New ideas
Innovations—mutant memes—require new names. If you’re copying the innovation from another culture, you’ll just take their word for it. But if it’s something developed within your culture, you’ll make up a word in your own language for it, generally by using some existing root in a new way.
That’s why it is significant that the words for wheel, wagon, thrill (the thing that lets draught animals pull the wagon), and axle are native Proto-Indo-European words, and that they are relatively late words—signifying that previously the words were not needed.
And as the Proto-Indo-Europeans, flush with the wealth achieved through superior technology (wheeled vehicles), spread across Eurasia and Europe, their language came with them and evolved—for example, to include words like "spoke" (of a wheel) that the Proto-Indo-Europeans apparently didn’t need.
And, as always when cultures meet and memes are exchanged, the word for the meme often goes along as part of the package. Thus (and this story is from TYD), as the Proto-Indo-European wave took over Greece and began its evolution into Greek (an Indo-European language), some words from the earlier inhabitants were retained—presumably for memes new to the PIE. Place names, for example, that end with –ssos or –nthos (Corinthos, Knossos, Parnassos). And, The Younger Daughter points out with some glee, the word for "bath" in Greek was not from the Proto-Indo-European language.
One imagines the scene: Two men, one standing by a huge wagon drawn by two oxen, one in the village square.
"Welcome, stranger. What an amazing contrivance! A ‘wagon,’ you said. I am.." Sudden fit of coughing and gasping and a little lurching, then, "There, that’s better. I think you’ll like that breeze in your face… I say, I can tell that you must have traveled quite a spell. I imagine you want to take a bath. Probably before dinner. Maybe even right now, it’s… What? Oh, you don’t know the word ‘bath.’ Aha. I think I see the source of the problem. Walk this way, I have something to show you that, in its own way, is as amazing as that ‘wagon’ thing."
