A Pre-Greek name for Odysseus

In my previous post (Odysseus, Uthuze and Utnapishtim), I finished off with the dangling idea that the name Odysseus had reached Anatolia and the Aegean by the second millenium BCE. This shouldn't be a provocative speculation given the facts and communis opinio. However, the question is exactly how the name entered Greek and how a Sumerian name Utu-zi suggested by the Babylonian rendering of the name Utnapishtim (UD.ZI^tim) might have even influenced Greek if Sumerian is said to have been a dead language by the beginning of the 2nd millenium BCE!

There are additional facts that make this topic very intriguing, such as the fact that Ὀδυσσεύς (''Odusseús'') is but one Greek reflex of the name, others being Ὀλυσσεύς (''Olusseús''), Οὐλιξεύς (''Oulikseús'') and Οὐλίξης (''Oulíksēs'') from whence Latin Ulysses. Notice the alternation of d to l? Strangely enough Robert Beekes identifies a lot of "Pre-Greek" words with this same alternation and many of the pairs seem to me to be rather convincing. As previously mentioned, the Etruscan name shows an aspirated plosive th, yet another phoneme for what is surely the same sound in the beginning.

So here's what I hypothesize to explain all this maddening variation. Let's presume that Beekes' observation of "Pre-Greek" d/l alternation is suggestive of Minoan phonology. The unetymologizable d/l pairs in Greek are afterall inexorably linked to the current awkwardness of the Minoan transliteration (cf. Paleoglot: A new value for Minoan 'd') which doesn't exhibit a natural phonology for a language. I've previously suggested an affricate /t͡ʃ/ for Minoan "d" but I'm lately honestly considering an affricate /t͡θ/, attested in Athabaskan languages, which when unaspirated may be mistaken as either a "d" or an "l", particularly in a language like Mycenaean Greek which evidently lacked this sound. This brings us to a reconstructed Minoan form *Oduze /'Ot͡θut͡se/ which is more in line with the presumed Sumerian form.

Now how might the Sumerian form enter Minoan by chance? Certainly one way would be if a Minoan scribe moderately knowledgeable in Babylonian characters read the Sumerograms UD.ZI literally as Utuzi. The use of the original Sumerian phonetic values for the Babylonian symbols when writing Babylonian long postdates the extinction of the Sumerian language.

Finally, back to the Etruscan aspirated plosive, I would suggest that there may be a correspondance between Minoan "d" /t͡θ/ and Proto-Cyprian *tʰ. (Note: I've now decided to call Proto-Etrusco-Cypriot simply Proto-Cyprian since, for one thing, it's easier to type. Lol.) From Cyprian, we get the derivative languages Etruscan, Lemnian, Rhaetic, Eteo-Cypriot and Eteo-Cretan.

Odysseus, Uthuze and Utnapishtim

I've been dwelling the past few days on the origin of Etruscan words. Many words appear to be of Doric origin and then there are even older loanwords, it seems, showing Anatolian IE, West Semitic and Egyptian influence. On the topic of the origin of the Etruscan name, Uθuze (''ET Cy G.1'' and ''OI G.39''), we need only look to a borrowing from Greek Ὀδυσσεύς 'Odysseus'. Or so it seems.

Now, please forgive me, my readers, if I should tread on something that's already understood by everyone but me. However, on closer inspection of the aforementioned Greco-Etruscan connection, even if we should say that the name was borrowed from a Greek vocative form Odusseu, we can see that Greek voiced, unaspirated /d/ doesn't nicely become a voiceless aspirated /tʰ/ at all. We should rather expect Etruscan plain t. And thus, we trek through yet another etymological safari hunt.

Upon investigating the origin of Odysseus, we may find that the origin is spoken of vaguely as "uncertain". As far as I'm concerned, uncertain is one of the most disgusting words in the English language because it's such a common excuse for intellectual laziness. Why is it uncertain? Must it truly be uncertain?

In the Etruscan form, I can't help but be idly amused by Uθ- at the beginning which strongly reminds me of Sumerian utu 'sun'. This combined with a free-word association with Utnapishtim, the legendary Babylonian survivor of the World Flood, evokes a Sumerian name Utu-zi 'Life-breath of the sun' being readapted to Ut-napishtim (napishtim = 'life, breath') but still written in script using the Sumerograms UD-ZI^[1]. Things get complicated if we consider that the other corresponding Sumerian name normally cited, Zi-ud-sura, may be a "re-borrowing". That is to say, Sumerian Utu-zi 'Life-breath of the sun' would have become a partial calque Ut(a)-napishtim which would be reinterpreted by scribes and priests to mean 'he found (uta-) life-breath (napishtim)' (nb. the replacement of Sum. utu 'sun' with Bab. ūta 'found') and thus back into Sumerian with the reformulated Zi-ud-sura 'Life of long days', now implying a character who has found immortality. Odysseus' relationships to an underlying sun-god motif have already been noted in literature which is what made my synapses fire in the first place.

So I now wonder if this Sumerian name Utuzi reached Anatolia and the Aegean by the second millenium BCE in order to better explain the source of the Greek and Etruscan names.


NOTES
^[1] It seems that the journal Kairo (1987) has beaten me to the punch on that one (see link).

A ramble about the Nostratic pronominal system, part 2

(Continued from A ramble about the Nostratic pronominal system.)

In my view, long-range comparative linguists who think that they have to make a really long list of highly tentative cognates to impress people are a dime a dozen. What seperates the wheat from the chaff is how structured and attentive to detail a theory is. A theory without a structure isn't a theory; it's nothing more than a tale heard at a local pub. Publishing drunken tales still doesn't make them theories.

So this is why I encourage people who are interested in this topic to first explore the Nostratic pronominal system because it's safe to say that if the premise of Nostratic has any truth to it, there should be an underlying pronominal system that explains the interrelationship of pronominal systems of later language groups that Nostratic is said to have begotten. We should be starting with these questions instead of putting the cart before the horse and comparing look-alike words by pure, directionless whim. Knowing how these pronominal systems are related to each other goes a long way to understanding the evolution of Nostratic and to finding more credible sound correspondences.

Now since this is all at the level of entertaining conjecture, I'll just spit out what I think, like the drunken bar patron that I am. Grab yourselves a drink too, my buddies! There is one interesting, recurring feature in Nostratic language groups that I notice: a suppletive system involving two very unrelated forms for each person. So for example, in Indo-European we have two sets of pronominal endings in use: the *mi-set (*-m, *-s, *-t) and the *h₂e-set (*-h₂e, *-th₂e, *-e). The former set was used for imperfective forms and the latter for perfective forms in most IE languages while in Anatolian it seems that verbs were inherently part of either a mi- or hi-conjugation class. We see in Uralic-Yukaghir, Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut languages a shared theme of subjective-objective conjugation and again there are two different sets of endings that seem to be quite ancient (e.g. Hungarian 1ps -m & -k, 2ps -d & -l). Bomhard believes that Dravidian is also a Nostratic language but Dravidian uses quite different pronouns in the first and second person from the other Nostratic languages (*yān, *nīn) forcing him to reconstruct extra Nostratic pronouns just to account for them. In Afro-Asiatic languages, yet again, we apparently have two different sets (Middle Egyptian *anāka "I" > Sahidic Coptic anok versus Middle Egyptian *anāna "we" > Sahidic Coptic anon).

So I figure the best way to explain that is to propose a suppletive absolutive-ergative system for Nostratic as follows (note that my intention is to conjecture for the sake of discussion):

	ergative	absolutive
1ps	*nu (> *mu)	*hu
2ps	*tu	*nu
3ps	*ca	*ʔi

These pronouns might have optionally bore the suffix *-n for uncertain reasons. Absolutive pronouns are used for the agent of intransitive verbs and patients of transitive verbs while ergative pronouns are used for the agents of transitive verbs. As a result, we would expect to see the ergative and absolutive pronouns eventually attached to verbs as affixes in a new subjective-objective conjugation as I believe could have happened in a hypothetical ancestor of Indo-European, Altaic, Uralic-Yukaghir, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut and Dravidian. In Indo-European, a subjective-objective system could eventually evolve into the mi- and hi-classes of Anatolian IE because some verbs by nature are more apt to be either subjective or objective. It appears that an extra element *-e has been added to this absolutive set at an early stage of PIE, perhaps to use it for transitive verbs by marking it with a dummy object (nb. PIE *i- "he, she, it" and *e "here, there"). The same system can evolve into a contrast of imperfective and perfective as well because there is an implicit nuance of modal differences when dealing with subjective and objective conjugation as in the Siberian language called Nenets. Verbs lacking objects tend to convey a perfective sense^[1]. The PIE 2ps in *-s can be explained by softening of final *-t in word-final position and the 3ps in *-t can be attributed to the attachment of the demonstative stem *to- to an originally vowel-final form long after. In boreal languages like Uralic-Yukaghir, Eskimo-Aleut and Chukchi-Kamchatkan, the subjective-objective system could have evolved into *-m versus *-ɣ and 2ps *-t versus *-n. This system also helps to explain what would have happened in Dravidian. Simply put, Dravidian could have opted to generalize the absolutive pronouns for both agents and patients of actions and thus PDr *yān < *yan < *ʔin < *hun "I (abs.)" and PDr *nīn < *nin < *nun "you (abs.)".

NOTES
^[1] See Pedersen, Zur Frage nach der Urverwandtschaft des Indoeuropäischen mit dem Ugrofinnischen, Memoires de la Société Finnoougrienne 67, pp.311-315, Helsinki. He discusses the derivation of PIE's so-called "perfective" endings from a pre-IE intransitive conjugation. Also Abraham/Kulikov (eds.), Tense-Aspect, Transitivity and Causativity (1999), pp.21-42, Amsterdam. Kulikov shows a relationship between imperfectives and transitives (and conversely between perfectives and intransitivity) using similar data from Yukaghir and Aleut.

A ramble about the Nostratic pronominal system

I'm sure I must have hinted before that I hate when some treat long-range theories (like Nostratic, North Caucasian, Dene-Caucasian, or whatever far-away proto-language) as if they're written in stone. A person with a level head recognizes these ideas for what they are, idle conjectures requiring many ammendments before something more substantial can be made of them. However, I'm not against conjecture as long as it's fully differentiated from facts or well-substantiated theories. I also think there is an important difference between sharing conjectures for discussion on a blog or in a forum versus wasting trees to write a manifesto of your pseudolinguistic doctrine for you to enforce on disbelievers.

As much as I sound like a conservative fart for downplaying long-range comparison, I'm actually quite interested in it. It's just that I haven't read anything serious enough for me to go "wow!" yet and as I learn more, the errors in books start to become more apparent. Overall, I'm the most impressed (in a very moderate sense) by the Nostratic hypothesis as presented by Allan Bomhard who proposes that Indo-European, Uralic-Yukaghir, Altaic, Eskimo-Aleut, Elamite, Dravidian, Sumerian, Kartvelian and Afro-Asiatic language families come from a parent language dated to about 15 000 BCE in a period following the last ice age. He wasn't the first to come up with this century-old theory but he had a few different takes on it. For now, Nostratic is not an established theory because it doesn't present enough evidence to prove its claims, but it doesn't hurt to suggest further improvements that may help to inspire discussion and, just maybe, progress.

When looking through Allan Bomhard's Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis (1996) or The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship (1994) co-authored by Allan Bomhard and John Kerns, one thing that I noticed was how many pronouns are being reconstructed without a clear structure. This is but one of a number of serious gaps in this theory just waiting to be resolved. The reconstructions presented by Bomhard and Kerns are always cited ad nauseum in ablaut pairs (e.g. *ma-/mə-) which of course serves no other purpose than to make the book twice as long. Since the ablaut patterns are said to be regular, there is no need to cite the second pair of each reconstruction any more than it is necessary to cite the Indo-European root *bʰer- as *bʰer-/*bʰor-/*bʰēr/*bʰr̥- each and every time. So I will dispense with irrelevancies and cite only the first pair of each of their reconstructions below.

First off, Bomhard and Kerns, on page 3 of The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship, show us this list of pronouns in the 1st and 2nd persons: *mi "I" [1ps], *tʰi "you" [2ps], *ma "we" [1pp.inclusive], *wa "we" [1pp] and *na "we" [1pp]. Immediately after are "notes" which are hampered either by irrelevancies or false information. For example, it suffices to say that Indo-European (IE) has a 1ps enclitic pronoun *me, 1ps genitive *mene, verbal 1ps thematic secondary ending *-m and verbal 1pp ending *-mes, the last being nothing more than a 1ps element with the plural ending *-es. So indeed there is ample evidence of an underlying 1ps pronominal root *me- in the deepest recesses of IE's prehistory. It's development in IE's Celtic branch however is wasteful rambling since it's obviously immaterial to Nostratic reconstruction and *me is well established in all other branches of IE even without the consideration of Celtic. Basing an Afro-Asiatic reconstruction solely on Chadic is bad practice known as "reaching". The so-called Etruscan imperative endings cited (-ti, -θ, -θi) are without substantiation, if not provably false altogether, despite ad hoc claims made by some prominent Etruscologists such as Giuliano and Larissa Bonfante. The belief that these endings are imperatives are based on ad hoc comparisons with Indo-European imperatives in *-dʰí (e.g. *h₁sdʰí /ʔəsdí/ "be!").

These aren't all the first and second person pronouns that are suggested by Bomhard and Kerns (see here). False comparisons are made between an underlying Uralic and Eskimo-Aleut 1ps ending in a velar stop on the one hand and Indo-European *h₁eǵoh₂ (cited as *ʔekʼ-) on the other^[1]. Some fun pronoun splicing of random data from the Afro-Asiatic family and presto changeo, yet another 1ps pronoun, *ʔa-. Then don't forget Bomhard's 1st person pronoun *ʔiya, supposedly proved by evidence from Chadic.

So in the 1st person alone, we now have five claims: *ʔa-, *ʔiya-, *ma-, *na- and *wa-. I'll discuss this more later.

(Continue reading the sequel: A ramble about the Nostratic pronominal system, part 2.)

NOTES
^[1] Read my views on the etymology of PIE's nominative 1ps pronoun in The origin of Indo-European ego.