythians
        • 2.3.4.1The Massagetae
        • 2.3.4.2The Scythians (Hdt. iv.2.1–2)
      • 2.3.5Pliny the Elder
    • 2.4Concluding remarks
  • 3.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 21 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.215.13gar
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