Picking at TLE 939 some more

I feel like revisiting artifact TLE 939 (aka ET Cr 0.4). There are a lot of different versions of the story on this and translations are hampered by irritating transcription disagreements and, alas, few clear photos available to the general public. I can only suspect for now the following tentative translation until I learn more about this object and the roots of some of the hapaxes involved:

Zusa tunina atiuθ arvasa aφanuva-θi, masuve-m
The cleansed wrapped body is lifted among the families, then before the tomb.

Maniχiur ala alχuvai, sera Turannuve.
The ancestors lie with the laid, and they remain with Turaniu.

In Elusisnial, θui uria-θi.
They are of the Elysium, united in bliss.

Litil-ta lipile-ka Turanuve.
The sacrifice and this libation is with Turaniu.

Ec mimari.
They shall remember.

Matesi, ara Turanuve Velusinase χeθai.
On behalf of the gathering, (he) is raised before Turaniu of Volsinii with fish.

Ara ina asi.
He is raised by them through burning.

Ikan ziχ akarai.
This text shall be done.

The translation is amenable to change. However, if I'm not mistaken, the text is detailing a series of fascinating Etruscan rites used toward someone's burial service. The sequence is expected: a burial procession, a presentation of holy offering, a cremation of deceased and offering, then the final entombment of the urn containing the ashes. Somewhere in all of that we also expect a burial banquet, a kind of "last supper" with the dear departed.

To tackle the phrase zusa tunina atiuθ, I first assume that zusa (if properly parsed) refers to the physical 'body' of the deceased. It's interesting then to note that the Latin word tunica has an unknown etymology but is thought to be Etruscan. I wonder. Is it from a form such as *tunaχ 'wrapping, cloth'? Assuming then a native underlying verb root tun- 'to wrap', tunina could reasonably be interpreted then as an adjective in -na conveying 'wrapped'. Analysis of atiuθ points to an intransitive participle of aθ which I've so far attributed a transitive meaning to: 'to clean'. To be grammatically consistent, I'll have to ammend slightly to 'to be clean'. The text in the Tabula Capuana gives the sequence ita eθ aθene which could mean "that herein was made clean." The verb arvasa should be a passive derivative in -va of ar 'to lift, to raise'. It all seems to fit together coherently, if I do say so myself.

The sequence elusisnial is hard to miss and its connection with the Elysium (Ἠλύσιον), the Greek conception of the afterlife, is rather tempting considering the other burial keywords of this text. This would suggest that Elusisna was the corresponding Etruscan term for their City of the Dead. Elusisnial is its type-II genitive form.

The pronoun form ina is also interesting and I've already noted ana from TLE 27. They must be oblique forms (ie. non-nomino-accusative forms) for the third person. The use of ina for human plural agents could mean, as I've predicted for a while, that third person pronouns have a quirk such that plural 'they' was conveyed by the same pronoun as the inanimate 'it'. This isn't too far from the situation in English where our three singular choices of 'he', 'she' and 'it' collapse to the undifferentiated plural 'they'. One would need only further contemplate the result of collapsing 'it' and 'they' together and one would understand the Etruscan situation as I've suggested it.

What I still don't understand though is how I'm supposed to interpret Turaniu. In the name we have the diminutive suffix -iu and it simply means "Little Turan". The name's use on one mirror to label a cupid-like deity described as an Etruscan version of the divine boy Eros doesn't help me understand the emergence of this deity in this context. However it makes me start thinking instead of the significance of the neighbouring Kore cult of the Greeks. Kore means 'little girl' or 'maiden' in Greek and is the byname of Persephone who, among other things, was the lady of the dead, wife of none other than Hades. It makes sense if Turaniu here is functioning as a deity of rebirth and the immortal soul. A child-like deity would fit the image of eternal youth.

The magic of literacy

As I read through Duane Smith's latest entry, Cuneiform writing and scribal values, I'm reminded once again that writing wasn't just a practical tool to store information for ancient people. It was something magical by a great many, and for most of our recorded history. Once upon a time, we saw magic in the mere act of representing spoken language in a visual form. (Or in the case of the Inca, the magic was tactile in the form of knotted strings called quipus.) The smallest word pun or special use of a symbol was an opportunity for awe and contemplation, regardless of the writing system used.

Then I think on one of my favourite scenes from Black Robe, demonstrating a dramatic culture clash between the Algonquin perspective and that of the European point-of-view of the priest. The French Catholic priest, referred to as a "black-robe" by the locals, has made it his mission to "educate the primitives" through the love of his Saviour. He takes for granted that writing in his world is an everyday thing, For him, writing is something good and, in the case of his bible, divinely blessed as well. To the Algonquin band journeying with him however, the priest's alien ideas are shocking to their traditional way of thinking and he comes to be seen as a harbinger of death, an otherly curse. The magic of his writing that he demonstrates to them is interpreted negatively as a sign that he's a demon using black magic.




This dramatizes well both the positive and negative reactions to this power to communicate, two halves of our human quest into the unknown country beyond the comforting territory of what we know, the reverence and the fear, the worlds of our angels and demons. Both holy writ and written curses well up from the same source, an infinite universe of imagination within, incapable of ever being conveyed in its purest totality, and only insufficiently so through our finite systems of language. In our modern internet culture, we still swing between awe and dread in regards to what kinds of information exchange are to be considered good and what are to be assigned to evil (ie. copyright issues, piracy, Wikileaks, etc.).

Devotions to an Etruscan deity in TLE 939

According to Helmut Rix's Etruskische Texte, an important resource that lists inscriptions on Etruscan artifacts, an inscription written on a vessel from Caere in the 7th century BCE labeled ET Cr 0.4 (aka TLE 939 in Testimoniae linguae Etruscae) is transliterated as follows:

zusatunina atiuθ: arvasa
aφanuva θi masuvem maniχiur:
ala alχuvaisera turannuve
inelusisnial θui uriaθi litilta
lipileka turanuve
ecmima-ṛịmatesi ara turanuve
velusinas eχeθai ara ina asi
ikan ziχ: akarai

It seems apparent to me that the continuous text as it's presented here demands more accurate parsing. Some of these words are just too long and are likely multiple words strung together. So I would suggest that it be parsed more like this:

zusa tunina atiuθ: arvasa
aφanuvaθi masuvem maniχiur:
ala alχuvai sera turannuve
in elusisnial θui uriaθi litilta
lipileka turanuve
ec mima-ṛị matesi ara turanuve
velusinase χeθai ara ina asi
ikan ziχ: akarai

Let's first approach this with what we know. This text is quite a few centuries older than the text of the Zagreb Mummy Text. This is Old Etruscan. The intent of the final sentence is rather apparent: Ikan ziχ akarai "This text shall be done". (We'd expect *Ecn ziχ acari in 1st-century Etruscan.) This is a commitment by the parties involved to respecting the gods by proper rite and it recalls the concluding sentence of the Cippus Perusinus: Iχ ca ceχa ziχuχe "Thus this rite has been written". Preceding this concluding sentence then, we expect a list of rites being performed to bless an event, most often being the passing of a loved one and their final journey to the underworld, but there are many other reasons for ritual blessings such as to honour certain deities during yearly celebrations, to solidify contracts between people, to implore the gods for aid, etc.

I find the thrice occurrence of turanuve interesting and it seems to be a locative form of Turaniu which is in turn the diminutive of the name Turan, the goddess of fertility. According to Larissa and Giuliano Bonfante, turnu on one mirror represents Eros, the child of Turan. The meaning of the name is thought to be read in that case as 'The dear (one of) Turan' rather than 'Dear Turan'. However I wonder whether in TLE 939 we're not dealing with Turan instead of the more minor deity Eros. The last occurrence of the name is suggestive of a specific epithet declined in the locative case: Turanuve Velusinase 'before Turan of Volsinii'. Volsinii is an ancient Etruscan city, modernday Bolsena. The word masuve-m refers to a burial (nb. mas 'to entomb, to inter').

Thoughts to think about next...

Alas, I have no methodically thought-out post for you all today. It's not as if I don't have thoughts to write about but it takes some time to structure ideas, find relevant links and get out nicely proved points. So I'll just simplify my life this week and jot out half-thought-out ideas. Some commenters out there might have unexpected perspectives to add on some of these things so it's constructive to share in whatever small way we can. Consider this "Glen's January 2012 leftovers", a big pile of leftover thoughts demanding my attention lately, loose threads that need to be tied.


Old Chinese phonology problems

Baxter-Sagart's Old Chinese uvular stops still irk me. I need to resolve that problem in my head. While I'm well aware of the reasons they use for proposing this, nothing can convince me that this reconstruction is sound. Oh sure, the phonemes may be properly identified in abstract terms at least, but these sounds are certainly not mapped properly to real-world phonetics and this is a flaw that needs to be fixed. When I see their sign for a labialized, aspirated, pharyngealized uvular stop, my mind keeps screaming "Bullocks!" The unnecessary complexity of some of their phonemes is beyond sanity. Yet what creates a problem is that they have some interesting evidence for reconstructing the uvular stops in the first place, based on an aspirated/plain/voiced alternation in some roots, the same as already established for pre-existing plosives. Thus Baxter and Sagart reconstruct *q/*qʰ/*ɢ even though every fiber of my being reviles this suspiciously rare series.


Mysteries of the Piacenza Liver

My eyes are focused on the "celestial" region of the interior portion. My previous analysis has been that tlusc arc should be reconstructed as *Tluschval Arcam 'Bow of Tluschva (Seas)', hence the rainbow as messenger of the gods (like Greek Iris). Going with this and my prior identification of the eight gods seated in the shadow of the prominent "celestial peak" as male-female pairs of the four winds, I wonder more about the significance of this structure and the significance of each character in the pantheon. The concept of such a rainbow deity coupled with the wind gods reminds me of Greek myth regarding the rainbow goddess Iris and her sisters, the Harpies. A connection? Are Harpies just wind gods in the end? What is the nature of the pairs I observe among the wind gods? Catha (Earth) and Fufluns (Hades) seem to represent the west, the direction of the setting sun as it sets into the underworld. Tins Thneth (Thundering Tinia) and Thufaltha (Truth) then should represent east (the rising sun). This leaves Tins Thufal (Tinia of Oath) and Lasa (presumably like Venus) in the south and Lethams (Rivers) and Tul(??) in the north. But then perhaps I've paired them improperly. What I need is an analogy with surrounding religious beliefs of that period with this same motif.

I also need to find an analogy to the six infernal gods seated around in a wheel pattern on the opposite side of the liver. Is this an omphalos in the center of it? How should all these things be tied together conceptually? What are the analogical concepts behind these interesting representations of the cosmos?


Phonation, root and tone in Pre-Indo-European

I had a flashback of some unresolved business between Phoenix and I regarding the reasons for why known Indo-European phonotactic rules in a monosyllabic root show us that only voiceless stops can co-exist, or voiced breathy stops can, but not both types at once. Curiously, the voiced plain (ie. creaky voiced stops in the revised phonology) can coexist with either voiceless stops or voiced breathy stops just fine. There are even apparent alternations between voiced and unvoiced variants of a same underlying root. Does this indicate "phonation harmony" across a syllable? Or tone? How can it properly fit in my model of Old and Mid IE? I haven't come up with firm answers yet but then again, I haven't devoted enough time on it.

Those who clutch on to the past have no future

"You can't rehabilitate shoehorn freaks like GG," blurts Douglas Kilday about me on Cybalist, a Yahoogroups forum originally devoted to Indo-European linguistics before devolving into a depraved gathering of angry lunatics hurling invectives to malign intelligent debate. And to emphasize just how depraved many of these sorts are online, this remark apparently arose simply because of a perfectly valid reference I cited a whole ten years ago and which, to boot, I no longer even believe. I've moved on and evolved considerably since 2001, unlike some apparently. However I've discovered that this is part of Kilday's larger campaign of trolling to slander any online contributors that threaten his little basement-dwelling life.^[1]

Kilday incites further: "Anyone familiar with the Etr. corpus will reject Gordon's /n/-genitive nonsense." Funny enough, the nonsense was published by Giuliano and Larissa Bonfante in 1983. It can't be "my" nonsense because I was all of 7 years old at the time! Indeed he may as well beat up a child to justify his drama-addiction because on page 70 of The Etruscan language: An introduction, it was verily alleged the following:

"There is also an archaic genitive in -n (-an, -un): so lautn: gen. lautun or lautn; puia: gen. puian."

Of course now I know that it's fabricated poppycock but that's a part of the learning process that some insecure people want to pretend they're beyond - that is, the process of trying something, getting it wrong, admitting it to oneself, and adapting accordingly. Some people get stuck at the first stage and never do a thing out of a crushing fear of failure. I suspect this is Kilday's more genuine issue.

There is no word *puian in Etruscan as we can now confirm online in Helmut Rix's Etruskische Texte. The closest form listed is puiam but this is composed of nomino-accusative puia plus phrasal conjunctive -m. It's one of several booboos they've published which give me the impression that the Bonfantes hadn't boned up on the linguistics side of their field before rushing to publish on it. I trust that in later versions of that book the claim of a genitive **-n in Etruscan was omitted, however little else had been updated after almost 20 years between the first and second editions. Their mistake is exacerbated by the fact that a published book is expected to be thoroughly thought-through before being printed and it can remain on library shelves for a very long time to misinform future readers, even several decades later.

I bring up this quote from the Bonfantes though because in a strange way it's comforting to know that even respected specialists can be fallible. It's comforting not through petty spite but because it reminds us that there's still so much knowledge for every one of us to discover and share with others openly. Once we get past our egos, that is.


NOTES
^[1] On Nostratic-L, Kilday concocted the claim, "it is quite clear that thesane cannot be a case-form of thesan," tripping over himself to provoke others with pompous pet theories and twisted strawman arguments despite Steinbauer and Pallottino maintaining exactly what he rejects. He forcibly mangles so much here that I really doubt his views are honest. Tellingly he cites no relevant references regarding his theory on thesan as a verb nor proffers a decent rationale in his favour. If it quacks like a duck...

Looking into the eyes of the Iceman

Remember Ötzi the Iceman? He was that mummified man found back in 1991, ice-encased in the Alps somewhere around the border of Austria and Italy, having died some 5300 years ago at the age of approximately 45. Above is a reconstruction of his face.

I didn't know this until now but it turns out that not only can scientists figure out what supper he ate last, but they can even be reasonably certain of his eye colour thanks to genome analysis! They were brown, by the way. DNA analysis also reveals he had Lyme disease, was at risk of atherosclerosis, and of Ibero-Sardinian descent. Very fascinating stuff!

Sadly, genetics won't tell us what language he spoke but we can make some educated guesses nonetheless. Given the region, he might have spoken some Celtic or Italic dialect. On the other hand, could he have spoken Paleo-Sardinian or some other non-Indo-European language instead? We can never be sure; that's a possible option too. In case anyone is wondering though, given the millennium he died in, one thing is sure: he didn't speak an Etrusco-Rhaetic language since that population hadn't yet settled in Italy.

More information is found in this link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41782798/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/iceman-looks-tired-hes-years-old/

Theft is big business

BBC News informs us of the frustratingly inevitable plundering that occurred in yet another country in arms: Libya's historic treasures survive the revolution.

One may start suspecting a regular, enduring theme of events given Egypt's looting under the watch of Zahi Hawass (who was unsettlingly connected with the Mubarak regime at home, mind you) and Iraq's looting of Babylonian artifacts during the Iraq war. Regardless of why it keeps occurring lately, the world loses one more piece of its soul as we stand by and simply allow our collective history to be sold for a cheap buck.

See here!

After parsing into sentences and adding punctuation, TLE 170, the inscription devoted to Arnth Alethnas who is described as a 43-year-old leaving behind two sons, reads in Etruscan as follows:

Arnθ Aleθnas, Ar. clan, ril XXXXIII.
Ei-tva tamera śarvenas.
Clenar zal arce acnanasa.
Zilc marunuχva tenθas eθl matu manime-ri.

In the inscription, eitva is written without spaces however we've seen tva elswhere in the inscription that starts Eca sren tva (TLE 399) already translated by the Bonfantes as "This image shows [...]". Ei is abundantly attested too and means "here".

I notice that ei-tva is strangely similar to a French expression I'm familiar with: voici. Voici is composed of vois "(you) see; see!" and ci "here". According to my grammatical model of Etruscan, tva is the present-future form of *tau "to see". The sentence may be translated as "Here (ei) [we] see (tva) an urn (tamera) for cremation (śarvenas)." I find it difficult to be sure of the last word of the sentence since it's attested only once in Etruscan, although Lemnian śerunai, declined in the locative case on the Lemnos Stele, is a tempting match.

Haider's transcription of the Minoan medicinal text

Eureka! I've finally nabbed a detailed photo of the previously mentioned Minoan spell text. With all the silly errors I discovered being committed by Etruscologists alone, I suspected that a photo might reveal similar errors in the transcription of this text too. Sure enough, I'm reminded that many have a lazy eye.

Our Minoan text is written on lines 6 and 7 from right to left (see picture below).

I can see quite clearly now that in Minoan deities in an Egyptian medical text (2001), published in Aegaeum 22, Peter Haider's transcription is dreadfully loose. One word that begins sȝ-b-w-j-ȝ-jj-... is demonstrably inaccurate. The above text (upper left corner specifically) shows that there's an extra symbol between the b (foot) and the w (coil). Why and how was this overlooked?

It goes on. Haider's alleged god name Razija or Razaja is concocted out of the seventh line which shows only r-...-ȝ-y^DEITY. The intervening gap could conceivably be anything but the author indulges in wishful thinking to connect with some Linear A fragment showing RA₂-TI. Any gain from even bothering to associate these two things is hopelessly unproductive in my view. I'm also having trouble mapping his alleged *humekatu to the correlating portion in the picture, but then again my hieratic could be rusty.

And why would the Minoan text be broken up here by an interloping Egyptian phrase *pa wūra 'the great' (which he transcribes as pȝ-ȝ wr). Something is surely wrong with the overall handling of this text but it appears this will be a long-term ball of yarn for me to unravel.


UPDATES
(27 Sep 2011) I've deleted my confused/confusing statement: "A sure error however is in the reading of Ameja itself where Haider reads a trailing eagle glyph (the final ȝ in his ˀa-m-ˁ-j-ȝ) where it's visibly a different glyph, reused in fact on the next line in case there's any doubt of its true shape." This is unfair of me considering that I misread the sparrow (representing wr) as an owl (representing m), thereby assuming the sequence that Haider reads as Ameya starts sooner. Even still, I'm completely at a loss as to how he obtained Ameya out of this sequence because then the "m" is where a gap lies. Still problematic and confusing.

Tidings from Arzawa

Written by J. David Hawkins, The Arzawan letters in perspective (2009) covers some interesting facts concerning the history of the region of Arzawa such as the Amarna letters recording correspondences between the ruler of Arzawa, King Tarhundaradu, and the concurrent Egyptian king referred to as Nimuwaria (ie. Egyptian *Nib-Muˀˁat-Rīˁa = Amenhotep III). It's frustrating that more isn't known about this region and time period but the article is a good read for those interested.

There's Latin acila and then there's Etruscan acila

I received a comment that I felt was just best to delete, not because it was at all offensive but because it was full of inaccurate, half-remembered facts. It's time-consuming to try and piece together someone else's "thought mess" and even more time-consuming to explain away all that isn't even true. One rule is definite on my blog: No half-remembered facts. If you can use your fingers to type a comment, you can certainly use your fingers to google beforehand.

However, if I were to guess at one thing the commenter was "half-remembering", it was probably what was published on page 205 in The Etruscan Language by Larissa and Giuliano Bonfante and I think this merits close attention:

"One mirror shows snenath tur(a)ns; perhaps snenath means 'maidservant or companion': compare acila = ancilla, 'handmaiden', on a Praenestine mirror."

I would label this "a falsehood waiting to happen" because the above text could be misinterpreted very easily by many readers, leading to a flat-out falsehood. The potential error is to read into this that acila is an Etruscan equivalent of Latin ancilla. The Praenestine mirror in question is explained in the Corpus speculorum Etruscorum showing only an *Old Latin* inscription with acila on it. It's a *Latin* word, not Etruscan, yet the Bonfantes weren't quite clear here about the nature of their comparison. (And mind you, this is in the "revised" edition published in 2002 which strongly makes me wonder how things get labeled "revised" if there are so few updates in it.) Their comparison was instead meant to link the semantic value of Etruscan snenath with Latin acila ~ ancilla.

On the other hand, to make it more confusing, there's also an identical word in Etruscan in ET Ve 6.3, the only instance that Helmut Rix lists in that language. Yet in Etruscan, acila is not a feminine noun at all (since there are none) and it's instead the commitative case of acil, the latter nomino-accusative form being amply attested. In fact, the Bonfantes had already translated acil as 'work, thing made'.

So let that be a poignant caveat: Be careful not to confuse Etruscan with Latin by misreading English.

Pit worship and common Cypro-Minoan rites

Albert Grenier in The Roman spirit in religion, thought, and art (1926) described this important type of Etrusco-Roman ritual space quite succinctly^[1]:

"The mundus is really a mouth of hell, a way of communication between the upper earth, the abode of the living, and the subterranean world, the dwelling of the dead."

As I said before, chapter 12 of the Liber Linteus shows a case alternation between muθ hilarθ une (with locative un-e) and muθ hilarθ una (with commitative un-a). Cross-correlating the context of each of these words with other Etruscan inscriptions, I read "The mundus (muθ) is enclosed (hilarθ) with libation (une/una)." The slight variation in case of the last word must nonetheless convey the same thing, much like the creative case choices seen in the main religious formula of the Liber Linteus that likewise suggest only nuanced semantic differences if any despite different case endings. The phrase mut-ti ceśasi in LL 10 refers then to depositing (ceśasi) a holy offering 'in the pit' (mut-ti).

Additionally, considering that Indo-Europeanists haven't identified a native source for Latin mundus,^[2] it may very well be loaned from Etruscan muθ. Afterall, a large portion of Roman religious rites has already been attributed to the Etruscans before them whose traditions are simultaneously linked to similar rites like those of the influential Hittites of yore.^[3] This further contributes to the plausibility of interpreting muθ as a ritual pit.

Given the existence of this important Etruscan word, and charging forward with my previous identification of a Minoan accusative-declined noun phrase on libation table KN Za 10, tan muti Asásaramana 'the pit of Asasarama' (as per John Younger's transliteration), a common Proto-Aegean word *muti meaning 'pit, hole' is a natural sequitur. The reduction of final vowel and concommitant aspiration of plosive in Etruscan is already explained by Cyprian Syncope.

Finally there's the matter of what kind of goddess Asásarama would have represented to the Minoans. I get the impression of an archetypal fertility and earth goddess paralleling Isis and Ashtarte. If we follow the recurring themes of the religions hugging the eastern Mediterranean during the 2nd mill. BCE, this would lead me to suspect that she was also the wife of a local god of storm and/or underworld, like Egyptian Osiris or Hattic Wurun-Katte. If a fertile earth goddess, the link between Asásarama and a word 'pit', already noted as a chthonian symbolism in Hittite rites, is all the more promising.

I plan on elaborating more on the nature of Asásarama and other possible intercultural connections in a future post.

Translating KN Za 10

This is the post where I now willingly put myself in the bullets. This is something I owe after expressing my critique of Bayndor's recent post on the Minoan libation table known as KN Za 10.

Which transliteration is right?

As long as the ivory tower makes it difficult for the general public to access artifact photos, we're left to the mercy of various scholars with greater access and biased agendas. With no way to rationally judge what's correct for ourselves, we can do little but defer to the competence of, say, the contributors of GORILA 4 and of John Younger who present the opening of the inscription as TA-NU-MU-TI. Alternative readings co-exist such as TA-NU-A-TI, motivated by idle Semitic comparisons, and TA-NU-TA2-TI, equally based on subjective expectations.

Translating Minoan based on a Proto-Aegean model

I continue to be encouraged by a historically guided comparison of Minoan to Etruscan, not only because of the shared vocabulary but also parallels in grammatical structure. The comparisons also yield contextually sound phrases further guiding my inquiries. Thus for KN Za 10, I would like to offer my following attempt:

KN Za 10
• TA-NU-MU-TI • YA-SA-SA-RA-MA-NA • DA-WA-SI • DU-WA-TO • I-YA •
Tan muti Asásaramana ṭausi. Ṭawáto iya.
The pit of Asásarama is filled(?). It is filled(?) here.

First, on the lexical level, many terms here directly relate to Etruscan vocabulary. The first word tan (TA-NU) is identical to the Etruscan accusative distal demonstrative. Due to Cyprian Syncope, the Etruscan equivalents can be regularly predicted so that Minoan iya contracts to Etruscan ei like clockwork and Minoan muti links with Etruscan muθ (see LL 12.iii: muθ hilarθ une & LL 12.v: muθ hilarθ una = '[the] mundus [is] enclosed with libation.'). Although I find no Etruscan equivalent for a verb like ṭausi, we might deduce that a meaning of 'offering to', 'filling' or 'pouring to' is a reasonable approximation of the intended meaning of the inscription.

The grammar too is parallel to Etruscan, demonstrating the same SOV word order that I've previously sussed out from the common Libation Formula: Asásarame una kanasi 'Before Asásarama a libation is brought.' (cf. Etruscan un 'libation' and cen 'to bear'). Note how the demonstrative tan signals the accusative object muti by means of its specific inflection. By comparison with Etruscan, we may predict nominative *ta. Minoan verbs, often in -SI or -TE, trail both the subject and object, as here and also in Etruscan sentences. This inscription suggests a new verb stem to analyse, *ṭau, whose Etruscan equivalent would be *zau. (I have yet to ponder a relationship with the word zavena which I've so far translated as 'kantharos' in my Etruscan database.) It's possible that an apparent intransitive participle ṭawáto (cf. Etruscan intransitive participle -θ) reflects a separate verb stem or something else altogether since the introductory accusative noun phrase shows that ṭausi must logically be transitive. For ṭausi, we would expect a transitive participle form, *ṭawau (cf. Etruscan transitive participle -u), paralleling ṭinau in HT 16 (= Etruscan zinu 'formed, fashioned').

The phrase also fits context since what more do we expect from the inscription other than it describe the ritual purpose of the object it marks and to whom it was dedicated? And the notion that a same term for a ritual pit works in both Etruscan and Minoan is exciting but also historically plausible considering that it's generally accepted that Etruscans have brought several common traditions from Asia Minor to Italy. On the Minoan libation table, there are indeed pits for the ritual pouring of libation. The pits serve in a sense like the physical mouths of the gods.

Eyeballing Minoanists and the value of A-SA-SA-RA-ME

Minoanist Leonard Palmer once wrote, “[...] for in questions of genetic relationship the linguist rightly attaches small importance to common elements of vocabulary. Decisive are resemblances of morphological procedures, for these are less readily borrowed.”^[1]

Eyeballing is for the bored and desperate

Rational people deal in facts and probabilities, not in mere possibilities and assumptions. If one's translations depend fundamentally on subjective similarities of words between languages, then one's contribution to the field of paleolinguistics is as useful as toxic sludge.

The eyeballing method, if it can be dignified as a 'method' at all, relies primarily on individual perceptions about phonetic similarity and difference. Since subjectivity is in the eye of the beholder, different individuals will reach different conclusions about the same data according to this strategy, making it disordered and unhelpful. It's best to become familiar with this shameless tactic so as to shun it whenever it surfaces in someone's work.

Internal analysis first

A widely applicable statistic known as Zipf's Law adds to what we should already be able to deduce by experienced linguistic intuition. In any given language, the most frequent words tend to be the shortest. Conversely, less frequent words tend to be longer. Afterall, how often do words like osteochondrodysplasia or spatiotemporal pop up in everyday conversation? This relates to the efficiency of information exchange.

The sheer length of Minoan A-SA-SA-RA-ME and its derivatives also hints that it most likely belongs to a core word class, such as a noun or verb. We can see that a five-syllable term is above the average length of attested Minoan vocabulary which implies that, with all things being equal, its typical frequency in random text or conversation should have been comparatively infrequent. Yet to the contrary, its unexpected ubiquity among libation table inscriptions demonstrates in itself a strong link between its genuine semantic value and its evident religious context. If one agrees that the analyzable suffix -NA belongs specifically to nominal morphology, then since our term is found with this very suffix (KN Za 10: YA-SA-SA-RA-MA-NA), it must likewise be nominal. Hence we can make an informed guess that it's likeliest a name or common noun relevant to Minoan religion.

These rational considerations alone then compel us towards the optimal conclusion that the term conveys the name or title of a deity to which these libations must have been dedicated. Palmer's original comparison to a title for a neighbouring Anatolian goddess (or goddesses) merely supplements the strong deductive foundation of this avenue of investigation. So this identification with the divine can't be so easily downplayed as the kind of immature eyeballing method that sensible linguists work hard to avoid. This view has something richer going for it.

Minoan Asasarame is not a deity??

The transliteration of an inscription on a libation table from the House of the Frescoes (KN Za 10) is written out as ]-TA-NU-MU-TI • YA-SA-SA-RA-MA-NA • DA-WA-[•]-DU-WA-TO • I-YA[ by John Younger to which Bayndor (Andras Zeke) of Minoan Language Blog has plausibly revised with DA-WA-SI. Shedding the ugly brackets, I would thus reconstruct the inscription in full as:

• TA-NU-MU-TI • YA-SA-SA-RA-MA-NA • DA-WA-SI • DU-WA-TO • I-YA •

Bayndor's Minoan translation turns "bloody"

In his latest entry Those "bloody" Minoans..., Bayndor commits a number of false deductions towards his favoured value of YA-SA-SA-RA-MA-NA and I'm left disappointed by how he rationalizes this. The status quo maintains that Asasarama refers to a goddess figure (or figures) and despite any perceived difficulties in the comparison with Anatolian epithets, it still fits the context best. It's comparison with Isḫassaras-mis (see The Song of Ullikummi), with Mycenaean Potniya, with 'My Lady' equivalents in Asia Minor (cf. Kubaba, Cybele, Asherah, Ashtarte, Ishtar, etc.), and Egyptian ones (cf. Hathor, Isis) only adds to its historical plausibility. So I expect that any credible objection to all of this must be next to flawless.

To be brief, Bayndor's alternative translation based on Luwian asḫarmis 'sacrifice' is shockingly incoherent for someone who spends much of his time studying Minoan. The Luwian sequence /-sx-/ can't possibly explain reduplicated -SA-SA- in any meaningful way. This reduplication is so consistent in Linear A that it's absurd to avoid interpreting it as anything other than underlying -sasa-, not *-ssa- or *-sa-. As such, Bayndor has no leeway here. I won't dwell further on something so easily falsifiable.



Asasarama is *not* Minoan

Given the formulation of the original hypothesis, Bayndor errs some more when he states: "Isḫassara- is a compound stem, made up from isḫa- = 'lord' and the feminizing suffix -sara-, thus meaning 'lady'. None of its parts have a particularly good Indo-European etymology." Yet the source of -sara- is already commonly known to be from Proto-Indo-European *-s(o)r-, a suffix present also in Celtic and Indo-Iranian! Therefore Asasarama *can only be* from an Anatolian Indo-European language like Hittite. Even Judith Weingarten, who we may also assume studies Minoan rather extensively, falls into the same false reasoning in her comment further below: "So, I'll stick with Isḫa-ssara as the most likely parallel, also because it seems non-Indo-European in origin." Sigh.



There's a difference between the origins of isḫa- and of isḫassara-

As I said above, isḫassara- 'lady' is a transparently Anatolian formation so any talk of its possible Minoan origins is off to left field. Nonetheless it's true that the *root* of this Hittite word, isḫa- 'lord', may very likely come from Hattic asḫaf 'lord, god' (= asḫap, asḫaw) as per Jaan Puhvel in his Hittite dictionary. This particular non-IE etymology can have little to do with the source of Minoan Asasarama though and we must endeavor to keep these irrelevant side-facts separated in intelligent discussion on the matter.

On the other hand, these facts about the Hittite root suggest a stress accent on its second syllable. Thus Hattic asḫáf /əs'xaɸ/ would be lent to Hittite nominative isḫás /ɪs'xas/, then extended by the IE feminine suffix to isḫássaras, in turn used to form an epithet which in the vocative case becomes Isḫássara-Mi /ɪs'xassara-mɪ/ 'O My Lady'. If anything, we may best trace underlying Minoan Asásarama /ə'sasaramə/ from this foreign vocative. Searching for a Luwian equivalent to explain initial a- becomes unnecessary.

From this, we have the Minoan locative case form Asásaram-e and the qualifier Asásarama-na 'pertaining to Asasarama'. To respond to Bayndor's objections regarding the nature of the distinctive Aegean suffix -na, I maintain that the semantic distinction between a true genitive form and a qualifier is rather moot. We must note that Anatolian languages too had gone so far as to systematically replace their inherited Indo-European genitive case forms with adjectival formations. Finally, the same case and derivational endings I theorize for Minoan are amply attested in Etruscan with precisely the same usage, lending further weight to my interpretation of the term.

I'll speak more later on the reasoning behind a full translation of KN Za 10 I have cooking in my wok right now.

Praisos #2

I was reading the latest post from Minoan Language Blog entitled Place-names on Cretan sealstones - A key to the decipherment of Minoan hieroglyphs? where in re of the artifact Praisos #2 the author observes: "Unfortunately there is no word separation; yet - if we follow van Effenterre's considerations - we can be almost sure that the word *inai was separate." This is a sound conclusion I can agree with given the likely division between two consecutive iotas. (For those unfamiliar with this artifact, please take a gaze Ray Brown's Eteocretan Language Pages from which I've borrowed the pictures below.)

A lack of word separation can be a source of headache for the would-be decipherer but it's common in ancient texts like this one. What could help is trying to deduce what are the likeliest rules of syllable structure and grammar this language might have had. For me, since I've strongly felt over the years that Eteocretan is related to Minoan and Etruscan, I'm guided by a generalized "Proto-Aegean" model of grammar and syllable structure. So let me explain what that is and how it leads me to separating the words as I do below.


Features of a common Proto-Aegean language family

As I've said before, I define a hypothetical ancestor of Minoan, Etruscan, Lemnian, Rhaetic, Eteocretan and Eteocypriot which I call Proto-Aegean. It would have been a fairly "syllabic" language (ie. no consonant clusters) with a mild stress accent lying by default on the initial syllable, although occasionally on the second. Judging by Etruscan alone, internal reconstruction affirms this conclusion about stress as it nicely explains the eventual development of initial clusters in Etruscan words that must have once had stress on the second syllable. I maintain there were no long vowels in its simple 5-vowel, V-shaped system consisting of *a, *e, *i, *o, and *u. Stops had no voice contrast and only a plain/aspirated distinction (ie. plain *t versus aspirated *tʰ). It had a default SOV word order.

Internal reconstruction also strongly suggests a Pre-Etruscan stage with the loss of word-final vowels (eg. Etruscan avil 'year' < *awilu). In Etrusco-Lemnian languages, there is an odd overabundance of word-final aspirated stops but this aspiration is explainable as a residue of the "whispered" word-final schwas as they disappeared beside word-medial plosives, eg. *ḳota 'four' > Etruscan huθ /hutʰ/. I also deduce that Proto-Aegean had certain grammatical features such as two tenses (unmarked present-future tense & a simple past in *-i) preceded optionally by modal markers like perfective *-ka (hence the perfective past *-ka-i becomes Etruscan -ce).


Enough! Let's parse and interpret!

So, long story short, based on considerations like the above, this is what I can currently pick out from this artifact:

[...]ona  desieme  tepimits  φa[...]
[...]do--iarala  φraisoi  inai[...]
[...]  restnm  tor  sar  doφ  sano
[...]satois  steφ  siatiun[...]
[...]anime  stepal  une  utat
[...]  sano  moselos  φraisona
[...]tsa  adoφ  tena
[...]ma  prainai  reri[...]
[...]irei  rerei  e[...]
[...]n   rirano[...]
[...]askes[...]
[...]it[...]

The most certain word or word stem repeated in this document by far is φraiso, the city of Praisos from where this artifact derives. Based on Etruscan vocabulary and grammar, I offer the following possible connections that I can perceive:

desieme 'with sacrifice' (= Etr tesiame [PyrT 1.x])
φraisoi 'in Praisos' (= Etr -i [locative])
φraisona 'Praisian, of Praisos' (= Etr -na  [pertinentive])
restn-m 'then wine lees' (= Etr restm-c 'and lees' [TCort A.ii])
tor 'to give' (= Etr tur [LL 11.iv])
doφ 'oath' (= Etr θuφ)
sar 'ten' (= Etr śar [TCort ii])
utat '(it is) served, (it is) delivered' (= Etr uθ 'to deliver' [LL 10.xiii])
une 'with libation' (= Etr une [LL 8.xvii])
tena '(they) present, (they) offer' (= Etr tena [CPer B.ii])

If my assigned values are even half on-track, it suggests that the topic of this artifact involves much the same as we might find on Etruscan stelae - a list of performed rites (presumably involving wine and lees, libations, oaths and animal sacrifice) performed in Praisos as a religious commemoration of a person, deity and/or event.


UPDATES
(2011 June 24) On Bayndor's advice, I corrected a typo that I'd copied and pasted from Ray Brown's website: *desime should be desieme and *tora should be tor. I've also changed the Etruscan comparandum for tor to reflect the newly apparent infinitive (ie. -a marks the present-future tense and an unmarked form represents an infinitive which has a meaning of 'to X' or 'X-ing' when translating into English).

Let us try to be on our guard against all that sort of thing

Duane at Abnormal Interests lately quoted an English translation of Plato's Politikós 263d:

"But indeed, my most courageous young friend, perhaps, if there is any other animal capable of thought, such as the crane appears to be, or any other like creature, and it perchance gives names, just as you do, it might in its pride of self oppose cranes to all other animals, and group the rest, men included, under one head, calling them by one name, which might very well be that of beasts. Now let us try to be on our guard against all that sort of thing."

It's an interesting quote when placed alongside modern quests to understand language origins in proto-humans. Do some of us likewise group modern humans separately from all other antecedents of our species and assume in shame that they must surely have been lacking in the ability to communicate in complex ways? And do we assume that oral speech, using a developed modern larynx, is the only way to convey rich ideas?

In the dumbed-down hype over the discovered FOXP2 gene a few years back, I could only be irritated by a persistent media bias towards spoken communication when discussing it, in blanket ignorance of the possible role gestural communication (including ancient-but-now-dead sign languages) might have played in our development towards what we now label "language" but which we improperly imply to mean only "vocal language" or "speech". If this gene were honestly at the very root of our capacity to understand grammar, it would also affect an ability to express in sign language or learn writing while having no effect on our other abilities somehow. Then again, isn't every form of thought, even outside of language proper, formed from some kind of set of "grammatical rules"? Circuits are structured by the grammar of logic (a combination of fundamental AND, OR and NOT gates), for example. Is one grammar truly different from another? If so, how? How can we then separate a capacity to decipher communicated ideas via consistent rules from a capacity to reason itself? If we admit what's suggested here, we admit that language is in effect universal to all living things in a plethora of forms and complexities. Language, when defined less biasedly as mere information exchange, turns out to be surprisingly commonplace.

Thankfully Geoffrey Pullum debunked much of this brown sugar drivel six years ago on Language Log. FOXP2's not a grammar gene afterall. It's terribly unlikely in fact that DNA codes for something as abstract as "language" or "grammar" by way of a single gene. For that matter, it's unrealistic to expect that the double helix codes such an abstract thing even explicitly at all. Check out new theories on how "emergence" plays a role in everything from gene function and computer programming to human language and grammatical rules.

So let's be on guard against unscientific human chauvinism; that somehow we modern humans gained the corner on language. Plato's pagan writings of long ago are correct. We're not that different from all the talking beasts around us. Science is merely reminding us of what was already gestured before we were born.

The house of Armna

In inscription ET Vs 1.133 I notice the last name of an individual written out as Armnes. I can't be terribly certain from only three names in this rather brief inscription but it seems at first blush to me that vel : armnes : vipes : should be read with a directive case form of Armna rather than with a genitive of Armne. In this way it reads in English: "Vel (son) to Armna, of the (gens) Vipe." We find the use of the directive case in -is signifying 'to, towards' in order to specify descent in TLE 321 as well. The name Vipe, by the way, was known to Latin-speaking Romans as Vibius.

I then wonder. Does Armna bear relation to the gloss *arim 'monkey', identified by Strabo as a Tyrrhenian word? Is this name a later form of *Arimna '(He) of the monkey'? Great Tinia only knows, stranger names had existed in the Etrusco-Roman record. Further, when I think of monkeys, my thoughts are drawn to Carthage from whence such exotic imports would sail to Etruria.

Ancient African adstrate in Etruscan

This subject, I feel, doesn't get enough attention and yet I think it's a fascinating topic: African loanwords in the Etruscan language. Considering what little Etruscanists currently seem to know about the language, unable even to explain conjugation and declension as I have attempted on this blog, it's probably unrealistic to expect that I should find a published mention of Punic or Berber adstrate in Etruscan, and yet, surely some African loans wandered their way into the vocabulary of ancient Italy, no?

The relationship of Etruria with Carthage is well proved ever since the Pyrgi Tablets were discovered. These are bilingual artifacts written in Etruscan and Punic. Punic, a dialect of Phoenician, was the official language of Ancient Carthage in what is now Tunisia. Berber dialects must also have been spoken in the Carthaginian region but Berber is a separate although related group to the Semitic and Egyptian languages traditionally to the east.

There is at least one word that may be considered Berber, at least based on the popular etymologies of the name Africa which source it either to afar 'dust' or to ifri 'cave, cavern' in allusion to local cave-dwelling. The name Afircina is recorded in ET AT 3.2 in the form of the type-I dative Avhircinasi 'to/for Afircina'. This mirrors Greek Ἀφρική 'Carthaginian region' and Latin Āfrica 'Carthaginian region'.

Now what about other African words, hmm? So far I've spied my eye on Proto-Berber *a-kal^[1] which bears a curious resemblance to Old Etruscan cal(u) 'earth', attested by calus 'of the earth' [TCap xv] and calusi-m 'and to the earth' [TLE 99]. Later, Etruscan a regularly rose to e before resonants like l. It should be noted that in Berber languages, noun stems are completed by additional gender prefixes like masculine singular *a- and feminine singular *ta-, so there's an unusual wealth of nouns with vowel onsets in their citation form.

Coincidentally Phoenix has been exploring the Berber language in great depth on his blog and I've been reading it avidly to guide me through this oft-neglected but fascinating and historically important language group.



NOTES
^[1] Phoenix in a comment below justifies Proto-Berber *a-ʔkal instead.

Cretan geography in the land of Minoans

Andras Zeke deserves a shout-out for his latest post at Minoan language blog called What do the Minoan Linear A tablets tell us about Cretan geography? - Part II. He characteristically goes to a lot of effort and detail to explain the texts for us, noting all the difficulties and possibilities. While PA-I-TO, written in Minoan Linear A script, is easily linked with the famous town of Phaistos, many other towns listed in these ancient accounting records are far more tricky to identify.