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.