More on Etruscan verb *zil-

To add to my previous rant, Overseeing in Anatolia, it turns out that a quick google search yielded a gem in my favour. To recap, since the attested Etruscan words zilaθ and zilχ strongly imply a verbal root *zil- presumably meaning 'to oversee, to supervise', I considered the possibility that the verb was simply inherited from a Proto-Cyprian form *zila-. I then considered the possibility of a relationship between this word and Hattic zilat 'throne, seat' by way of a cultural exchange between these two unrelated language groups. I asked: Could this latter word be built on a Hattic verbal root -zil? Is there a shared verb pertaining to governance between Hattic and Cyprian? Sadly, Cyprian-Hattic loans seem to be hard to examine given the gaps in present-day linguistic information of that region and time period.

Now to the aforementioned gem. I came across Yasemin Arikan's article, An official in Hittite cult: ^LUtazzelli-, where he surprisingly contemplates precisely this Hattic verb, *-zil, but with the added evidence of another Hattic word, *ta-zil, pertaining to a type of official. If I understand correctly so far, ta- creates derivative nouns as in *ta-parfasu (cf. Hittite taparfasu-, a type of ritual bread), and another noun *t-astup (cf. Hittite tastuppa-). Both of these latter nouns are mentioned in Petra Goedegebuure's article I read previously.

Overseeing in Ancient Anatolia

A particular Etruscan word currently haunts my mental processes, zil 'to oversee'. It's the verbal base of the participle zilaθ 'supervised' and the noun zilχ 'supervision'. I have some quams against the comparatively exaggerated values given by Larissa and Giuliano Bonfante that would have zilaθ mapped to English 'magistrate' and zilχ equivalent to 'magistracy'. For zilci Larthal Cusuś, which they translate as 'in the magistracy of Larth Cusu', I read less fanfare into it: 'Under the supervision of Larth Cusu'.

As with every morpheme I've entered into my database so far, I ask myself: What's the etymology of this verb zil 'to oversee'? Where does it come from? If inherited from Proto-Cyprian, a form *zila would be indicated for the 2nd millennium BCE. If Proto-Cyprian is also to be located in Cyprus and Western Turkey (including Lydia, as Herodotus had himself prescribed for the ancestors of the Etruscans), it strongly appears as though interaction with the Hattic language, cradled once upon a time in central Turkey, would not just be likely but inevitable.

This is why it's curious that we should find a Hattic word zilat being given the meaning of 'seat' or 'throne'. The Hattic word for 'to sit' is already known to be nifas though. It builds the name Hanfasuit 'She of the throne' (ha- 'down (?)' + -nifas 'to sit' + -it [feminine marker]), an epithet of a goddess that was borrowed into Hittite as Halmasuit. So what morphemes then compose zilat? An understandable hunch enters my head: Could Hattic have had a related verb stem *-zil meaning 'to oversee'? Is this a possible piece of evidence in favour of Hattic-Cyprian language contact?

If so, the proof remains unsatisfying and paltry. I naturally need further evidence to build a stronger case.

Hattic grammar and Proto-Aegean

I'm currently data-mining an excellent article about a very obscure subject, that of Hattic grammar. The article is written by Petra Goedegebuure who gave it a rather verbose title: Central Anatolian languages and language communities in the colony period: A Luwian-Hattian symbiosis and the independent Hittites (2008). It's refreshing that the author has a mature grasp of the subtleties regarding cultural identity and language. Sometimes language shifts while the culture stays largely the same; sometimes culture may alter radically with no large changes to language. A question she explores is: Can certain peculiarities of the Hattic language hint at the specifics of complex, unrecorded shifts in language and culture/cultural identity between the Hattians and the Indo-European speaking population in early Anatolia?

She gives a wealth of thorough examples showing Hattic grammar in action and my eyes have been opened. More frivolously, I believe I can now partially conjugate a Hattic verb with a modest degree of confidence: fa-nifas 'I sit', u-nifas 'you sit', an-nifas 'he/she sits', ai-nifas 'we sit' and nifas '(they) sit'. There are a camp of linguists who believe that Hattic belongs with the Abkhaz-Adyghe languages^[1] that are currently restricted to the northern regions of the Caucasus mountains and I think this most likely.


A Proto-Cyprian connection?

While a few kooks carry on dreaming that Etruscan is actually related to Hattic^[2], the two languages couldn't be any more alien to each other. Hattic is a prefixing language and exhibits an underlying VSO morphology (ie. verb-subject-object, as in Semitic and Egyptian languages) while Etruscan strictly uses suffixes. If there were any prefixes in Etruscan, we can expect them to be very rare, as is in fact typical of any SOV language (compare with other SOV languages like Inuktitut, Japanese and Turkish, for example). We can be certain then that the Cyprian languages, like Etruscan and Eteo-Cypriot, represented an entirely separate language group to Hattic.

Yet, there's still the potential that some traces of Hattian influence lurk in Etruscan through lexical and structural borrowings. Comparing the locations of Hattic (central Anatolia) and of Proto-Cyprian (western Anatolia & Cyprus) alone warrant the thought. And if not with Proto-Cyprian, could there have been an interaction with the older Proto-Aegean stage in the 3rd millennium BCE from which Minoan too would derive? This is why I've been feverishly recording Hattic vocabulary into my computer. Cross-correlation is delicious.

Missing Etruscan onsets

This time, a much shorter post about the implications of Cyprian Syncope on Etruscan and about gaps in the expected available onset possibilities. If I've defined this Pre-Etruscan syncope properly, then it's curious that Etruscan lacks some expected clusters that could not have been reason to trigger stress shift to the first syllable. As I said before, wholesale onset deletion is unlikely to have happened to deal with impending invalid clusters since this would surely overload the vocabulary with a deluge of monosyllabic homophones which would in turn undoubtedly trigger tonogenesis like in Chinese in order to compensate with this imagined "lexical condensation". (But there's no evidence for tones in Etruscan so we aren't going there.)

I now have 1800 entries with over 4300 word forms in my database so I expect to find ample stuff when I search for words in Etruscan starting with pr-. Yet what does my simple search yield? I have only 11 headings starting with this onset! Six of them are names of either Italic or Greek origin (Prastina, Prisina, Priiamne, Prumaθe, Prumaθina and Prusilna). Of the remaining words (besides the one mystery term prezu I have trouble assigning a value and origin to), pruχu 'pitcher', pruχuna 'of the pitcher', prumaθś 'great-grandson' and prunta ~ frunta 'augur of lightning') are all Greek or Latin loanwords (cf. πρόχους, pronepos and βροντή). This same pattern happens when I search for pl- , seeing likewise only 11 terms consisting of many names and few words, all non-native terms. Why should this be so? What's so exotic about this onset cluster in a language with ample terms starting with #tr or #sr?!

We might invent a rule that *pR- (R = resonant) was somehow avoided in Proto-Cyprian by its aforementioned stress shift rule while *tR- and *sR- were allowed but I wince at the irregularity in that. Yet if the cluster survived into the post-Cyprian era, it suggests one possible thing: word-initial clusters of the form *pR were regularly simplified in Pre-Etruscan by deleting *p. I must remind myself to investigate this pattern further.


UPDATE

15 Oct 2010: I changed "Yet if the cluster survived into the post-Cyprian era, it suggests one thing" to something less absolute: "Yet if the cluster survived into the post-Cyprian era, it suggests one possible thing". Afterall we must rationally acknowledge other logical possibilities that may not be considered such as, perhaps, a general softening of *pR to *fR (although I have only five headings thus far in #fR making that particular idea impractical).

Aegean phonotactics and more about Cyprian Syncope

After I posted Adapting the rule of Cyprian Syncope, Tropylium strove hard to paint it as linguistically unnatural or unoptimal while pushing some alternatives that I don't believe he researched. Being stubborn and fierce about my linguistics, I challenge his reasons for objection. Disbelief is no less in need of firm basis than belief. Let's quickly go over my theory some more to see why it's indeed natural, or at least more natural than anything I've seen anyone come up with.

Since stress accent must fall on one of the first two syllables in Aegean (and in later Minoan) we might say that accent placement is left-handed. By dividing the Aegean protoword into feet of two syllables consisting of trochees (or strong followed by weak syllables), then we see how Cyprian consistently erodes weak syllables towards the left and how this explains Etruscan's later shape. Let's simply make up some example forms to illustrate my theory at work, without being obstructed for now by the separate issue of the validity of any of my reconstructions:

Aegean		Cyprian
**áinatʰo [ˈai . na . ˌtʰo] ( ¯ ˘ | ¯ )	→	**áinatʰu [ˈai. na . tʰu] ( ¯ ˘ | ¯)
**táḳalimi [ˈta . kˤa . ˌli . mi] ( ¯ ˘ | ¯ ˘ )	→	**táklim [ˈtak . lim] ( ¯ ˘ )
**kápari [ˈka . pa . ˌri] ( ¯ ˘ | ¯ )	→	**kápri [ˈkap . ri] ( ¯ ˘ )
**sarópa [sa . ˈro . pa] ( ˘ | ¯ ˘ )	→	**srupʰ [ˈsrupʰ] ( ¯ )

In the above examples, the weak syllables all nicely squish into a previous syllable except for the first example whose diphthong blocks syncope (as per my previous post on this). The next example shows why stress shift is not just a plausible phonotactic-correcting strategy, but possibly the most optimal one to avoid unacceptable onsets, given the specific qualities of this protolanguage.

**takíru [ta . 'ki . ru] ( ˘ | ¯ ˘ )

→

**tákru ['tak . ru] ( ¯ ˘ )

Without shift, **takíru becomes Cyprian **tkir yet this disobeys constraints on onset clusters and unacceptably overloads the inherited and highly strict rules of syllabic structure. Or succinctly: "(Too much) change is scary." Certainly it takes more than a few generations before a Japanese-like language turns into a Kartvelian-like one, そうですか?

Since stop+stop sequences are simply not found in Etruscan or related languages, some rule or rules must have repaired or avoided these logically inevitable conflicts. Simple onset deletion is a common cluster-fighting strategy in world languages and this would produce **kir, although this would also surely create a tsunami of homophones! (That is, we'd see that a long list of terms like **takíru, **kʰakíra, **pakíri, etc. had all merged to **kir. Surely not.) Seeing it from this angle, onset deletion doesn't pass muster.

Lenition of the offending onset is barely a better strategy to avoid conflict in this respect because similar issues resurface. While **takíru could always plausibly yield **skír if lenition were so, what about a word like **pakíri which couldn't possibly produce **fkír in Etruscan! We might appeal to a mixture of lenition and onset deletion, I suppose, but now we're already multiplying hypotheses and assuming much too much.

By contrast, accent shift is in this case far more natural than wholesale onset deletion or piecemeal lenition. It also offers some added benefits besides its simplicity, obviously one of them being avoidance of homophony if nothing else. Also since the stress was already largely on the first syllable, this leftward stress shift would only help to pin an occasionally wandering accent permanently onto the first syllable (as in Proto-Germanic).

So accent regularization, solving cluster conflicts, preserving inherited consonantism, and avoiding troublesome homophony are a lot of things this strategy of simple stress accent shift has to offer that make it a win-win over other ideas pushed by Tropylium in my commentbox. Thus **takíru becomes Cyprian **tákru (not **tkir, **kir, or **zkir).

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

Subtle truths about Etruscan letter-names

Long ago, I had privately indulged in tentatively reconstructing letter-names in the Etruscan alphabet based on the hunch that they could likely be related to those found in Greek (ie. alpha, beta, gamma, delta, etc. < West Semitic). Perhaps we could theorize something like *alφa, *peta, *camla, *talta, etc. Contrary to this, it seems that many specialists have assumed that the Etruscan letter-names had inspired, or were even identical to, the Latin names that the Western world now learns from gradeschool.^[1] The Latin alphabet rejected the original but arcane Semitic-derived names and had opted for a more phonetic naming system, as follows:

ā, bē, cē, dē, ē, ef, gē, hā, ī, kā, el, em, en, ō, pē, qū, er, es, tē, ū, ex (ix), hy (ī Graeca), zēta

I've never heard of conclusive facts proving the assumption that this is derived from Etruscan naming practices, however there are simple facts that can easily abolish this belief. For example, Latin maintains a contrast in the alphabet between bē and pē. This is patently impossible in Etruscan with only unvoiced stops. So if the claim were true, Latin's allegedly Etruscan antecedents could only have been *pe for both! The same contradiction immediately obstructs us concerning Latin dē and tē which can equally find no source in Etruscan due to a more restricted phonology. So evidently it was the Italic population that innovated these names, not the Etruscans who no doubt used the original Semitic-derived names familiar to Greeks. For Latin bē & pē, Etruscans can be predicted to have uttered *peta and *pei respectively.


NOTES
^[1] Arthur Gordon, On the origins of the Latin alphabet: Modern views (1969) (see link); Ullman/Brown, Ancient writing and its influence (1963), p.167 (see link).