tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72021507938691842892024-02-25T15:13:31.033-06:00PaleoglotAncient languages, cultures and civilizationsGlen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.comBlogger602125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-26601572943462327642014-07-18T20:42:00.000-05:002014-07-18T20:54:46.092-05:00ET Vs 3.7; TLE 736
Tn turce Vel Sveitus.
This was given by Vel Sveitu.
(figurine of a priest; Volsinii; 4th century BCE)Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-60372391549510534872014-07-13T20:01:00.001-05:002014-07-17T19:21:17.442-05:00ET Vs 4.8; TLE 900
Selvans Sanχune-ta cvera.
Silvanus of the Oath with votive.
(cippus; Volsinii; 3rd to 2nd century BCE)
Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-50993089448152612332014-07-04T19:30:00.000-05:002014-07-13T20:13:23.994-05:00CII 307; ET Vt G.1; TLE 405
natis
haruspex
(Etruscan gem showing a haruspex examining a liver; Volaterrae; 4th century BCE)Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-72615613595113523992014-06-29T17:45:00.001-05:002014-07-13T20:13:46.238-05:00The Pesaro bilingual inscription (ET Um 1.7; TLE 697)
Latin:
L. Cafatius., L. f., Ste.
Haruspex fulguriator.
Lars Cafatius, son of Lars, of the Stellatina.
Haruspex (and) augur of lightning.
Etruscan:
Cafates Lr., Lr.
Netśvis, trutnvt, frontac.
Larth Cafatie, (son of) Larth.
Haruspex, libator, (and) augur of lightning.
(Etruscan-Latin stone epitaph; Umbria; 1st century BCE)Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-28914550784425262662014-01-24T19:55:00.003-06:002014-01-24T19:55:53.483-06:00The history of the translation of Etruscan cvilI've been not only logging in my translations of each word into my Etruscan database but also the history of each word's translations by various authors. Sometimes there is little consensus in what a word means, sometimes there is unanimity across the board. I even record translations offered by Albanian-obsessed Zachary Mayani because even though I may feel he is of zero worth in Etruscan Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-68084125964540822802014-01-12T16:17:00.003-06:002014-01-26T14:27:31.033-06:00Boopis and Cvl Alp
In usual interpretations of the Piacenza Liver, the work of Martianus Capella is often consulted, attempting to explain one mystery with another. I continue to disagree with that method. I believe that we should look at the artifact itself long and hard, noting its symmetries and asymmetries. One would do better making appeals to ancient Near Eastern religions which are a bit more certain Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-39858475824583985762013-10-06T13:04:00.003-05:002013-10-06T13:04:58.849-05:00Gianni examines the character Umaele and other personages on a series of Etruscan mirrors
Gianni. The importance of being Umaele (2009)
"From the linguistic point of view, Etruscan mirrors have been defined as figured bilinguals, whereby the scene with its details illuminates the meaning of the inscriptions. In contrast, from the iconographic and iconological point of view, there is often no ready association because characters with names that we instantly recognise in the Greek Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-825342274806116142013-10-02T13:33:00.001-05:002013-10-02T13:34:13.377-05:00Examining the Etruscan goddess Nortia
There is a goddess of fate and stars named Nortia by Roman authors of which next to nothing is known save, that is, a few Roman accounts of time-keeping rituals using pegs or nails on the wall. Erika Simon makes an educated guess that the name used by the Etruscans themselves might have been *Nurtia, however such a name in Etruscan texts has never as yet been found. Even more absent is any Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-36441043718262782042013-03-24T08:00:00.000-05:002013-03-24T08:00:02.358-05:00Analytic Proto-Bantu?In 2007 Derek Nurse asked: Did the Proto-Bantu verb have a synthetic or an analytic structure? He came to the conclusion that it was originally analytic. Proto-Bantu is the originator of several central and south African languages including Swahili, Xhosa and Zulu.
Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-13586120209233356712013-03-10T08:00:00.001-05:002013-03-10T08:00:02.095-05:00The Minoan art and artifice
Mary Beard in Knossos: Fakes, Facts, and Mystery reminds us that human history may not just be written by the victors of war but also by a few modern archaeologists corrupted by the power of capitalist enterprise to ride the fast-track to academic praise.
Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-80245133207061068312013-02-24T16:39:00.000-06:002013-02-24T16:39:00.092-06:00Good morning & night good
At the WordReference forums someone inquires on Romanian grammar: Why "noapte bună"? The word order appears one way in bună dimineaţă 'good morning', bună ziuă 'good day', bună dupămasă 'good afternoon' and bună seară 'good evening', matching what we see in other Romance languages like French and Portuguese. Yet the order is reversed in noapte bună 'good night'! Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-59534488265232738532013-02-10T08:00:00.000-06:002013-02-10T08:00:01.612-06:00Why we outlasted the Neanderthal
On the Wall Street Journal website, author Chip Walter of Last Ape Standing describes what we know about the Neanderthal's day-to-day life and why Homo sapiens were better adapted to survive and thrive.
What he mentions about postnatal development in humans is food for thought. Remarking on human beings differing from other primates by our extensive brain development, we may Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-52375246352626322332013-01-29T19:01:00.001-06:002013-01-29T19:01:48.174-06:00The Sahelian kingdoms of Africa
The Sahelian kingdoms once stretched across grasslands (called the sahel) which bordered the interior side of the Sahara desert, gaining wealth from routes traveled by traders on camels and horseback. While bounded by the inhospitable desert to the north, Ashanti and Yoruba warriors well-adapted to life in dense forests were simultaneously effective obstacles to any Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-63596618887868197712013-01-28T08:00:00.000-06:002013-01-28T08:00:02.602-06:00The recent Sarteano inscription on an Etruscan plate
Details on a bucchero plate discovered last year are found under New inscription from Sarteano on Rex Wallace's blog. Many thanks for his clear photo of the text. Wallace has segmented the short, continuous-script text as m lariś riertu and opts to translate as "I (am) Laris Riertu" although, as he explains, the last name Riertu is unattested elsewhere.
Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-79849552826445410392013-01-20T12:00:00.000-06:002013-01-20T14:52:39.737-06:00Estara Alphaza and Phoenician influence in Etruria
The sequence estrei alφazei appears throughout an Etruscan document called the Liber Linteus. I take this to be marked in the locative case ending in -i (with a meaning like English 'by', 'with' or 'at'). I see in this an original exonym of a goddess *Estara Alφazai, a transparent byname of the pan-Semitic lady of fertility. We can compare *Estara to Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-19361208565778003942013-01-16T23:13:00.000-06:002013-01-16T23:13:16.905-06:00A naughty speculation on the word 'cannabis'
I'm still on a kick examining Pre-Greek terms. The topic of Greek substrate isn't complete without discussing the murky origins of the word κάνναβις 'hemp, marijuana'. There's still a certain prudishness about these topics in certain academic circles because of modern moral stances and deviant politics, however looking past the current times and exploring ancient perspectives Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-21705142047483582772012-12-30T19:50:00.000-06:002012-12-30T19:50:32.794-06:00Aegean coleslaw, anyone?After months of slacking off, I should probably get back to work and blog something. It's not as if I ever ran out of ideas. So today I want to talk about a package of vegetable terms that seem related but I believe may be misetymologized.
Let's focus on *kremus- 'onion', an unanalysable Proto-Indo-European root presumed to be a nominal derivative in *-us-, concocted to explain Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-45329770415079134262012-12-23T23:48:00.003-06:002012-12-23T23:49:57.528-06:00Happy 13th baktun
December 23 2012 is the start of the 13th baktun according to the Mayan Calendar (using 584285 as the correlation constant). Some may have gone by the other popular correlation constant of 584283 making it December 21 2012. Either way, everything went by without a hitch. Peachy! Congratulations to all who have survived this precious moment. Lol. If we assume that an age lasts 13 Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-68384019965858546672012-08-26T16:00:00.000-05:002012-08-27T03:44:20.246-05:00Etruscan future tense?Carrying from my previous post, I've been thinking about tense and the workings of Etruscan grammar. Generally in world languages, I notice a tendency for temporal concepts like past, present and future that we find in verbs to be expressed respectively by ablative, locative and lative markers taken from nouns.
For example, in French, one may hear the phrase "Je viens de..." to expressGlen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-4750543955866123542012-08-23T16:00:00.000-05:002012-08-23T16:00:01.173-05:00Finiteness, tense and other crazy things about Etruscan verbsLet's talk about the notion of a "finite verb" in Etruscan.
From what I understand thus far, Etruscan has two tenses: past and non-past (aka present-future). So given a verb am 'to be', the past tense is ame 'was/were' (-e for past tense) and the present-future tense is ama 'am/is/are' (-a for non-past). We can further elaborate on these verbs with additional aspectual markers like Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-23357132703143873252012-08-15T16:00:00.000-05:002012-08-19T12:20:50.441-05:00An excerpt from Liber Linteus chapter XIn the Liber Linteus, I identify a sentence in chapter 10: Ce-pen sulχva maθcva-c pruθseri. The grammar and vocabulary is pretty straight-forward and we have a typical SOV sentence pattern, the default word order in Etruscan and one of the most common word orders on our little planet.
The word cepen has been horribly mistranslated by several Etruscanists as "priest" due to an absurd and Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-48296284397848069902012-08-06T16:00:00.000-05:002012-08-06T16:00:04.442-05:00Narrowing down the meaning and etymology of acilIn my previous post, I've deviated away from the translation given by the Bonfantes of the Etruscan word acil as 'work, thing made' and have used the value of 'abundance' instead. Truth be told, I'm not confident with my own value but on the other hand I know that the value assigned by the Bonfantes doesn't jive with the evidence. Let me explain what I mean.
Assigning acil the value of&Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-48783397624889785332012-08-02T16:00:00.000-05:002012-08-02T16:00:01.339-05:00On the 18th of Acale
In the middle of chapter 6 of the Liber Linteus (aka "The Mummy text"), it reads: eslem . zaθrumiś . acale . tinś . in . śarle // luθti . raχ . ture . acil . caticaθ . luθ . celθim // χim . scuχie . acil . hupniś . painiem // anc . martiθ . sulal .
Lacking any clear translations of this passage from other Etruscanists and online contributers, I'm left to my own judgement calls based onGlen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-28614604947914603672012-07-29T16:00:00.000-05:002012-07-29T16:00:06.493-05:00Now she speaks MandarinSo I'm sitting at home, browsing the net for info as I always do and what pops on the telly but a commercial for Rosetta Stone language learning software. Towards the end of it, a spunky white woman declares in both Mandarin then English, "Now I speak Mandarin!"
I always get tickled by this sort of out-of-the-box iconoclasty towards cultural norms. I wish a lot more people were as adventurous.Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7202150793869184289.post-58332586081968243032012-07-28T16:00:00.000-05:002012-07-28T16:00:02.712-05:00Etruscan such and suchThere's a curious lexeme with an interesting inflection in the Liber Linteus (LL 6.xviii): caticaθ. Another similar form is found again at LL 7.xix but this time as cnticnθ. Are they related and if so how? What is the origin?
Contextually it appears that an English equivalent like this very (one) is a nice fit, or alternatively such. The word might then be compared to Glen Gordonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02440249042894225949noreply@blogger.com0