Okay, long story short, it's true what they say: Bad things come in threes. One of the problems lately has been that my internet connection has been for some reason impaired and I will have to get that fixed. The cable gods must be angry. So I'm here now at a library making my next blog entry. Other crap has happened at the same time and maybe some day I'll share that with you all. At any rate, let's get back to the last subject I wrote about: Etruscan phonotactics.
Etruscan phonotactics are intriguing to me because it's the kind of details that never ever show up in current books on the Etruscan language. Most authors seem to be effectively hijacked by an overhyped mystery of Etruscan civilization to be capable of moving forward and coming up with new questions to resolve and explore with the reader. I feel as though the available reading materials are impoverished and I'm starving for something new. So I'm treading new ground here and I realize in hindsight that my definition of these onset clusters isn't complete. None of you piped up to correct me either! This saddens me but nonetheless at least I'm interested in these nagging details and my devil's advocate is fully oiled.
I feel compelled to expose glaring counterexamples to my previous claims such as fler 'offering' and the rather uncommon gentilicium Fnesci which I failed to account for. In these instances, we have a bilabial fricative followed by a resonant. While rarer than word-initial stop+resonant sequences, such clusters appear to be legal formations in Etruscan. Certainly the cluster fn- is so unusual that it emphasizes my point that at some point in a Pre-Etruscan stage, accent must have fell at times on the second syllable and then had succumb to syncope to produce these and other fascinating clusters (i.e. the word tmia 'temple' also comes to mind). So it seems that we need to expand these rules a bit before they're acceptable.
Let's then restate the rule as the following and see whether this sits well on my conscience: Valid word-initial clusters in Etruscan are either of the form FR-, sS- or (s)SR- where F = fricative (/s/, /ɸ/), R = resonant (/m/, /n/, /l/, /r/, /w/) and S = stop (/p/, /t/, /k/, /pʰ/, /tʰ/, /kʰ/). In this way, lexical items like sren, fler and Fnesci are covered by FR-; staile and scuna are covered by sS-; and finally tmia, tnucasi, tleχe, tva, clen, θresu, and streteθ are covered by (s)SR-. Does this sound good? Speak to me people! Share questions.
7 Apr 2008
3 Apr 2008
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".
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".
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