Perhaps we need an Etruscan "anti-dictionary"

"What's an 'anti-dictionary'?", you ask? It was a term I just devised today meaning "a dictionary not filled with real words of a language, but instead listing completely imaginary words that people have claimed that the said language contained over the centuries". You may ask, "How would that be useful at all??" and I would answer that normally it wouldn't be of much value but as I do my own investigation on the subject of the Etruscan language, I am constantly discovering one concocted word after another. Sometimes false versions of entire inscriptions have been dreamed up by authors with university degrees, despite the resources available to them to get informed.

It doesn't just happen once or twice either. Almost every inscription, no matter how legible, has been contorted by whim in a number of ways in order to justify one's hobbyhorse rhetoric about how the Etruscans are related to Greeks, Luwians, Albanians, Slavs, Ottoman Turks, Ukrainians, Basque, Chinese, fish-like extra-terrestrials from Sirius, etc. and I've already remarked on several examples regarding nonsense published from university-educated persons that fail their own institutions' standards of scholarship (read for example Selvans Canzate: a 'pure guess', TLE 900: Sancus, yet another Etruscan "mystery god" and More Published Errors on Etruscan). To say that these numerous and very different accounts of the same artifacts are merely "educated differences of opinion" is like trying to soothe a dying AIDS patient with a cough candy. The fun's over; time to get serious.

There's already a website online that is in effect almost an "anti-dictionary", namely Rick McCallister's Etruscan Glossary. McCallister didn't intend on making this an anti-dictionary of course, quite the opposite, but by merely collecting raw data regardless of trustworthiness without sifting the nonsense from the credible, the glossary succeeds at being total, irrational gobbleygook.

However, when thinking of the perfect anti-dictionary, I'm imagining something that would consciously pursue the task of identifying and exposing non-existent words that many readers may mistakingly believe exist because some bad author told them a shameless fib that they failed to verify with facts. I think this would be a great way to break the game of telephone that keeps this field down. So let me give a few examples of "anti-words" I've come across in this potential "anti-dictionary":

Losna: Not Etruscan whatsoever but a particularly infectious meme started with Dennis' account of the supposed Etruscan goddess in 1848. It's easy to debunk considering the "o". It's been published everywhere at this point that Etruscan doesn't have a vowel "o" at all nor does it use that letter since V (used to write the vowel "u") is regularly employed to transcribe Latin "o". Others thankfully see that losna is an Italic word for "moon", not Etruscan. Ignoring all historical and linguistic facts, the myth of an Etruscan *Losna as shown on a single mirror spread like wildfire across the internet by uninformed fanatics and new age practitioners. It's hard now to miss. It's even included in the Etruscan Glossary of Rick McCallister and the drivel finds its way onto Wikipedia, the low-IQ encyclopedia for those who don't realize that unsourced and long-ago disproven views cloaked as valuable information is a serious problem in society today. Sillier yet, it was already understood to be an Italic deity way back in the late 19th century (consult William Ricketts Cooper's words published in 1876: "Her figure is found on a mirror from Praeneste, which is erroneously supposed to be Etruscan.") but almost 150 years later, we still can't seem to absorb these simple facts.

lusni, luśni: Misread from TLE 646 (a.k.a. CIE 443 or ET Co 3.1) but published by Corssen and Dennis in the late 19th century which then gave loons fertile ammunition to link it to "moon" à la Latin luna (of course! what else?). It's now known to be the gentilicium Muśni with an "m" (see Rix, Etruskische Texte (1991), p.303 and note also Musenial in CIE 3953).

nakvani: A bizarre misreading of Larkienaś, a person's last name, in the inscription TLE 506 (or CIE 1136). Hans Lorenz gave this the meaning of "der Begrabne" in German; Arnaldo D'Aversa links it to naχva, naχve and naχś all claimed to mean "tomba"; Mario Buffa invented an Etruscan toponym based on it, *Sur Nakvani "venerando Sur", from Sura Naquane described with a flair of unmerited self-assurance.

Any Etruscan glosses made by classical authors are also assumed a priori to be 100% correct by far too many people, along with random claims about curious words or names being somehow Etruscan in origin based on a subtle mix of whim and desperation rather than firm proof (e.g. *φersuna for Latin persona, *capus for Greek gloss kapus 'hawk', etc.). There are many more of these "anti-words" but identifying all of them and the histories of these myths would in itself be a monumental task. All I can say is: Keep on your toes, scholars!


UPDATES
(Feb 6 08) I just found damningly conclusive proof now that Losna is indeed falsely identified as Etruscan as I asserted above. It turns out that a root may be reconstructed securely in Proto-Indo-European (PIE), namely *louksno- 'shiny' , based on cognates in Avestan raoxšna- 'shiny' and Old Prussian lauxnos 'stars' (see Puhvel, Hittite Etymological Dictionary (1984), p.154). As usual, Etruscologists are allergic to diligent research and my shameless skepticism of these 'experts' is once again entirely valid. Teehee!