Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! (was: Latin perfects)

[Steven A. Gustafson]

Rick Mc Callister wrote:

> Past participle ending seems to be -u
> which is passive if the verb is transitive
> and active if the verb is intransitive

Ergativity?  (Uh oh. . .)

Etruscan would seem to me to be a perfect test for claims of Nostratic
and other super-families.  It is a prime candidate because it is a
language about which we still know relatively little.  It is not
Indo-European, but it seems possibly related.  For example, we know that
Etruscan had:

1st sing. pronoun: nom. -mi-, acc. -mini-.

Demonstratives -ita-, -eta- and -ica-, -eca-.

Nouns seem to have had four cases.  In the singular, these include a
genitive which often ends in -as or -ial, a dative in -l or -al, and a
locative in -thi.

If there is a language that cannot be classified as Indo-European, but
can be related to a reconstructed common ancestor, Etruscan would seem
to be a likely candidate.  In fact, if these features mentioned above
were -all- we knew about Etruscan, it might have -been- classed as IE.
Fortunately, we have a much larger body of texts.

I've a pet crank theory that Etruscan might be related to the non-IE
substrate spoken by the boat-people that seems to be present in
Germanic.  This is a far-fetched hypothesis.

There do seem to be some vocabulary coincidences:  -aisar-, Etruscan for
"gods;" cf. ON -aesir-, "celestial gods."  Both Etruscan and Germanic
had plurals in -aR, which in the case of Germanic represents *-az.

When borrowing Greek mythological names and other words, the Etruscans
did phonetic violence to 'em that resembles the Germanic sound shift.
Specifically, Greek b, d, g > p, t, k in Etruscan.  Kastor stayed Castur
in Etruscan, but Polydeukes became Pulutuk.  (And Pulutuk became Pollux
in Latin.)

There does also seem to be some evidence of cultural contact between
Germans and the inhabitants of Northern Italy at an early, pre-Roman
date, probably around 200 BCE at latest.  The Runic alphabet seems to
have been created from an Etruscan or North Italian prototype.

--
Amorem semel contraxi. Consanui, et morbi immunis sum.