The holy goddess of sewers

It started with looking up North African terms for 'rainbow' in Berber and Arabic. I confirmed that one Arabic expression is similar to the hypothetical Etruscan expression *Tluscval arcam that might lie behind the aforementioned abbreviation tlusc arc inscribed on the Piacenza Liver where its religious significance might have something to do with a role as messenger between sky and earth. That expression is qaws al-māʔ 'bow of the water', spoken in the Maghreb. Another rainbow expression in Berber, 'bride of the jackal', led me to the Roman Virgo Caelestis, the Latin name given to the Carthaginian goddess of the sky. To the delight of my humour bone, this then led me straight to something I hadn't come across before: Cloācina, goddess of the sewers and of the Cloāca Maxima (ie. The Great Drain of Rome). Yes, the Romans had a goddess of sewers. It's very amusing but also a natural product of a polytheistic religion that maintains that all things great and small, glorious and foul, must have a deity governing it. Stinky as this tale is, something perverse within me needed to dig further.

The name of Cloācina immediately takes hold of my attention because it could be quite easily an Etruscan name. Many Etruscan names end in -na, including those of divine epithets (eg. Aracuna 'Of the hawks', a byname of the death goddess Vanth). In fact, the Cloāca Maxima herself was the ingenious invention of Etruscan engineers to efficiently take away much of the daily filth naturally produced by its inhabitants in the city. Etruscans were master architects and founders of Rome before the Latin-speaking population became dominant so it naturally makes me wonder if the name Cloācīna and the term cloāca 'sewer' could be hidden Etruscan lexical items.

Immediately when looking it up, one will find an ample number of etymologists connecting it with cluēre 'to cleanse, purify'. Perfectly sensible. But... Latin has two homophones here and the other meaning of this verb is  'to hear, be spoken of, be said'. This latter verb is without a shred of doubt traced back to Proto-Indo-European *ḱleu- but does the other verb truly go back to PIE  *ḱleuh₁-  as often claimed by Indoeuropeanists? Etymological dictionary of Latin and the other Italic languages by Michiel de Vaan lends doubt under the heading cloāca:

"Since an original sequence *klowV- would have yielded *clau- (at least, in pretonic
position), Vine 2006a: 2l7f. posits an adj. *kleuH-o- 'clear, clean' from which a
factitive pr. *kleuH-eh₂-ie/o- > *klewāje/o- > *klowā- could have been derived. This
verb might be preserved in the Servius gloss cloare, although its reliability is often
doubted. From *clowā-, the noun cloāca can then be explained. WH and Rix argue
that cluō may have been invented by Plinius to explain Cluācīna but it might also
derive from *cluwere < *klowere < *kleuH₁-e/o-. For the root, Derksen (fthc.) reconstructs *ḱlh₃-u-, whereas Rasmussen posits *ḱleh₁-u-. If one accepts such a root structure, the ablaut *kle/ou(H)- of Latin must represent a secondary full grade based on a zero grade *kluH₁- < *klHu-C-. The short vowel of Greek κλύζω remains unexplained under any account."

So given the limited cognate set (limited to Western IE languages only) and dubious attempts to derive these words using IE-based grammar, there seems to be room for another hypothesis from outside of Indo-European. Is it possible that Etruscan had a verb *cluva 'to cleanse, to purify' that led to an adjective *cluvaχ 'clean, pure'? Through *cluvaχ, we could obtain *Cluvacuna /ˈkluwəkʊˌna/ '(She) of the pure' leading to Latin Cloācīna. We'd also have the basis for Latin cloāca 'sewer', now to be understood as a loanword and nothing to do with Proto-Indo-European. The instance of cluce in the Liber Linteus could be translated as a perfective 'has purified' (< ? earlier *cluvace), a verb to be expected in a ritual text.

Relative pronouns in Etruscan

A small commentbox coalition developed recently against my Etruscan translation concerning the Cippus Perusinus such that ipa in ipa ama hen agrees in case with its antecedent, tezan 'cippus'. I remain unmoved. Rather than honest criticism, the claims made were boldly exploiting unreferenced half-truths and exaggerating the importance of minutiae while, as always, cloaked in complete anonymity. A bullshitter exposes himself when he approaches the grammar of one language by sole appeal to another unrelated one. Etruscan isn't Latin; apples and oranges. I appreciate the comical absurdity of the attempt though.

Back to linguistics, it's beneficial to explain why their "issues", or what I like to call, "turds", are inane so that no sensible reader could be confused by my judgement calls. The first turd was their imaginary "language universal" such that relative pronouns are always declined according to their role in the subordinate clause and never by their role in the antecedent. The second turd was the general ignorance they had regarding Etruscan's relative pronoun ipa (and about the language as a whole, for that matter).

Concerning these imaginary universal case-agreement rules

Speaking globally, the choice of a relative pronoun's case is *not* necessarily bound to the subordinate clause alone, despite the persistent shouting from this normally silent group of persons. For example, on the grammar of Old English, Gotti/Dossena/Dury, English Historical Linguistics 2006: Syntax and morphology, v.1 (2008), p.11 explains that a relative pronoun may share with its antecedent "features for number and gender, and, optionally, for case". An example is:

Ic wat witodlice ðæt ge secað ðone hælend ðone ðe on rode ahangen wæs.
"I know truly that you seek the Lord (ACC.), who (ACC.) was hung on the cross."

If a relative pronoun was only about its relative clause, we should expect "who" to be declined in the nominative since it's the patientive subject of the participle formation, "was hung". Classical Greek also throws a curve now and then,^[1] and same too for Arabic where the dual relative pronoun agrees with its antecedent in gender, number and *case*.^[2]

Regarding Ancient Ugaritic, Roger Woodard publishes in The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia (2008), p.31: "The relative pronoun agrees in gender and number with its antecedent; whether the case of the relative pronoun itself is decided by the case of the antecedent or by the function of the relative pronoun in its clause cannot be determined [...]" Even Woodard is unaware of this alleged "language universal" that I'm being harassed with.

There's no need to elaborate further. It's official: my commentbox hecklers are bored latchkey kids.


Etruscan relative pronouns (for real, this time)

If we're going to talk about Etruscan relative pronouns, let's talk about Etruscan relative pronouns. Not Latin ones, Greek ones or Esperanto ones. In Etruscan, there's no question that the relative pronoun is declined for case as are all known pronouns and demonstratives. In the Cippus Perusinus, ipa is certainly in the nominative case (matching corresponding nominatives ita 'that' and ica 'this') but the question is whether this pronoun's declined according to its role in the relative clause or its antecedent, tezan, which I give the value of 'cippus':

Sleleθ caru tezan fuśleri tesnś teiś Raśneś ipa ama hen.

I admit that this is tricky to assert based only on this (despite the fact that my translation is still grammatically valid and contextually sound) but if one is so certain that Etruscan relative pronouns somehow must behave like Latin ones, then I defy such narrow-minded armchair linguists to explain the following on Laris Pulena's sarcophagus (TLE 131):

Χim culsl leprnal pśl varχti cerine pul alumnaθ pul hermu huzrna-tre

Things aren't so simple. First off, we may wager that pśl is an unstressed type of pronoun because it's spelled without vowels just as postclitic demonstratives are (eg. cl 'of this', tś 'to that'). Second, this pronoun appears to be doubly marked which is normal for Etruscan and observed many times elsewhere. In fact, in a language like Etruscan proven to operate under Suffixaufnahme, in what way can we meaningfully avoid interpreting this sentence as a genitive case agreement between three consecutive elements that I've boldfaced in the above phrase (ie. culs-l leprna-l pś-l)? And if we can see this, then we can see that the role of the antecedent in Etruscan relative pronouns might actually be important.

For now, I've never ever seen a decent and complete translation of this artifact so we're in uncharted territory. However, here are some hints I can most securely offer: χi-m 'and next' and culsl 'of the gate'. Have fun pondering on that. As always, everyone is free to have opinions but may yours be only productive ones.


NOTES
^[1] Croy, A primer of Biblical Greek (1999), p.164 (see link) gives the following example:

ἀκούομεν τῶν λόγων ὤν ἡ θυγάτηρ σου λέγει
"We hear the words (GEN.PL.) which (GEN.PL.) your daughter speaks."

^[2] Ryding, A reference grammar of Modern Standard Arabic (2005), p.323 (see link):

li-l-zawj-ayni llað-ayni ya-ntazˤir-āni ħadaθ-an saʕīd-an
"for the couple (OBL.DL.) who (OBL.DL.) are awaiting a happy event"

Checkmate has me 'at a loss'

I have to give a plug to the blog Bradshaw of The Future who recently wrote about the origin of the word "checkmate" and then added further to this interesting etymological puzzle by writing a follow-up entry.

Excellent and thorough work done, congrats. I've been a chess buff since I was still in gradeschool which fortunately had its own chess club. I've been hooked by the intricate logic of the boundless game ever since. So I always had assumed that checkmate meant "the king is dead" and was from Arabic. I had read that the "mate" part was from Arabic mat 'dead', which ultimately comes from the Semitic root structure *[mwt]. The Semitic root in turn has an Afro-Asiatic cognate in Egyptian also as mwt (presumably pronounced *māwat, hence Sahidic Coptic mou). It all seemed airtight and my normally curious mind never revisited the issue again.

Well, it turns out that it may very well be from Persian and instead means 'the king is at a loss', not 'dead', as the blogauthor of Bradshaw of The Future goes to the effort of pointing out.