| Abstract: |
Introduction: Comparative-historical linguists have long recognized the potential contribution of their discipline not only to an understanding of the prehistory of language but also to the general study of prehistory. Under the labels <i>Wörter und Sachen</i> (words and things) and <i>linguistic palaeontology</i> reconstructed vocabulary has formed the basis for a variety of inferences, some sounder than others, about the natural environment and cultures of prehistoric peoples.<sup>1</sup> As Saussure (1959), Sapir (1968), Hockett (1948), and others have noted, the Wörter und Sachen technique must be used with circumspection, but these warnings in no way vitiate the method as such. Widespread cognate sets, for example, leave little doubt that speakers of Proto-Indo-European in the fourth and third millennia B.C. were familiar with the horse and the wheel. Similarly, *saRman 'outrigger float' and associated lexical reconstructions show that speakers of Proto-Malayo-Polynesian (PMP)-a language that could not have been spoken later than about 3000 B.c.-already possessed the outrigger canoe.<sup>2</sup> Typically, the Wörter und Sachen technique is concerned with vocabulary that refers to distinctive characteristics of the natural environment (the homeland problem) or to nonuniversal features of culture (culture history). Because culture tends to appropriate features of the material environment that have no cultural significance in themselves, however, the culture-historical value of the Wörter und Sachen technique is by no means limited to words whose original referents can be called "cultural." Anttila (1972:137) cites the well-known example of English pen < Middle French <i>penne</i> 'feather, wing, pen', and ultimately Latin <i>pinna</i>/<i>penna</i> 'feather, wing', a semantic change which even without documentary support could be taken as a fairly reliable indication that the modern pen in all its variant forms has developed from a feather quill prototype.<sup>3</sup> The purpose of this paper is to show that through the study of semantic change and opacity, reconstructed vocabulary of a seemingly neutral type can sometimes yield culture-historical insights of genuine value to the prehistorian.
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