Finally, I decided to put out a simple file on Etruscan grammar. I've just focused on nouns and it's not that extensive but I can work on it and improve it as time goes on. My grammatical outline differs slightly from the usual, particularly where the case in -is is concerned, often called an ablative case ending, but which I've found to be a directive case signifying direction toward something.
Anyways, the file has been uploaded to the Lingua Files section under Etrusco-Lemnian Nouns. Cheers!
UPDATES
(28 May 2010) As per a later entry, the pdf labeled Etrusco-Lemnian Nouns has now been expanded to Etrusco-Lemnian Declension.
19 May 2010
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Thank you very much! It is actually a great help, because most Etruscan grammars (both those in books and online materials) simply do not deal with cases like the partitive, commitative or directive, because "they are not universally accepted among scholars". Indeed it is hard to imagine a language with just 4 declensional cases (and without pre- or postpositions in the same time). That is why I feel it more than acceptable that many more cases existed: they must have existed in order to make the language capable of expressing finely graded statements. I agree that some of the words used might have been simple postpositions (like '*-pi'), while the others fully-fledged declensional cases. It is hard to draw the border sometimes - but that does not matter, because suffixes were ultimately born of attached particles in most if not all the World's languages.
ReplyDeleteBayndor: "Indeed it is hard to imagine a language with just 4 declensional cases (and without pre- or postpositions in the same time)."
ReplyDeleteThere's certainly nothing odd about a language having only four cases per se (eg. German), but of course, a language nonetheless is supplied with either prepositions (eg. English to, from, etc.), postpositions (eg. Turkish içeri 'inside', karşı 'against') or some alternative such as verbal derivatives (eg. Mandarin zài '(to be) at'). Etruscan is no different and, as a typical SOV language, it prefers postpositions.
"I agree that some of the words used might have been simple postpositions (like '*-pi')"
There's no need for asterisk because pi is not hypothetical. It's attested in TLE 45 (Turan pi) and TLE 13 (mini pi).
"[...] suffixes were ultimately born of attached particles in most if not all the World's languages."
Correct. Etruscan is an agglutinative language however and so one sometimes finds more case endings attached to postpositions which are already attached to case endings! It gets fiercely complicated and I'm really starting to appreciate Etruscan's linguistic style more and more.