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').

Flights of fancy and ornithomancy

Duane Smith over at Abnormal Interests makes mention of The birds in the Iliad - Identities, interactions and functions by Karin Johansson. This is an excellent and welcomed addition to educational resources on the net and I will be going through it to try to gain insight into the religious practice of ornithomancy in Etruria. It's worth learning everything we can about this ancient science made out of observing birds and their paths across the sky because it's a central component in life and faith in Etruria. Without knowing this, we can only understand Etruscan civilization at a distance.

While the author states "The methodologies in bird divination differed in different parts of the world, such as in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Etruria and Rome," I respectfully doubt that there is enough known about Etrurian religion to be secure with that claim. There is little way thus far to accurately gauge that "difference". More likely there are connections, many connections, that continue to be missed by Etruscanists who as yet still have a hard time deciphering much of the language and rely, perhaps too much, on the second-hand reports of Romans rather than reading the extant Etruscan-language works like the Liber Linteus or Tabula Capuana directly.

Lasa and the transgendered deity

The consensus on the Etruscan term lasa is that it may be equivalent to the Greek concept of 'nymph'. "It might be possible someday to establish some kind of correspondence between Lasa and the Greek concept of nymph," states Roman and European Mythologies by Yves Bonnefoy under the heading Etruscan Daemonology on page 41. However the Bonfantes have cautioned in The Etruscan language: An introduction (2002), "Lasa Sitmica, however, is a male winged figure." At times like this, I find myself briefly chagrining, "Why does everything have to be so complicated?" But then I realize that life wouldn't be so interesting if there wasn't a new puzzle to solve.

First off, I'm toying with the idea that lasa isn't referring to some specific deity or kind of deity but instead might be translated simply as 'lady, woman'. This has benefits. For one thing, back in Anatolia, it's curiously similar to the Lycian word lada with an identical meaning. Second, rather than apply an over-specified meaning without established reasons, applying a more generalized value such as 'lady' can at once explain its use with Venus-like characters on mirrors, its use with some nymphs, and... as I will get to in a moment... possibly the problematic male lasa aforementioned.

This is where the tale of the transgendered deity comes in. Before any of you scough and giggle, there really were transsexual deities in existence in classical times, popular ones. Across Anatolia, there was a particular cult revolving around Attis, Cybele and Agdistis. In one tradition it is said that the handsome vegetation god Attis, who cyclically died every year to be reborn for the benefit of humankind (long before Jesus was invented), was esteemed greatly by Cybele, goddess of fertility. Yet he was also desired by Agdistis, the hermaphroditic deity associated with (of all things) walnuts. This created quite a mythical love triangle. Agdistis, having lost his "walnuts" one fateful day when the fearful gods of Olympus felt the need to "correct" this alternative biology, was magically transformed into a woman for all intents and purposes. Cult worshipers of this tradition were even inspired to become eunuchs in the service of this deity and this must have been one path in ancient society for many naturally transgendered people.

So coming to the mirror in question (ES 115) with the "boy" Lasa Sitmica who appears next to Atunis (= Attis) and Turan (= Cybele), I can only suspect that Lasa Sitmica might be performing the role of Agdistis. I'd be surer if I could nab a photo of that mirror but the available facsimile shown above still gives me the impression that, indeed, lasa might in this very special case be referring to transgendered Agdistis who, upon losing his male genitals, or at the very least his testicles, was considered a lady in the mindset of Etruscan culture, either as a hermaphrodite, or as in the illustration of this mirror where male features are unmistakable, as a possible eunuch.

What then is sitmica in the epithet? No specialists seem to have piped up about it, leaving me to ponder on my own. One guess I thought of is that Lasa Sitmica may mean "The Lady in Sidon". Taking away the phrase-final article -ca, lasa would be 'lady' and Sitmi then could be the locative of *Situm 'Sidon'(?). Sidon was an important Phoenician city where such eastern cults might be easily imported. No guarantees though. It's better than nothing for now and it would be one way of explaining away the curious gender conflicts inherent in the attestation of this term.


UPDATE
(2012 Feb 13) Gazing at and thinking over the mirror some more, I consider a new possibility. How are we entirely sure whether Lasa Sitmica is attributable to her male attendant or whether it is referring back to Turan? Perhaps Turan is described twice, both with her direct name and by the title Lasa Sitmi-ca 'The Lady in Sidon'. Afterall this phrase seems more in line with the historic fame of Sidon as a destination for the worship of the equivalent fertility goddess Ashtarte more than anything. The attendant then would be an unmarked feature of the background, merely a servant aiding Turan (still possibly a eunuch attendant as many chamberlains were and as many men in devotion to the Asian Cybele were).

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.

A resting place

Recently I've been investigating the Etruscan word hupni. Looking at the word, I had assumed a native formation in -ni which normally seems to mark persons elsewhere. I shrugged off the slightly awkward use of -ni, open to the possibility that the suffix might have a broader usage than I thought. Through this analysis, one must assume a root *hup-. In turn, with the apparent meaning of the full word being that of an 'ossuary chamber', I'd surmised that the underlying root might then mean, perhaps, 'bones'. Admittedly tentative but this is how I do things.

I dare to explore until I find paradoxes. If we don't dare to explore the consequences of a promising idea, our theory will become stagnant. Yet if we don't keep our theories in check by distinguishing between fact and hypothesis and by carefully prioritizing the relative probabilities of each proposal, we lose track and our theory goes to mush. (This is why I always mark anything I propose with an asterisk in my lexical database for the sake of clarity, for me and for others.) Sometimes, all you're able to do, given limited information, is to try out things and hope new information comes along. Sometimes this new information arrives in the form of a paradox or a better proposal than the one we have.

At last I stumbled across a comparison between hupni and Greek ὕπνος (húpnos) 'slumber', which I suppose implies a derivative in that language of *ὑπνις (*hupnis) 'resting place'. At that I realized that this very well is likelier than the view I held as my default answer. I feel compelled to abandon the root I tentatively put down now since this etymology is cleaner than assuming a root *hup- which up to now hung in mid-air, both in terms of its exact meaning and its utterly untraceable history, and it also cures the problem of the seeming inappropriate use of the suffix -ni. Another exciting contradiction to push me towards greater accuracy. Adaptation is far more exhilarating than idées fixes.

Explaining away "tlusc arc"

A commenter reminded me of some unresolved issues regarding tlusc arc, written on the Liver of Piacenza artifact. The inscription in question can be seen inside the blue box in the picture above. To get to properly solving this inscription, we must overcome a few lazy misanalyses that still stifle any progress in the field. First, there's the persistent misanalysis of Tluschva as a "plurality of gods", even though the suffix -cva is already well-known to be grammatically inanimate (see Paleoglot: The nonsense about the Etruscan god Tluschva). The second problem is the whimsical misreading of *tlusc mar instead of reading it simply with respect to a single direction of writing as tlusc arc (see Paleoglot: The "Tlusc Mar" reading error on the Piacenza Liver). In search of a legitimate explanation of this elusive deity that specialists fail to offer, I've come to my own conclusions that Tluscva must be the Etruscan sea god, like Roman Neptune or Greek Poseidon. His name then likely means "Depths" and his positional opposition to Tinia, the highest of all gods in the pantheon, on the outer rim of the same artifact solidifies this interpretation.

Given this new analysis however, we're still left wondering what tlusc arc could refer to. We can see that the first element of the epithet is abbreviated for the full name Tlusχva (as shown on another inscription). Is the second word abbreviated in this cramped space as well? I suspect so. Arcumna and Arcmsna appear to be the only plausible comparisons we can make in the available Etruscan lexicon to date but this in itself tells neither what the epithet should mean nor the names.

Not accepting a dead end, I extended my search further, finding Latin arcus 'bow' in the process. The received wisdom among Indo-Europeanists is that the Latin term must stem from PIE *h₂érkʷo-. However this is one of many roots listed by IEists that fall on tenuous evidence. It could just as well be yet another substrate word passed off as a valid IE term. The compared Germanic neuter *arhwō 'arrow' doesn't entirely match the formation seen in Latin and a purely Germano-Italic term does not make for a strongly argued IE root. This naturally leads those like Donald Ringe to concede doubt of its thinly accepted IE origin and this naturally in turn makes me wonder if an Etrusco-Rhaetic word is at the heart of it.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that Arcumna and Arcmsna are built on a word *arcam 'bow' (later *arcum > *arcm due to syncope). The Germanic word in *-ō then would be a reflex of Old Etruscan /-əm/ in *arcam presuming that the word was borrowed (perhaps through the Veneti) before Grimm's Law had occurred, sometime in the early 1st millennium BCE. The trading of bows and arrows between the Etrusco-Rhaetic population and northern Italian peoples would be historically expected and natural (particularly if we assume an Adriatic point-of-entry of Etrusco-Rhaetic people from the River Po). The above two names would then mean "Of the bow" and "Of the archer" respectively (if *arcamis = 'archer' with agent suffix -is). Coming back to tlusc arc, we might fill this out as *Tlusχval Arcam "The bow of Tluschva". Granted, my idea is cursed with little evidence either way but it's worth a try, if anything, because it will inspire others to come up with something better.

But what then would "The bow of Tluschva" refer to, if so? Latin arcus, aside from meaning simply 'bow', has a secondary meaning of 'rainbow' as in pluvius arcus 'rainbow' or literally 'bow of rain'. Even in French we say arc-en-ciel for 'rainbow', literally 'bow-in-sky' and other Romance languages have similar phrases. Perhaps there's a connection. Or perhaps not. However, the inscription's presence in the celestial zone should be noted. Additionally, according to Hesiod's Theogony, the goddess of the rainbow Iris is the daughter of Thaumas, a sea deity. The other daughter of Thaumas, twin sister of Iris, was coincidently named Arke. If this is all innocent coincidence, we have to agree that it's an interesting one to ponder over.

Ghost words and anti-dictionaries

I've mused before that what we need is an Etruscan "anti-dictionary" to reference all the words that have been made up over the decades out of thin air due to misanalyses by various scholars. Lazy authors spread these infectious memes the most, of course, but even careful scholars can overlook things. These words end up being taken as 100% fact by more naive readers and it's difficult sometimes to talk them out of their factless stupor. The more everyone shares information however, the more we can crush these little fibs and understand our history just a little better.

Michael Weiss at OHCGL Addenda and Corrigenda likewise has noticed some phantom words in the Hittite lexicon and calls attention to *itar/*itnaš, explaining some details behind that inaccuracy.

Baxter-Sagart reconstructions and Occam's Razor

The internet abounds with information if we make the effort to search. One interesting find is a pdf of the Baxter-Sagart reconstruction of Old Chinese roots in tabular format. Excellent! But being an analytical bad news bear, I also see some important issues that tie in with my stance on developing orthographies that properly conform to Occam's Razor. This is out of respect for logic, for necessary simplicity, for clarity and for general readers, some of whom may not be well-versed in linguistics but which nonetheless are interested in the beauty of a language and its history.

Contempt for Occam's Razor inhabits even mainstream linguistics and the field is far too often misconceived as an intuitive art than a logical science. I put my money on organized phonologies and uncluttered orthographies that express only what's necessary for the topic at hand. It's not necessary to show exact phonetics of a word each and every time when the discussion is not about the exact phonetics of a language. If we have a list of roots, it doesn't make sense to list it all out in excruciating phonetic detail any more than it makes sense to write English this way. As such, mixing IPA symbols into your orthography often spells more trouble than what it's worth. "IPA" doesn't stand for International Orthographic Alphabet. At some point a decent linguist must come up with a sensible, legible, optimal, uncluttered orthography to express their language of study beyond the microscale phonetic level. A means, in other words, to quickly and clearly cite words in a vocabulary, pruned for immediate and sufficient comprehension by an everyday reader. Abusing symbols to complicate the message is as corrupt a practice as abusing unnecessary specialist terms for little other reason than for show.

On the top of the list, the Baxter-Sagart team begins with roots like *ʔˤra. This shows us that they envision a phonemic pharyngealized glottal stop. Fine. However unless */ʔˤ/ is phonemically distinct from other phonemes in the language, say */ʕ/, why be so precise on the orthographic level? Why not use a single clear symbol for this instead of mixing up orthography with the phonetic level far below it? If the orthography, in its necessary simplicity, doesn't make the phonetics you intend very clear, one may simply write a quick primer on it and be done with it. If only this, then I can concede that perhaps there's some reason for it that I've overlooked.

Further down the list, we also have *qˤrep which is quite the tongue-twister. One may dismiss this as within the bounds of plausibility although I do admit that this apparent pharyngealized uvular stop is unusual for its Schrödingeresque ability to inhabit two places of articulation at once. Then again, there are many consonant rich languages like Klallam around, right? We also have to keep in mind though that these kinds of languages are also quite rare and there's nothing scientific and methodical about a theory that strives towards the exotic rather than the minimal. Strong proof should come before the addition of a new phoneme to a reconstruction.

But when we come across *qʷʰˤat-, what is Baxter and Sagart trying to express to us and how does it fit into a plausible phonological system? A labialized, aspirated, pharyngealized, uvular stop??? How on earth could this possibly be contrastive with another phoneme? Surely at this point we have to concede that Baxter and Sagart have not respected the differences and proper uses of phonetic versus orthographic transcription. It gives the impression of a poorly organized phonology and orthography, mixing exact and even unlikely phonetic symbols together to create a visual mess that ends up being more confusing to the reader than helpful. At this point, it's just not reflective of the facts, even when (and especially when) armed with knowledge of the IPA system!

Keep in mind that there are already expressed concerns by others about the use of "j" in Middle Chinese onsets in words like gji  (祇 qí) considering that the "phoneme" doesn't seem to exist when compared to some loanwords coming from outside Chinese (eg. MC *bjut [Baxter] < Sanskrit buddha 'enlightened one; Buddha'). There is indeed informational value behind "j" here but it's very unlikely a true semivowel or a palatalization of the preceding consonant. At some point then, we have to get back to reality, paying careful heed to creating a balanced, minimal orthography because overcomplexity quite simply hampers progress in all things.

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/

Sand-hundred

Here's a funny little word in Greek: ψαμμακόσιοι (psammakósioi). It literally means 'sand-hundred', from ψάμμος 'sand' with the suffix for 'a hundred' attached. As you might have guessed, it conveys a huge uncountable sum. I love the mental imagery of that.

The reconstruction of the Pre-Egyptian case system

Antonio Loprieno states something confusing to me on page 55 of Ancient Egyptian: A linguistic introduction (1995):

"Also, the ending *-u is still preserved, although functionally reinterpreted, in the forms of some singular patterns as well: when the original stem ended in a vowel, for example *u in *ḥāruw '(the god) Horus,' *-a in *ḫupraw 'form,' or *-i in *masḏiw 'enemy,' the ending was maintained as a glide, often written in good orthography as <-w> in the case of *-aw as opposed to <-ø> in the case of *-iw or *-uw: <ḫprw> =: *ḫupraw 'form,' <ḥfȝw> =: *ḥaf3aw 'snake.'"

Stated more directly, he's claiming that the *w in *ḫupraw was written by scribes according to "good orthography" while strangely ignored in *masḏiw and *ḥāruw despite being present in all these words. It's hard to understand why that would be so. It's rather as if we have *ḫupraw with *w but *masḏi and *ḥāru without. But then this would be inconsistent with what he's stated on the development of the case system from Pre-Egyptian into Old Egyptian.

So it seems that either I'm missing something here or his theory needs a few tweaks. If I ventured an attempt at revisal, perhaps we could try Pre-Egyptian nominatives *ḫaprúwu, *másḏiyu and *ḥārawu. After reduction of unstressed vowels, this becomes *ḫaprūwa /xəpʰˈɾəwə/, *masḏi /'masɟi/ and *ḥāru /'ħaːɾu/ before the case ending was omitted altogether: *ḫaprū, *masḏi and *ḥāru. I contend that only the first word ever motivated writing w. I question its existence altogether in the pronunciation of the second. In the third, 'hawk', I suspect the word was built on the notion of 'that which is above', consisting of *ḥar 'above, upon' and an ancient masculine suffix *-aw, becoming therefore *-u. As such, it couldn't have consonantal w during literate times either since we have only a short vowel. This then explains Loprieno's "good orthography" which now reflects a transparent, underlying reality. No more arcane scribal rules on whether or not to write the trailing semivowel. No more wildcard symbols either, as I've shook my fist at beforehand.

Socrates' debate with Gorgias and others

I'll get to Egyptian tomorrow, but for now please take a look at Plato's Gorgias on Perseus, which may be read both in its original Greek and also in English translation. It's then discussed on Youtube by an interesting online lecturer.




As I finally got around to reading Gorgias, I immediately appreciated how much it relates to the modern age. The seething anger of a growing number of people towards an insolent plutocracy is just beginning to boil over as the markets show increasing instability and as yet more responsible homeowners are being put out to the streets. To add insult to injury, these same victims are doubly left crippled in utter joblessness as politicians flutter about feigning stupidity. Democracy? Only in word, not in deed.

Socrates' words spoken more than two thousand years ago ring true as he rejects feel-good Rhetoric for the greater virtues of Truth. He proceeds to tear apart in laborious detail and unceasing wit all the ridiculous arguments put to him in favour of "might makes right" and in favour of childish selfishness at the expense of society. In effect, he establishes the beginnings of a logical morality, not based on cultish dogma or religious superstitions but only on pure reason. As the lecturer briefly notes, Socrates treats Truth in a quasi-religious way, being in keeping with the Apollonian traditions of his time (ie. the likening of justice and truth to a kind of illumination by the all-seeing sun god Apollo). Yet Socrates' public process of inquiry is anything but religious. Quite the opposite, it's defiantly anti-religious as he challenges the validity of all idle beliefs that do only harm to humankind. As then, we still have trouble heeding his insights and to our own peril.

Changes in Pre-Egyptian vocalism

Lately I've been reflecting on what Loprieno says about the early Egyptian vowel system on page 55 of Ancient Egyptian: A linguistic introduction (1995):

"In our discussion of phonology (section 3.4.3), we saw that one of the major features of Egyptian in its early stages was the presence of a strong expiratory stress, which eventually caused a reduction to /ø/ of short vowels in open syllables in posttonic position, with the resulting change from the Dreisilbengesetz to the Zweisilbengesetz (**saḏimat > *saḏmat 'she who hears')."

While Loprieno speaks of reduction to zero, I've long been thinking more along the lines of a Pre-Egyptian system of *a, *i and *u being reduced to *schwa* wholesale in all unstressed positions. To begin with, long vowels were only to be found in stressed positions in Pre-Egyptian, at least if the comparison with Proto-Semitic is trustworthy, and this length contrast in stressed positions clearly remained in Egyptian, as still evidenced by Coptic. I therefore choose to write all of these reduced, unstressed monophthongs of Pre-Egyptian as *a (to be implicitly understood as [ə]). Furthermore diphthongs *Vy and *Vw (*V = any vowel) then become *i [əj] and *u [əw] respectively. This has worked very well for me for a while now. The result is an Egyptian vowel system that still looks on the surface much like Proto-Semitic with long vowels restricted to stressed syllables and unstressed positions having only short *a, *i and *u. Yet since the system has been notably altered, we find a curious incongruence nonetheless between the vowels of Proto-Semitic and those of Egyptian.

We can also avoid a lot of the wildcard symbols Loprieno and others occasionally use in the unstressed syllables this way since my theory makes this pointless: Only *a can exist in these positions unless accompanied by a written semivowel y or w in which case the appropriate short high vowel is selected. It appears that the matter of whatever the original vocalism may be is an issue for Pre-Egyptian reconstruction, not Egyptian proper. Loprieno's */'ri:ʕuw/ (> */'ri:ʕə/) 'sun' becomes my *rīˁa.

There are further reasons why I'm dwelling on this, but I've divided it up into subsequent posts.

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.

Small quibbles about Proto-Berber orthography

Phoenix responded to a minor issue I raised about Proto-Berber orthography in Why I reconstruct *β and not *v. In defense of using a relatively arcane symbol *β (taken from the IPA system) for a v-like sound that could instead be accommodated by a straight-forward symbol *v, he supplied the following reasons:

• "In African linguistics v is commonly used as the symbol for the voiced fricative while β is used for the labial approximant."
• "So I don't use v to transcribe Proto-Berber β, because it would suggest that it is the fricative counterpart to *b."

So from what I can see, his justification for the specialist symbol boils down to phonetics and tradition in the field. However I fail to find any justification here grounded in a clear methodology of some kind.

To the first argument, I suggest that basing an orthography on the phonetic level is inevitably cumbersome because it's then prone to constant revision as new discoveries about underlying phonetics come into view. A more stable and sensible orthography is based on the higher phonemic level instead, which focuses less on exact articulation of each sound in its context but instead displays for us *distinct* sounds of the language. For example, in English, the phoneme /p/ is pronounced differently in "spun" than it is in "pat". The /p/ in the former example is completely without a puff of breath (ie. [p] in IPA symbols) since it follows /s/ while in latter example, /p/ is indeed pronounced with a puff of breath by default (ie. [pʰ]). However on the higher phonemic level, we represent in both examples the single phoneme /p/ to eliminate extra irrelevancies that are ungermane to the focus at hand. It'd be likewise unnecessary to write out every word of a proto-language like Berber with only phonetic symbols rather than phonemic ones unless the topic was specifically about the exact articulation of each sound.

It's also a fact that there are exceedingly few if any languages that contain two distinct phonemes /β/ (bilabial fricative, pronounced by blowing through near-closed lips) and /v/ (labiodental fricative, pronounced with the lower lip touching one's upper teeth). It's pointless to obsess on minutia about the exact articulation of the sound if it can be reasonably ascertained that the sound was v-like. It then suffices to take advantage of an available letter from the Roman alphabet, *v, to aid readability both by specialists and by people in general. Things should be written with clarity for both specialists *and* the general public when possible lest it encourage ivory tower attitudes, the scourge of current academia.

To the second argument, tradition indeed is a seductress but it must be rejected when it no longer clarifies but obfuscates. Sometimes tradition is misguided. Sometimes tradition is outdated. Sometimes tradition is just plain wrong. In this case, I feel that this tradition is wrong precisely because of the first argument, that orthographies should reflect the phonemic level not the phonetic and that by ignoring this rule, one has unnecessarily obfuscated rather than clarified.

Possible solutions

After reading Phoenix's explanation with deep interest, I pondered on how the system might be revised to be clearer and to follow a more consistent methodology in its design. By following the principle of phonemics over phonetics, and by reserving diacritics and special symbols for the rarer sounds of a language marked by special articulatory features, we can arrive at a more balanced and clearer phonology.

Breaking with empty Berberist traditions, emphatic sounds may be marked by the underdot, as in Proto-Semitic studies. Again, we all may quibble about the exact pronunciation of *γ (or *q) but a revised symbol *ġ has the definite advantage of visibly showing a shared feature of "emphatic" with the other emphatics which would likewise be indicated more consistently with the dot: *ḍ, *ḍḍ (former *ṭṭ), *ġġ (former *qq), *ẓ and *ẓẓ. The missing emphatic counterpart of *b, represented in this new system as **ḅ, is now impossible to confuse with non-emphatic *v which lacks the underdot. We may finally eliminate unnecessary IPA symbols and replace them with more generally readable symbols from the standard Roman alphabet that we already use while simultaneously making explicit any shared features that the different sounds may have in the language, such as "emphaticness".

And finally, through this revised system, specialists may continue to debate on the exact articulation of *ġ and such, but it won't affect the symbol shared among the specialist community until the phoneme's emphatic nature or its existence is disproven.

UPDATE
(1 hour later) Upon further thought (my mind never stops!!), enforcing a surface representation with unvoiced letters might be even more kosher and, again, this would be even more in line with what's done in Proto-Semitic linguistics. So alternatively, we could use the following symbols to clean things up: *ṭ (= *ḍ), *ṭṭ, *ḳ (= *γ), *ḳḳ (= *qq), *ṣ (= *ẓ) and *ṣṣ (= *ẓẓ).

Egyptian vowel reconstruction and other gripes

Occam's Razor is a valuable tool to the student and scholar. It forces us to think hard about the assumptions we hold on to and whether they are absolutely justified or whether there's room for doubt. Linguistics seems to be one of those studies where this methodical principle is still not respected to the level that it should be and, as a result, there are many ancient languages being reconstructed with too much artistic flair to properly reflect the data.


Diversity of plausible theories or diversity of empty opinion?

I've been very busy collecting data on Ancient Egyptian after growing dissatisfied with the lack of profound discussion or clarity on its vocalism. Egyptologists constantly write words with only their consonantal values to reflect how the Egyptians themselves wrote these words. This is how it's always been. However I find that it often does more to obstruct and obscure the proper reading of these texts than aid us. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Egyptians themselves wouldn't have thought of words purely in terms of consonants. Some of the clever word puns exhibited in Egyptian texts require our knowledge of the vocalism too in order to grok its fullest meaning and pattern. After centuries of Egyptomania, why is there no clear consensus on the Ancient Egyptian vowel system? What's the hold up? Are we interested in Egyptian or not?

To illustrate the point, let's take the word for 'cat' which may be represented consonantally as mỉw. Here is the mountain of possible reconstructions for the utterly confused outsider to select from:

• Albright *mắȝĕʔ
• Callender *máȝejvw
• Garnot *mṓȝei̯
• Smieszek *må̆ȝjᵉw
• Vergote *māȝuy

Obviously they can't all be correct. Notice that a lot of these scholars seem to delight in masking their representation of the language with a bunch of unnecessary diacritics. (I've ranted against this before many times.) To aid in our investigation, we see that the plural form of the word is reflected in the Greek name Πανομιευς which represents the Egyptian phrase *pȝ-(n)-nȝ-mȝj.w 'He of the cats'. Of course, Egyptian shares with Arabic the use of broken plurals and so the plural vocalism is not necessarily the vocalism of the singular. In order to keep my sanity, I find myself forced to develop my own testable opinions on the matter with a conciliatory reconstruction of *māya /'mɑ(ː)jə/ for the period around 1500 BCE and it seems sufficient to account for later Coptic form moui agreed upon by Sahidic, Bohairic, Akhmimic and Fayyumic dialects.

Back to Occam's Razor, one thing that frustrates me when I see this kind of diversity of opinion and no consensus is that the reasons why these individual scholars have arrived at their differing ideas appears to be grounded less in linguistic science and more in artistic whim. To me, phonotactic analysis is unavoidable in this task. We need to be absolutely conscious about how syllables are put together in our language of interest, not just the individual phonemes. We need to start with the most universally commonplace rules and meet each contradiction with adaptation from a simple and commonmost state to a more complex and exotic one, not vice versa. Sadly linguists often don't demonstrate this rigour but it's vital in creating a coherent theory that obeys the KISS principle (ie. Keep It Simple Stupid). So, to me, the diversity of opinion in the example of 'cat' is not so much the result of coherent theories clashing for competition, but a bunch of lazy theories made by scholars ignoring Occam's Razor in their idiosyncratic ways.


And how to handle those unstressed syllables?

Focusing just on how different scholars treat unstressed syllables Egyptian, there doesn't appear to be a justification for how one decides which vowel it is, aside from appealing to outside branches of Afro-Asiatic like Semitic. Callender for example reconstructs *pAsīḏaw for 'nine' with wildcard symbol A whereas Loprieno chooses *pisī́ɟvw (nb. Loprieno's i = Callender's A) with yet another wildcard symbol v in the final unaccented syllable. In this case, Proto-Semitic having only *tišˁu has no equivalent cognate to enlighten our efforts on the matter.

Neither the Babylonian inscription EA 368 which records pi-ši-iṭ nor the later Sahidic Coptic form psis gives us much evidence of what the first vowel was because an unstressed vowel is often less audible than a stressed one. Coptic has already dropped the vowel while, for all we know, the Babylonians interpreted a garden-variety schwa as a lax -i-. I still search for precise evidence that justifies this need for more than one vowel quality in unstressed positions. Until I do, I reconstruct *pasiḏa /pə'siɟə/ where unstressed *a is nothing other than the generic schwa /ə/ which we would find in all unstressed positions. Notice too that I choose to avoid unnecessary diacritics like the plague, as I believe we all should if we strive to be good little linguists.

Naturally if there is indeed unambiguous evidence of other possible vowel qualities in unaccented syllables, I'd love to hear about it. But until I do, Occam's Razor must be my guide.

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.