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.

Etruscan grammar - The nouns and verbs and everything

Finally after much procrastination I've at last hammered out a provisional model of Etruscan verbs. My pdf, originally focused on Etruscan declension, now includes what I hope is a coherent and natural model of Etruscan conjugation. Given the available literature, I fear that I'm the only one that dwells on these little details. So please review it in the Lingua Files section. This is to be, as always, regarded as an ever-evolving work in progress for discussion.

One will notice that while amace '(he) has been' is often parsed as am-ace and called a "perfect", I elect to interpret this more elaborately as three morphemes marking both aspect and tense: am-ac-e = be-PERF-PAST. As such, I specifically call this form the perfective past which contrasts with the perfective present-future seen in eniaca 'shall remain' (see Pyrgi Tablets) which is then similarly composed of the verb root en 'to remain', the perfective -ac- and the present-future marker -a.

My model has the benefit of finally making sense of uncomposed Lemnian -ai which marks the verbs recorded on the Lemnos Stele. Surely these too then are imperfect pasts. I don't know of a competing model that can address these various facts as well. It seems too that treating -in(-) as a mood marker works best with a grammatical structure of tense, aspect and mood. So I've settled on calling this a mediopassive which contrasts with the default active mood. It's interesting too that both Greek and Latin, two languages having notable influence on Etruscan, had this same mood. "A product of areal influence or just accidental?" I wonder.

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).

That Lemnian inscription again...

My philosophy is that thought is never done and conclusions are often temporary. This is how adaptive learning works. So I continue to revisit things, always looking for a better answer. That Lemnian inscription I previously talked about here and here is still weighing on my head and I just thought of another possible interpretation worth considering.

Previously, I suggested that hktaiunuśi may refer to a personal name and thus 'on behalf of Hektaion'. However I stumbled on another Greek comparison that shows promise: Ἑκάταιον 'temple or statue of Hecate'. Such a loanword would give a different value for hktaiunusi, 'on behalf of/for (-śi) the temple of Hecate (hktaiun-) ', implying that the stone base in question was bearing a statue of the goddess Hecate. Indeed, Hecate was known to be an important deity in Samothrace^[1], right next door. What a nice coincidence. So I could just shoot myself for not piecing this together before.

Keeping with my understanding of heluke as 'has slain' and assuming Suffixaufnahme, the indirect object of the action is *śurum aśil in unmarked form (ergo, a double-marked genitive śurum-s aśl-as). The phrase then must refer specifically to a sacrifice being offered up to Hecate. This might bear fruit considering Aramaic *šōr [šwr] 'ox' and the Greek sacrifices known as hecatombs.

But what then is *aśil? My Etruscan database calls up one instance of exactly this word in TLE 205 although I've been unsure whether it was simply a transliteration error for acil or not. Other Etruscanists seem likewise confused and I have no photo of it. Helmut Rix transcribes the second line as asil sacni and I notice that Paul Kretschmer had once translated it has 'holy altar'. I wonder if this is close to the mark. By giving Etruscan asil the value 'altar', asil sacni becomes 'altar (of the) sacred' and then the Lemnian inscription, Hktaiunuśi heluke śurums aślas, becomes "For the statue of Hekate an ox (or hecatomb?) for the altar has been slain."


NOTES
^[1] Rice/Stambaugh, Sources for the study of Greek religion (1979), p.161 (see link).

On Rex Wallace's interpretation of a new Lemnian inscription

In early December at Rasenna Blog, Rex Wallace, a published professor of the Classics Department faculty at the University of Massachusetts, contributed a clear photo of the new Lemnian artifact whose inscription I had mused on earlier. Wallace then insists that soromσ and aslaσ "are not s-gentives^[sic] because they end in palatal fricatives". I feel this begs criticism.

Why assume this? The Etruscan san (ie. an M-like letter) represented *either* /s/ *or* /ʃ/ due to differing regional writing traditions in Italy as noted in Helmut Rix's must-have inscription catalogue Etruskische Texte. In early Greek too, san was pronounced /s/ since a separate esh-like phoneme was unavailable in the language. The 4-stroke sigma is nothing more than the san turned sideways^[1] and the Lemnians were surrounded by Greeks. In light of this, what does the mere co-existence of san and sigma suggest phonologically? Absolutely nothing. We don't know a priori which writing tradition the Lemnian san is based on. At face value, both /s/ and /ʃ/ could be possible values here. Yet it appears that Wallace's entire argument against analysing these lexemes as genitive forms rests entirely on his one narrow interpretation.

Worse still, it's a falsifiable interpretation. The Lemnos Stele consistently placed the 3-stroke sigma, not 4-stroke san, before /i/ in the dative ending -si. Surely we'd expect this -s- to be palatalized before a notoriously palatalizing vowel of all places! The two sigmas present in siasi only taunt Wallace's opinions further.

So this orthography must be backwards: the Lemnian 3-stroke sigma is /ʃ/ and the 4-stroke san is /s/. To the complete contrary, soromσ and aslaσ are indeed probable genitives, to be read more accurately as śurums and aślas.


NOTES
^[1] Speaking on Etruscan and its letter san, the late Giuliano Bonfante and his daughter Larissa note the self-evident graphic relationship between it and the modern Greek sigma in Bonfante/Bonfante, The Etruscan language: An introduction (2002), 2nd edition, p.62 (see link).

Translating a new Lemnian inscription

Michael Weiss has just notified us of a new Lemnian inscription published last year by Carlo De Simone. More details about its context are found here in Italian. According to Weiss, the inscription is:

soromš : aslaš hktaonosi : heloke
Weiss attempts to crack it by properly noting the preterite verb at the end. However drawing blanks on precise values, he describes hktaonosi as a possible 'pertinentive' and suspects that soromš : aslaš looks like a subject phrase. The last suggestion must be based on his training in Italic Indo-European languages but this language family won't help him here. Scholars agree that Lemnian is related to Etruscan and entirely non-Indo-European.

To begin deciphering this inscription, we must first transliterate this inscription better. Since we know from the Lemnos Stele that the Lemnian alphabet used omikron for /u/, we should replace o with u. If anything, this helps make the relationship with 'o-less' Etruscan more obvious, aiding in translation. Also the third item, hktaonosi, is surely malformed since we also know from Etruscan study that this is a language with a fixed stress accent on the first syllable. The cluster hk- is quite impossible so this spelling must either be a transliteration error or a scribal misspelling for, presumably, *hektaunusi.

surumś : aslaś h[e]ktaunusi : heluke
Weiss is correct that the last word is a preterite verb, specifically a perfect preterite which Etruscan marks in -ace. The stem hel- is also comparable to Etruscan where it appears to mean 'to slay, to kill'. This immediately establishes that this sentence refers to an offering being made.

We should analyse hktaunusi as a dative in -si signifying 'for' since this case suffix is found identically in Etruscan. Presumably then, aslaś h[e]ktaunusi is to whom the sacrifice was performed. Judging by other inscriptions of this nature, it's no doubt the name of an individual. This leaves surumś, an apparent type-I genitive in -ś which must be what was sacrificed.

We arrive at a provisional translation of "[Surum] has been slain for Axulos Hektaion." I presume here that the name of the recipient in question is Greek, a conclusion that I doubt would be objectionable considering its context on an Aegean island.

Adapting the rule of Cyprian Syncope

Recap: What is Cyprian Syncope?

Cyprian Syncope is a sound rule that I noticed on my own several years ago when first pondering on the language origins of Etruscan. Having recognized like many others that Minoan must fall under a Proto-Aegean language family, distinct from Indo-European or Semitic, I then reasoned that Etruscan phonotactics must have been simpler in its more recent past, aligning more with the much-stricter phonotactics of Minoan which only appears to have allowed syllables of a (C)V(C)-shape.

Cleaving Proto-Aegean into two branches, Minoan and Cyprian, I noticed that some Minoan vowels were being deleted in later Cyprian tongues due to some sort of very early stress accent, sometimes creating new word-initial consonant clusters that couldn't have been possible in Minoan. Etruscan, Lemnian and Rhaetic all have word-initial consonant clusters, showing that if they were created from vowel deletion, this must have occurred when they were once a single idiom back around 1000 BCE (ie. when these languages first arrived in Italy). This rule of syncope is unrelated to a later second syncope in Etruscan which has already been widely remarked by past Etruscanists and which took place around 500 BCE. As far as I've read, no Etruscanist has published a word on this first Syncope that I'm exploring openly here, as I have in the past online.

A slight change

This past week, reviewing my research, a new corollary on Cyprian Syncope came to me. Vowel deletion isn't always guaranteed, it seems, and I've been striving to understand why. Certainly I long ago saw this in derivational suffixes of a CV shape, eg. Proto-Aegean *-na [pertinentive] becomes both Minoan and Etruscan -na without vowel deletion. I also noticed later that a word-final structure of -CCV within a word also blocks vowel deletion. Thus the original structure of Proto-Aegean *tʰaura 'bull' (> Greek ταῦρος) is likewise preserved in Etruscan θaura. Recently though, I've been grappling with other notorious wanderworts like 'apple' and 'bee' in Western Europe, seeking Aegean solutions to these riddles, only to find that there is a new implication that some trisyllabic words with initial accent fail to delete the word-final vowel.

Without going into details about reconstructions I haven't yet detailed on this blog, I think I've arrived at a very phonetically plausible revision of the general vowel deletion rule by noting a preceding accent shift in specific cases. Thus:

1. Euphonic Accent Shift: Word-initial *CəCV́- where both consonants (C) are plosives attracts stress to the first syllable: *CəCV́- → *CV́Cə-

2. The Cyprian Syncope Rule: Any vowel in a syllable immediately preceding or following a stressed syllable is deleted.

The reason for the initial accent shift prevents consonant clusters like those perfectly valid in Greek (eg. κτεατίζω 'to gain' or χθών 'earth') from ever forming in Cyprian, thereby explaining why they are completely absent in Etruscan despite having several Greek loans.

The following table shows the regular patterns in correspondence I witness that are emerging from the attested and substratal data and will hopefully illustrate how the above rules can explain them:

Proto-Aegean	Cyprian (before Syncope)	Cyprian (after Syncope)
*aléli 'lily'	*əlélə	*lel
*ápia 'bee'	*ápiə	*ápi
*apísa 'pear'	*əpísə	*pis
*árapo 'sprout'	*árəpu	*árpu
*talóza 'sea'	*təlúzə	*tlus
*ṭapúri 'village'	*zəpúrə	*spur
*ṭínau 'moulded'	*zínəu	*zinu
*tʰáura 'bull'	*tʰáura	*tʰáura

Expanding the Etrusco-Lemnian primer

I've expanded my previously announced pdf to include not only my basic sketch of the Etrusco-Lemnian nominal declension but now also the pronouns and demonstratives as well. Sadly, no one has a clue as to what the plural pronouns were like and, as far as anyone knows, they aren't attested, so I'm restricted to the singular pronominal paradigm. Let's hope a happy-go-lucky farmer trips over a new Etruscan artifact with plural pronouns on it some day.

Anyways, lest I ramble on again, I've renamed my pdf Etrusco-Lemnian Declension and it's to be found in the Lingua Files section as always.

Grammar of Etrusco-Lemnian nouns

Finally, I decided to put out a simple file on Etruscan grammar. I've just focused on nouns and it's not that extensive but I can work on it and improve it as time goes on. My grammatical outline differs slightly from the usual, particularly where the case in -is is concerned, often called an ablative case ending, but which I've found to be a directive case signifying direction toward something.

Anyways, the file has been uploaded to the Lingua Files section under Etrusco-Lemnian Nouns. Cheers!


UPDATES
(28 May 2010) As per a later entry, the pdf labeled Etrusco-Lemnian Nouns has now been expanded to Etrusco-Lemnian Declension.

A modification of Indo-Aegean, plus some new grammatical ideas on Minoan

I like to explore new ideas and test them as always. One of my ever-evolving ideas is on the idea that Indo-European and Aegean are related to a common Proto-Indo-Aegean ancestor datable to 7000 BCE. Or so I've been thinking up to now but...


I decided to explore a radical new extrapolation that's got a grip on my mind recently. What would be the consequences to my theories if Proto-Indo-Aegean were dated to as much as a thousand years later in 6000 BCE? The first interesting thing about this fresh perspective is that 6000 BCE is just about the time before Proto-Semitic began to affect Mid IE (MIE) according to my currently defined chronology. Another interesting thing is that if we take for granted a more Balkans-positioned MIE vis-à-vis the later Ukraine-positioned PIE proper, then it begs the question: Where would this theoretical Proto-Aegean of mine be sitting at this time? The most obvious answer would be that it would lie somewhere to the west and/or south of the Balkans in the general area that it historically emerged (see graphic above). Yet my theory also positions Old IE (OIE) back in the northerly territory occupied by later Late IE such that the geographical path from OIE to MIE to PIE looks like a meandering vee that points towards the Aegean Sea (see graphic below). This isn't problematic since nothing says that languages have to spread progressively in only one direction over the course of time. However, this pattern, if taken as correct for the sake of argument, teases in me a further idea that Aegean would have been brought to Greece and/or Turkey by that very southerly movement that brought Mid IE into the same trading zone. It's as if to say that what I call "Old IE" circa 7000 BCE is to be revised as a still-evolving Indo-Aegean and the beginning of the Mid IE period should be called "Old IE" at 6000 BCE. It's as if the temporary spread of an early stage of PIE to the Balkans and the spread of a related Aegean branch perfectly coincide to warrant further pondering.


Given the general conceptual arguments in favour of this deviation from standard, I went towards examining all the morphological what-ifs with even more profound consequences. The unfortunate problem with Etruscan, Lemnian and Rhaetic (and probably too with Eteo-Cypriot and Eteo-Cretan) is that no personal endings appear to be attached to verbs in these languages despite the fact that many features like the 1ps and its oblique form (mi and mini), demonstratives and the declensional system (ie. the demonstrative accusative, s-genitive, animate and inanimate plural endings) all find direct connections to PIE. If Aegean is related to PIE then something has happened to these endings and they've disappeared at some unknown point in time motivated perhaps by reasons that are lost in the mists of time.

I refuse to believe the answers aren't recoverable and I don't particularly like mist. I've been poring over Minoan texts recently and while very hesitant at first, I've been rethinking on the published but nonetheless speculative view by some that -SI and -TI are the 3ps and 3pp endings respectively. This is an obviously PIE-inspired interpretation and given the lack of success in translating Minoan with PIE values, we have reason to be skeptical.

Yet...

It's interesting to observe that if we stick by my values of the Libation Formula such that *una (U-NA) means 'libation' (cf. Etruscan un 'libation') with plural *unar (U-NA-RU), and *kan- in KA-NA-SI/KA-NA-TI is cognate with Etruscan cen- 'to bring', then not only do we have a perfectly sensible phrase "a libation was given"/"libations were given" that coincides with the fact that it's written on several Cretan libation tables, but if we take the variation KA-NA-TI in PK Za 11 to be correctly read and written on purpose by scribes to indicate a different inflection, then what we have here is a language with personal endings that apparently have not been completely lost! It would seem that -TI might indeed correlate with plural subjects while -SI would correlate with singular ones.

If we additionally corroborate this with CR (?) Zf 1 (an inscribed gold pin) where we find a perfectly Etruscoid sentence with the ubiquitous SOV word order and with intriguingly Indo-European-like verbal endings, A-MA-WA-SI KA-NI-JA-MI (*Amawasi kaniami 'I (ie. the pin itself) was brought for Amawa'^[1]), then we have a very exciting verbal system that might help crack the language: 1ps *-mi (cf. PIE *-mi), 3ps *-si (cf. PIE *-ti), and 3pp *-ãti (cf. PIE *-énti).

The reasons for this strange hodgepodge grammar, neither fully Etruscan nor fully PIE by any sensible definition, would then relate back to the modified chronology that I suggest above. Speculation? You bet. But worth a look, I think.


NOTES
^[1] Ego-focussed dedicatory inscriptions such as these were plentiful in later Etruria and were also found in the Greek and Faliscan languages as well. Read for example Pallottino, The Etruscans (1955), p.253 (see link) who testifies to the Faliscan inscription eco quto ... enotenosio ... 'I (am) the pitcher of ... Enotenus ...'.

A thought on the real name for the land of the Minoans

On page 844 of Bromiley's The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1988), an intriguing and researched summary of the true name for the land of the Minoans is to be discovered:

"In an Ugaritic text concerning the abode of Kothar-wa-Ḫasis, the god of artisans, the word kptr occurs: kptr ksu ṯbth ḥkpt arṣ nḥlth, 'Caphtor is the throne of his sitting, Ḥkpt the land of his inheritance' (UT, `nt VI:14-16). The passage seems to preserve a memory of a connection with Crete as the home of their crafts; Ḥkpt may be another name for Crete or one of its regions. Economic texts from Mari speak of Kaptara, and an Akkadian text from Ugarit refers to ships arriving from Kapturi. C. H. Gordon had raised the question whether the words kpt-r and ḥ-kpt may include some morphological elements, a preformative ḥ- and a sufformative -r, leaving kpt as the basic word (Ugaritic Literature [1949], p.23 n.1), and relating this to Egyptian kft-yw. But the persistance of r in Hebrew, Akkadian and Ugaritic forms, plus the fact that final -r could become -yw by phonetic decay (see CAPHTOR II), rather support kptr/kftr as the original word."

So we can conclude with some degree of confidence that the name sounded something like *Kʰaputar, give or take some variation. For the sake of argument, I will suggest this specific form and what follows is a whole lot of speculation. I personally think of speculation as a necessary tool in the learning process, used to invigorate new paths of research and I always strive to improve my arguments with facts and evidence or to eventually abandon them, whichever logic guides me to do. However, for those overly evidentialist sorts that find any speculation without evidence too distasteful to even express, you may be spared reading further.

I'm very interested in the Minoan language and have been pursuing a hunch for years that the likeliest relationship it has is to the 'Etrusco-Cypriot' languages (Etruscan, Lemnian, Rhaetic, Eteo-Cretan and Eteo-Cypriot) whose epicenter lies in Western Anatolia and Cyprus, formerly known as the kingdoms of Alashiya, Arzawa and Assuwa. I also have a hunch that by 1400 BCE, Minoan had become a dead language but still used in ritual while, in the everyday world of the commoners, a mix of Greek and Etrusco-Cypriot languages survived on in Crete.

If I take the name *Kʰaputar for granted, I'm reminded of a plural suffix *-r that I see in the Minoan Libation Formula sometimes marking the word *una 'libation' (written syllabically as U-NA-; in the sequence U-NA(-RU)-KA-NA-SI, *una(-r) kana-si '(we) bear libation(s)', compare Etruscan -r [animate plural], un 'libation' and cenu 'brought'). Without this ending, we're tentatively left with a singular word *kʰaputa. Wild imagination may lead one to see similarity between it and the Latin-derived word 'capital' however this leads to another interesting mystery: Where does Latin caput 'head, summit' come from?

Some etymologists try very hard to make caput a Proto-Indo-European word.^[1] However, it's unclear to me why anyone would be so determined to force the word to be PIE given the meager basis. At most, they're reduced to label it vaguely as a 'regional term' or an 'Italo-Germanic innovation' which only skips over the problem of how the word came to be. However, let's try a new idea. Let's suppose for a moment that this odd word is entirely non-IE and a loan from a theoretical Old Etruscan word *χapuθ (> (?) Late Etruscan *χafθ), lent also at some point to Germanic (hence Old English heafod). At this juncture, I think many readers here might predict where I'm going with these crazy ideas.

Is it just possible that the word for 'head, summit' in both Minoan and Etrusco-Cypriot during the mid 2nd millenium BCE was originally *kʰaputa? From there, *Kʰaputar 'The Summits'(?) would become the word for the entire Minoan region, perhaps in connection to the Horns of Consecration, a very sacred and prominent symbol undoubtedly related to the Egyptian aker symbol representing the sun both emerging from and setting into the two horizons.

Now naturally, these are so far just a delightful multiplication of hypotheses and fun wordgames to toy with while passing the toke around. I recognize that it remains incumbent on me to prove them with tangible evidence if I'm ever to insist this hypothesis to others. So, as always, I'll just have to see where these ideas take me.


NOTES
^[1] Mallory/Adams, Encyclopedia of Indo-European culture (1997), pp.260-261: kaput (see link).

Nouns modifying nouns in Etruscan and related languages

I've been noticing a quirky grammatical pattern for a while in Etruscan but for the longest time didn't know how to interpret it. My journey started back at the beginning of my studies of this language when I was confused about why calendar dates and ages showed each element of a complex number declined in the same case ending. For example, in TLE 181, we read avil-s XX tivr-s śa-s meaning "of 20 years (and) of 6 months". In these instances, despite the meaning being clear, the grammar remains to be explained by specialists. If there is only one postposition in the English translation, why is the head noun tivr 'month' and the modifying numeral śa 'six' declined with the very same case ending to express 'of 6 months'?! The same curious phenomenon appears to exist in names where both a first and last name agree in case ending (eg. TLE 84: Larθi-ale Hulχnie-si Marce-si=c Caliaθe-si 'For Larth Fulchnie and Marce Caliathe'). If we dare to expand this phenomenon to all instances where nouns appear to modify other nouns, we help explain the complex grammatical structure of the noun phrase śacni-cś-tre-ś cilθ-ś attested in the Liber Linteus.

Now, I'm starting to wonder if this is not a special feature of all languages of the Aegean family, including Lemnian. On the Lemnos Stele, an as-yet undeciphered phrase is inscribed: aker tavarśiu vanalasial śerunai murinail. The overwhelmingly popular pet theory that has been published ad nauseum for decades is that murinail must mean "of Myrina" since Myrina is an ancient city on the Lemnos island. As admittedly intoxicating as this translation is, it has never been explained why we don't read a more grammatically acceptable *Murina-l instead. Indeed, I don't think anyone in their exuberant zest has bothered to notice their tiny grammatical faux-pas. Any acceptable analysis of this Lemnian phrase must account for the intervening iota before this perceived genitive ending -l.

So back to this grammatical pattern I'm observing in Etruscan, perhaps we can use this knowledge to help crack this Lemnian phrase in a more grammar-conscious way. Notice that we first have two possible noun phrases both inclined in the genitive-II ending: [tavarśiu vanalas]-ial and [śerunai murinai]-l. In turn, we might suspect that the second phrase is composed of yet another layer of case agreement, this time in the locative case: [śeruna]-i [murina]-i. *Vanalas may be understood as "of Venel (praenomen)".

If we piece this all together we get the following rough but promising partial translation of this Lemnian phrase: "an [aker] of Venel's [tavarśiu] (that is) before (the) [śeruna murina]."

The Lost Vowels of Pre-Etruscan Syncope

It's been a while since I've wrote about issues concerning Aegean or Etruscan linguistics. However, lately the issue of lost vowels in Pre-Etruscan Syncope sprang to my busy mind.

Many suffixes that are consonant-final in Etruscan appear to come from vowel-terminating suffixes at some Pre-Etruscan. In fact the vowels were probably lost at a stage when Rhaetic, Lemnian and Etruscan were still the same undifferentiated tongue. So far, I think I can ascertain what some of these lost vowels were in some suffixes and words. For example, the Etruscan derivational suffix -aχ appears to have been in origin *-aku. “How can I be so certain?” you ask? Luckily, alternations exposing the past are still present in Etruscan such as seen in *araχ “falcon, hawk” (glossed as arakos by Hesychius) versus aracuna “(one) of the hawks or falcons” where former *u is preserved when the pertinentive suffix -na is attached. I've also ascertained so far that the intransitive participle -θ was once *-ta whereas the homophonous agentive suffix -θ (as in the names Aranθ and Vanθ) was once *-ti. I could be wrong but that's my theory so far.

Since all vowels seem to equally disappear word-finally during Pre-Etruscan Syncope, I would naturally assume that the transitive participle suffix -u must consequently come from an earlier diphthong *-au. In Minoan, this ending may indeed be preserved as a diphthong in the inscribed word DI-NA-U /'tʃinaw/ “moulded” in inscription HT 16 for example (c.f. Etruscan zinu).

That's where I'm at in regards to Pre-Etruscan Syncope so far but I still have a lot more questions to answer (and it certainly would be nice if an extensive Minoan document floated our way soon in order to make its translation a helluvalot easier).

Nyah, nyah, I told you so (or... Let's now talk seriously about Proto-Aegean)

Ah, it's sunny again, so understandably I will be making this blog brief as I enjoy the weather (and in Winnipeg, it's our prerogative to enjoy it considering that we only get hot summer weather for three months of the year).

Anyways, back to the topic of this blog, I always find it funny how something has to be published in a book before many people feel that it's "real" enough to believe. Of course, I'm not complaining about the great comments and feedback I'm getting back from this blog. However, there are times when things that, at least in my mind, seem to be so clear and well-known in published literature as to be virtually unquestionable are fought by some readers tooth and nail without careful rationale other than "it doesn't satisfy my skepticism", I have to admit it makes me roll my eyes at times. Again, I'm not complaining because when one decides to reach out of one's own bubble and blog to the world, this just comes with the territory.

Now, the reason why I mention this is because whenever I assert on this blog that Etruscan and Rhaetic are closely related languages, there's a tension in the air and I swear that I can hear vultures looming above me. There are evidently a lot of online die-hards who still scough at this view as though this were the most ludicrous idea they had ever heard of. (But then, these are sadly often the same people that have desperate need to believe that Etruscan is related to North-East Caucasian or some other highly dubious claim that I have no interest in.)

Roger Woodard writes on page 142 in The ancient languages of Europe (2008), published by Cambridge University Press (see link):

"To the same language family as Etruscan there belong only two poorly attested languages: Lemnian in the Northeast of the Aegean (sixth century BC; Agostiniani 1986) and Rhaetic in the Alps (fifth to first centuries BC; Schumacher 1992:246-248; Rix 1998). Lemnian and Rhaetic are so close to Etruscan that Etruscan can be used to understand them. The date of the common source language, Proto-Tyrsenic, can probably be fixed to the last quarter of the second millenium BC. The location of its homeland is disputed, however; possibilities include: (i) the northern Aegean, whence Proto-Etruscan and Proto-Rhaetic speakers would have come in the course of the Aegean migration westwards at the end of the second millenium (similarly Herodotus [I.94] identifies Lydia as the Etruscan homeland); (ii) central Italy, from which Proto-Lemnian speakers would have migrated eastwards and Proto-Rhaetic speakers northwards. A decisive judgment is not currently possible."

Of course, I still maintain that the latter possibility (i.e. that these "Tyrsenic" languages are autochthonous to Italy, as per Dionysius of Halicarnassus) mentioned in the quote above is merely mentioned as a kind of diplomatic tip-of-the-hat to a historically vocal camp of thought that is destined to devolve into a new-age minority religion in the next century while the former (with perhaps some slight modifications) becomes the future standard view.

The loss of mediofinal 'h' in Pre-Proto-Etruscan

I recently suggested that the virtual absence of mediofinal "h" in Etruscan is a feature common to both Lemnian and Rhaetic as well but it may not be clear to my readers why I'm insistant on that idea, so let's discuss.

Just to be sure, I looked up in my database what words contain medial h. Of the more than thousand entries I have, I came up with only two results: cehen 'here before' and the name Uhtave. The name Uhtave is clearly of Oscan origin, from Úhtavis, and related to the common Roman name Octāvius. It is squarely an Italic, and hence, un-Etruscan name. The word cehen, while a native word, does not in reality show an archaic medial h afterall because it is transparently a recent compound composed of cei 'here' and *hen 'before' (c.f. hanθe 'in front'). Even if these two lonely items were attributable to a pre-Proto-Etruscan stage though, it would need a clear explanation as to why so few instances of mediofinal h exist in this language.

My attentive readers may have noticed that I've already asserted several times on this blog that -va (a plural inanimate ending) is an allomorph of -χva. The term allomorph is just linguistobabble for a piece of language, such as a suffix, that shows predictable variation in its form in different positions or circumstances. So in this case, we may observe that Etruscan -va always pops up after nouns ending in vowels or in sibilants like s or ś, whereas the Etruscan speakers regularly chose -χva when the preceding noun stem ended in most other consonants. Some may wonder why I'm so sure that they are allomorphs of a single suffix instead of two distinct suffixes, but we can put this skepticism to rest right away.

The evidence for allomorphy in the inanimate plural is clear after examining the pair maχ '5' and muvalχ '50'. Lo and behold, we find the same internal alternation of χ and v and for the same reasons. We know that letter chi is used for the sound /kʰ/ (as in Classical Greek) and the letter vee is used for what is in fact a bilabial approximant /w/ (much like Classical Latin vinum 'wine', also pronounced with initial /w-/). Clearly then there is an original sound, let's label it Q for now, that evolves into both chi and vee in Proto-Etruscan based on environment. Through this sort of internal reconstruction, we may then hypothesize that pre-Proto-Etruscan probably had the following items: *maQ '5', *muQalχ '50', and inanimate plural *-Qva.

All we need to do is figure out what the quality of this original phoneme is and we're home free, right? The answer to the mystery of the paucity of /h/ in mediofinal positions in Etruscan, Lemnian and Rhaetic, quite simply lies in this alternation of chi and vee.

So if we now replace our mystery phoneme *Q with *h, everything is resolved. We can both phonetically explain the origin of the alternation as well as explain the curious disappearance of h in both word-internal and word-final positions. Most likely, medial *-h- which was probably a velar fricative became weakened at some point intervocalically and after sibilants. The only thing that remained was the "backness" of the sound which came to be reinterpreted as /w/ and consistently written with the letter vee once the ancestors of Etruscans, Lemnians and Rhaetic finally adopted their alphabet. In other positions, a velar fricative can easily harden to a velar aspirated stop, hence this would explain the evolution to chi after certain consonants and in word-final position. We may then be so bold as to predict the following for a pre-Proto-Etruscan stage: *mah '5', *muhalχ '50' (probably < *mahálχu), and an inanimate plural marker *-hva.


UPDATES
(May 20 2008) I corrected my confusing flaw that Tropylium has mentioned to me. My hypothesized antecedent form of the Etruscan inanimate plural should be *-Qva (and thus in conclusion *-hva) rather than *-Qa and its result *-ha as I had initially written. Naturally, since this hypothesized *h should only result in either Etruscan chi or vee based on the pair '5' & '50', and since the Etruscan form of this suffix, -(χ)va, usually shows both sounds together, then *-hva would seem to be in order. Although, *-ho might also be a possibility if it can be shown that word-final *-o normally erodes to *-a with residual labialization. Sorry about that. There are a lot of details here.

Cool stuff about Etruscan phonotactics

While everyone else is hohumming about how the Etruscan language is a big, unsolvable mystery, I'm more interested in finding out new information and learning more. You don't need a degree to extrapolate and develop a good theory. You just need a brain and hopefully the one you're born with because they don't hand them out during graduation ceremonies. So I shamelessly ponder on the Etruscan language myself, and after having made my own language database on my computer, I'm starting to see new patterns in how Etruscan words are shaped.

One pattern that I saw long ago was the "intrusive y". You can see this, for example, by comparing the word śa 'six' with śealχ 'sixty' (TLE 98: śealχls-c 'and of sixty'). Notice the vowel change here? The reason why a changes to e is not by random. The vowel e is often derived from the Old Etruscan diphthong ai. So when also comparing Late Etruscan śealχ with the Lemnian root sialχv- present on the Lemnos Stele (sialχveiś 'of sixty'), we may postulate earlier *śa-i-alχu, showing clearly an intrusive glide between the terminating vowel of the root and the initial vowel of the decadic ending. It appears to me that this intrusive y pops up any time two non-high vowels would otherwise clash in a derivative form and is probably related to the fact that words avoid initial /y-/ altogether in all Proto-Aegean languages, including Minoan^[1].

Then there's the nifty issue of initial consonant clusters in Etruscan. The language doesn't allow just any cluster to occur at the start of a word. Rather, the only legal initial clusters seem to be SR-, sSR- or sC-, where R is any of m, n, r , v or l, S is any stop, and C is any consonant in general. The words tmia 'temple' (PyrT 1.i), streteθ (LL 6.iii), and sren 'image' (TLE 399) are examples of the three possible types of word-onset clusters.

Just recently however, I noticed that the words in my database are showing me something else. It looks like Etruscan words have a resistence towards initial clusters with aspirated stops. So far, I've found no clusters of the SR- type with φ or χ even though there's nothing phonetically implausible about such clusters. Occasionally though, I have found the aspirated dental stop in just a few clusters (e.g. θresu in TLE 222). Here again though, it's rare which then makes me think that there's an underlying resistence to aspirated stops in Etruscan clusters. Just thought I'd share that with yo'll because I think that all these details might be useful to someone out there.


NOTES
^[1] That is to say, the symbol used for A in the Minoan Linear A writing system and the symbol used for YA were used interchangeably in word-initial position by scribes. This can be seen in the word or name YA-SA-SA-RA-ME inscribed on libation tables which is written also as A-SA-SA-RA-ME. See for example Interaction and Acculturation in the Mediterranean, edited by Best and de Vries (1980), p.160 (see link).

UPDATES
(April 3 2008) Just after posting this, I thought of another letter that occurs in the R slot, namely v /w/ (as in tva 'it shows'). So I changed "R is any of m, n, r or l" to "R is any of m, n, r , v or l".

"Proto-Aegean" - What I mean and what I don't

Language Hat recently gave me good review^[1] and of course I'm very thrilled and flattered. However, there was something in there that made me want to write a response and clarification:

"Talk of things like 'Proto-Aegean' makes me nervous, but this guy is no pushover for sloppy comparisons and hand-waving correspondences"

Gee, thanks! Erh, I think? Well, I can't say that I didn't bring upon myself this nervous skepticism. Being skeptical of what one reads, particularly when reading a quirky online blogger one isn't familiar with, is actually healthy and I expect it if one's skepticism is based firmly on objective reasoning rather than subjective feelings. It's a good sign that one's brain is functioning. The term "Proto-Aegean" isn't part of the linguist's general lexicon as yet and I'm fully aware of that fact. So I need to explain what I mean by "Proto-Aegean" in order to help people understand that I'm not as kooky as I may seem at first glance.

First off, let's go through all the nutty ideas commonly out there that I absolutely reject. I reject any attempts to translate an undeciphered language such as Etruscan or Minoan based purely on look-alike matches with random foreign languages. I do however support methodical analysis of grammatical patterns and context to deduce a more sensible translation that's a little more multi-dimensional. I reject the work of those who casually connect Minoans to Semitic by extracting inscribed words out of context or who believe that Etruscan is a language closely related to Turkish, Luwian, Abkhaz, Klingon, Esperanto or any other clearly absurd language. I really don't care whether these nutty theories are published in a book or not, or whether the theorists have a degree or not, so I guess I'm irreverent that way. I do however accept detailed morphological comparisons between language groups that show me that the author actually thought about what (s)he was writing at least several months in advance. For Etruscan however, no such detailed analyses of grammar or comparisons to other language families currently exist. In fact, 'mystery' is far more sellable than the nauseating details that I like to explore on this blog, so I doubt that I'll see a comprehensive book published on the Etruscan language for some time to come. This blog is in large part a rebellion against the dumbed-down websites and books out there on ancient languages and proto-languages. I feel that we can do much better. Our global society needs to stop thinking like mindless, relativistic vegetables and to start valuing the power of logic and self-education more.

So concerning the issue of the origins of the Etruscans, everything that we may attribute to the term 'Etruscan', whether it be Etruscan religious practices^[2] (e.g. haruspical rites), alphabet^[3], or language^[4] appear to point to eastern origins. Whatever trivial aspect of Etruscan civilization remains which can be said to be autochthonous often turns out to be of non-Etruscan origin, attributable to some Indo-European-speaking people such as Faliscans, Romans or Sabines. Herodotus records in Histories 1.94 that the Etruscans are of Lydian origin and I think that this is fundamentally correct. It's easy in the modern age to dismiss Herodotus as the 'Father of Lies' as I've sometimes read, but how many of these armchair skeptics have bothered to read word for word what the classical historian actually said in original Greek to know what they're fighting against? I've seen people distort Herodotus' account to mean somehow that Etruscans were Lydian speaking or that this is some proof that Etruscans spoke Turkish (even though the Turkish language is an import from Central Asia during the Middle Ages and closely related to Mongolian)! So given all these simple facts, I like to connect the dots and state the obvious: The Etruscans are from Anatolia. If others are too fearful of this conclusion that many other academics have suggested despite my footnotes and the several facts I cite throughout my blog, well sheesh. What can ya do?

Etruscan is also not alone but is widely accepted to have been related to Lemnian and Rhaetic^[5]. Lemnian was spoken on the island of Lemnos in... {drumroll please}... the Aegean. Big shocker there. So moving on with my spooky Proto-Aegean concept with my head held high, I think I'll get a little cocky. I suggest (more tentatively, I admit) that Eteo-Cretan, Eteo-Cypriot and Minoan^[6], languages also centering around the Aegean islands and Cyprus, were also part of this Proto-Aegean linguistic group.


So now let's draw a circle around Greece, Western Anatolia, Cyprus, Crete and the Aegean islands. We then start to see the linguistic pattern that I'm getting at. An entire language family forgotten in the mists of time and modern-day mystery mongering. What's somewhat irritating to me and which should be irritating to you, the reader, is how we have an 'Etruscan mystery', a 'Minoan mystery', an 'Eteo-Cretan mystery' and an 'Eteo-Cypriot mystery' going on at the same time. If you research any one of these subjects, you'll get next to nothing on their languages or their translations. It's all "Who knows?" and "What if?". Why is this region and this time period such a freakin' mystery? Is it really because we lack information to piece it all together or is it because our power of concentration lacks get-up-and-go to solve problems without the use of a computer crutch?

Anyways, this is what I mean by "Proto-Aegean". It sits there before you readers, waiting to be developed further.


NOTES
^[1] While Language Hat gave me a good review, the blogger for whatever reason has a very laissez-faire policy on comments such that his commentbox filled up quickly with the most obscene rhetoric from anonymous trolls. I deemed it wise therefore to promply divorce this blog from that senselessness completely. The original review with comments are here but I also made a response with pictures of the original comments on his site that I found were deeply offensive for him to have published.
^[2] I've already discussed the comparison of the Babylonian liver model with the Etruscan Piacenza Liver model as one clear piece of proof that Etruscan haruspicy originated from the same practices found in Western Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent in my unfinished, multi-part rant called Finding Structure in the Piacenza Liver despite academic claptrap. If you don't believe me, you can always consult the Encyclopedia Britannica at your local library that will tell you the same thing I am here (minus the museum photo of the Babylonian artifact, that is).
^[3] See for example Fischer, A History of Writing (2001), p.88, fig.54 (link). Keep in mind that the author here falls into the trap of assuming a priori that Etruscans obtained their alphabet from the Greeks rather than directly from Phoenicians. However the existence of the Pyrgi Tablets proves that trading contacts between Etruscans and Phoenicians were already well established before 500 BCE. Simultaneously, there is no conclusive proof as yet that Etruscans obtained their alphabet specifically from the Greeks, nor do I wager that we will ever find it.
^[4] R.S.P Beekes explores the Anatolian origin of Etruscans in his article The Origin of the Etruscans [pdf]. Also some words are clearly of direct Semitic origin which can be seen most clearly in the numerals (e.g. Etruscan śar '10' versus Phoenician ʕsr, Hebrew ʕeśer-, Tigre ʕasər and Ugaritic ʕašar-).
^[5] Fortson, Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction (2004), p.246 (see link).
^[6] An interesting quote from Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (1967), p.34 (see link) reads: "In 1940, a new name appears for the first time in the literature of the subject: Michael Ventris, then only eighteen years old. His article called 'Introducing the Minoan Language' was published in the American Journal of Archaeology; [...] The basic idea was to find a language which might be related to Minoan. Ventris' candidate was Etruscan;" However interestingly, Ventris sought to connect Linear B, rather than Linear A, to the Etruscan language. Too bad. Regardless, he managed to decipher Linear B as an older form of Greek, leaving Linear A undeciphered to this day.

UPDATES
(Feb 20 2008) I created a quick illustrative graphic of this conjectured Proto-Aegean. Enjoy!