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Part of
Language Dispersal Beyond Farming
Edited by Martine Robbeets and Alexander Savelyev
[Not in series 215] 2017
► pp. 275–290

Chapter 12
Agricultural terms in Indo-Iranian

| Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

The article investigates the agricultural lexicon of Indo-Iranian, especially its earlier records, and what it may tell us about the spread of farming. After some general remarks on “Neolithic” vocabulary, a short overview of the animal husbandry terminology shows that this field of vocabulary was evidently well-established in Proto-Indo-Iranian, with many cognate terms. Words for cattle, horses, sheep and goats are well developed and mostly inherited, while evidence for pigs is more limited, ad the words for donkey and camel look like common loans. A more extensive discussion of plant terminology reveals that while some generic terms for grain are inherited, more specific words for different kinds of cereals show few inherited terms and/or irregular variation, and the same is even clearer for pulses and some other vegetables. The terminology for agricultural terminology is largely different from that of most European branches of Indo-European. The conclusion is that the cultural background behind these linguistic data points to spreading of a mainly pastoralist culture in the case of Indo-Iranian.

Keywords: Indo-Iranian, husbandry terms, plant cultivation, agricultural technology, pastoralist
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.“Neolithic” vocabulary
    • 2.1General remarks
    • 2.2Terms for domestic animals
    • 2.3Agricultural plants
      • 2.3.1Cereals
        • 1.General terms
        • 2.‘Barley’ Hordeum vulgare
        • 3.‘Wheat’ Triticum sp.
        • 4.‘Oats’ Avena sativa
        • 5.‘Rye’ Secale cereale
        • 6.‘Rice’ Oryza sativa
        • 7.‘Broomcorn millet’ Panicum miliaceum
        • 8.‘Foxtail millet’ Setaria (italica)
      • 2.3.2Pulses
        • 1.‘Bean’ Vicia faba (Europe); ‘Vetch’ Vicia ervilia, Vicia sativa and ‘Munɡ bean’ Vigna radiata (< Iran); ‘Black bean’ Vigna mungo (< India)
        • 2.‘Lentil’ Lens culinaris
        • 3.For different types of ‘peas’, there is a variety of different terms, partly overlapping with those for other pulses
      • 2.3.3Some other vegetables
        • 1.‘Onion’ Allium cepa and ‘Leek’ Allium ampeloprasum
        • 2.‘Garlic’ Allium sativum
    • 2.4Agricultural technology
      • 1.‘Field, cultivated plants’
      • 2.‘To plough’, ‘to sow’
      • 3.‘Plough’ and its parts
  • 3.Conclusions
  • 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
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https://doi.org/10.1075/z.215.12kum
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