As the diffusion of technology has brough new social forms [following white, brunner] with White plausibly connecting feudalism with the stirrup and Bloch positing the new plough (coulter, ploughshare, mouldboard) brought about the manorial system of agriculture, so does the passage of technology most often bring with it linguistic terminology. 1 "Important new evidence on othe origin of the heavy plough comes from philology. Plough terminology in the Teutonic, Celtic, and Raminc languages is singularly chaotic. But B. Bratanic(c with v on top) of the University of Zagreb has shown that twenty-six technical terms connected with the heavy plough and methods of ploughing with it (including he words ofr ways of laying out ridge and furrow) are found in all three of the great Slavic linguistic groups, the eastern, western and southern. This means that the heavy plough and its use for both strip cultivation and ridging were familiar to the unified Slavs before their separation in the later sixth century.2
Moreover, this entire vocabular is Slavic, except for the key-word plug
, or 'plough'. This last belongs to a mysterious group of p
-words (such as 'path' and 'penny') which are apprently neither Slavic, Teutonic, Celtic nor Romanic in origin.
3 "The expansion of Italian maritime cities in the Mediterranean detailed so far would not have been possible without parallel advances in the shipbuilding techniques and navigational arts of their fleets. Italian mariners incorporated and extended the knowledge and innovations of Byzantine and Muslim fleets, and to some extent those of the northern navies. This influence is attested through the Arabic and Greek origins of various terms connected with navigation."
"(the word 'galley' has Greek origins)"
Because it is coincidental, but not to be stressed in this work, this era also saw the first major blossoming of mechanical power for economic ends more sophisticated than grinding grain in world history, the flushing mill4
. And within 100 years the technology certainly had spread throughout western Europe. Whether its spread was limited by language, or perhaps the new wonder energized the traditionally backwards west, is not for me to say. Technologies also often spread within language areas, since they are much like ideas.5
