Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days!

[Damien Erwan Perrotin]

-----Original Message-----
 From  Eduard Selleslagh <edsel at glo.be>
Date Sun, 11 Jul 1999 12:31:58 +0200

>Ed said

>There seems to be a slight misunderstanding here: with "later Lat. 'am-'" I
>meant the beginning of words like 'amare', 'amicus', etc. , i.e. without
>the -b-, which - according to the reasoning above - would have transited via
>Etruscan, as opposed to those that came straight from PIE and preserved the
>(a)m(.)b-.

>Apart from all that, I never suggested that 'ambo', ambi-', Grk. 'amphi'
>(and Cat. 'amb', which proved to be unrelated) etc. were of Etruscan origin,
>only that they should be added to the data pool when looking at possible
>relationships of Etr. 'am(e)-' and Lat. 'amicus' etc. It seems to me that
>this led to an interesting discussion that yielded the possibility of the
>existance of two parallel paths: one 'directly' from PIE to Latin and one
>via Etruscan.

Ed

[Damien Erwan Perrotin]

The idea is interesting, but probably inexact as am- is not present only
in Latin but also in Lydian (ama : to love) and in Breton (afan : to
kiss from an older Brythonnic *ama). It is still possible that the
Lydian form was a borrowing from an Etruscan-like tongue of the Aegean,
but that is quite unlikely for Breton. So there can be only three
explainations for the ressemblance you point out :
a: chance ressemblance (always possible)
b: Etruscan borrowed the word from Latin or from Celtic
c: Etruscan is remotely linked to IE and this root is a remnant of this
old relationship.

Personnally, I favor the third thesis, but there is still work to do
before proving it.

Damien Erwan Perrotin