Cool stuff about Etruscan phonotactics

While everyone else is hohumming about how the Etruscan language is a big, unsolvable mystery, I'm more interested in finding out new information and learning more. You don't need a degree to extrapolate and develop a good theory. You just need a brain and hopefully the one you're born with because they don't hand them out during graduation ceremonies. So I shamelessly ponder on the Etruscan language myself, and after having made my own language database on my computer, I'm starting to see new patterns in how Etruscan words are shaped.

One pattern that I saw long ago was the "intrusive y". You can see this, for example, by comparing the word śa 'six' with śealχ 'sixty' (TLE 98: śealχls-c 'and of sixty'). Notice the vowel change here? The reason why a changes to e is not by random. The vowel e is often derived from the Old Etruscan diphthong ai. So when also comparing Late Etruscan śealχ with the Lemnian root sialχv- present on the Lemnos Stele (sialχveiś 'of sixty'), we may postulate earlier *śa-i-alχu, showing clearly an intrusive glide between the terminating vowel of the root and the initial vowel of the decadic ending. It appears to me that this intrusive y pops up any time two non-high vowels would otherwise clash in a derivative form and is probably related to the fact that words avoid initial /y-/ altogether in all Proto-Aegean languages, including Minoan^[1].

Then there's the nifty issue of initial consonant clusters in Etruscan. The language doesn't allow just any cluster to occur at the start of a word. Rather, the only legal initial clusters seem to be SR-, sSR- or sC-, where R is any of m, n, r , v or l, S is any stop, and C is any consonant in general. The words tmia 'temple' (PyrT 1.i), streteθ (LL 6.iii), and sren 'image' (TLE 399) are examples of the three possible types of word-onset clusters.

Just recently however, I noticed that the words in my database are showing me something else. It looks like Etruscan words have a resistence towards initial clusters with aspirated stops. So far, I've found no clusters of the SR- type with φ or χ even though there's nothing phonetically implausible about such clusters. Occasionally though, I have found the aspirated dental stop in just a few clusters (e.g. θresu in TLE 222). Here again though, it's rare which then makes me think that there's an underlying resistence to aspirated stops in Etruscan clusters. Just thought I'd share that with yo'll because I think that all these details might be useful to someone out there.


NOTES
^[1] That is to say, the symbol used for A in the Minoan Linear A writing system and the symbol used for YA were used interchangeably in word-initial position by scribes. This can be seen in the word or name YA-SA-SA-RA-ME inscribed on libation tables which is written also as A-SA-SA-RA-ME. See for example Interaction and Acculturation in the Mediterranean, edited by Best and de Vries (1980), p.160 (see link).

UPDATES
(April 3 2008) Just after posting this, I thought of another letter that occurs in the R slot, namely v /w/ (as in tva 'it shows'). So I changed "R is any of m, n, r or l" to "R is any of m, n, r , v or l".