An offering to Tluschva

Building on my previous elaboration on the Etruscan god Tluschva, we still have a partially translated inscription whose second line needs interpretation:

kanuta larecenas lauteniθa aranθia pinies puia turuce
tlusχval marveθul faliaθere

It's rather clear that the first line of the inscription records a freedwoman named Kanuta giving an offering. I can only imagine that perhaps originally an Oscan slave-girl from the south, the Larecena household had bought Kanuta as hired help and a reasonably to-do man of the Pinie family eventually swept her off her feet in marriage. Somewhere in between she was manumitted and became a full-fledged Etruscan citizen. In the end, however it transpired, I gather the freedwoman must have gained personal wealth of her own to have made this fine offering. Not bad for a former slave. Good for her. Of course, if somebody has an alternative biography in mind, I'm open to new perspectives as long as it carefully respects the grammar of the first line.

In the second line, the god Tluschva is named recipient of Kanuta's offering and I've already identified this deity as the god of the seas, comparable to Roman Neptune, based on my interpretation of the outer rim of the Piacenza Liver. Now we just need to grasp the next two hapaxes, marveθul and faliaθere, and wrap our translation up into a package that's historically coherent.

Rex Wallace, like countless 19th-century linguists before him, indulges in idle Latin look-alikes with marones and falando on his own blog but this just isn't acceptable or productive in modern linguistics. A careful morphological breakdown must be preferred over eyeballing. Assuming that the words are parsed correctly, first and foremost marveθul must be a type-II genitive of *marveθ while faliaθere is an animate locative plural of *faliaθ. In any novel Etruscan word we may encounter, native derivations are predictably built on head-first roots. Ergo, chances are that if marveθul and faliaθere are native formations, they are built on roots mar 'to harvest' and fala 'hill; hypogeum' respectively. I give these roots these values based on a number of other inscriptions where these values seem to consistently fit. The former root is present in the Etruscan godname Maris 'Harvester', consistent with Roman Mars' original agrarian function, while I trace the latter root to a recent loan (cf. Latin fala 'siege tower') with funerary nuances.

Put it together and the whole inscription then reads: "Kanuta, freedwoman of the Larecena, Aranth Pinie's wife, gave to Tluschva of the Harvested (Tlusχval Marveθul) before those of the hypogeum". And what parallels of Tluschva of the Harvested are present in the surrounding classical world of that time, pray tell? Try the Roman god Consus, god of harvested fruits and wheat.^[1] Both Dionysius and Livy mention his connection with the god Neptune and subterranean altars were devoted to him. In the absence of other possibilities discussed online, here's a tantalizing match to consider.


NOTES
^[1] Takács, Vestal virgins, sibyls, and matrons: Women in Roman religion (2008), p.55 (see link): "On August 21st, the Romans honored Consus, god of harvested fruit, in general, and wheat, in particular. [...] The Consualia featured horse races. Since the horse was associated with Neptune's Greek equivalent, Poseidon, this was reason enough to think the festival was in honor of the equestrian Neptune (Livy 1.9.6)."

The death of TV

Ever since Japan's horrible earthquake, the vultures at CTV News, CBC News, BBC news and many other news stations available on my TV have predictably latched on, chasing the sensational headlines like crack addicts chasing the pipe, providing 24-hour coverage for sadists who need to know all the calamitous details of other people's misery in the comfort of their safe living rooms. The toxicity levels of the television programs are starting to make me noxious.

If the TV news were informational and constructive at all it wouldn't bother me, but I shake my head at how consistently neurotic and obsessive these "newscasters" are at spinning everything into even bigger negatives than the world already is wrought with. While I'm usually pessimistic about a lot of things, television is giving me a Mr BadNews overdose now on a consistent basis. They've naturally latched on to the stories of damaged nuclear reactors after the earthquake and now want to make us all afraid about nuclear meltdown à la Chernobyl. But even if the dreaded worst happens, what could any viewer do about it? In what way does this news inform most of us? All it does is enrage while disempowering us as we are left clueless on how to seriously budge the giant corporate machine or aid the damaged world by any realistic and meaningul way.

If I want balanced coverage of a particular topic or to learn about something other than the Japan earthquake today (like, say, those poor people in Libya still fighting for their freedom that we all forgot about, hmm?), the internet supplies more information. I find myself instinctively turning off the TV altogether and being online. If one feels they want to help, yet again, that information is online. This is strange because, being in my mid-30s, I grew up with TV but I'm now wondering why anyone bothers with that dumb box anymore. It's just static noise. Two and Half Men again? No, thanks. Even Charlie Sheen knows it's shoveled manure so he can't be all that kookoo.

In the past decade especially, I feel like TV has become an antiquated medium for bitter old people with no taste. I google for the information I want when I need to seek out a more balanced picture of world events. I'm resourceful enough to find better shows and movies online instead of being subjected to repeat after repeat on TV.

There's probably little point to my post today other than to remark on how hopelessly irrelevant television has become to me and I'm suspecting, most of you too. I suppose this still has relevance at least to modern sociology and the topic of paradigm shifts. I celebrate TV's destruction (or to be more detailed, the complete assimilation of television into the more expansive, diverse and versatile internet medium).