Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days!

[Steven A. Gustafson]

Adolfo Zavaroni wrote:

> Like Paolo Agostini, I too think that Etruscan
> had perfective forms in -v-
> (cf. tenve = Lat. tenuit, zilakhnve = '(he) ruled',
> heramve 'profatus est', eisnev < eisneve '(he) was sacerdos' etc.).

Without context we can also understand, it's hard to tell; but it would
seem to me that this form in -ve, if it's really there (and I would not
presume to even form a personal opinion on that), would seem to me to
have a past progressive or "imperfect" meaning, rather than a past
definite.  All the verbs you mention seem more plausible as past
progressives:  "he held," "he ruled," "it is foretold," "he was
priest."  (Then why -svalce-, "he lived?" rather than *svalve?)

The word -eisnev- looks to me like it is made on an adjective; the root
eis- "god," which has already come up, plus the adjective suffix -(i)na,
familiar from -s/uthina-, "belonging to a tomb/the dead;" plus your
tense ending.  This may be a clue to its distribution.  Perhaps it's
some kind of participle?

(-S/uthina-.  An American idiom whose origin I don't know makes 'go
south' mean 'to die.'  Of course, the handy Germanic terms for the four
cardinal directions are also at least partly hard to explain [except for
perhaps 'east'] in PIE terms, and may therefore come from the non-IE
Germanic substrate.  I realise that my fancy is veering into linguistic
X-Files territory here, to suggest that an Etruscan idiom made its way
into colloquial American.  [And, of course, the conventional explanation
of -south- is that it represents "sun" + -th, with the /n/ dropped and
the /u/ predictably lengthened for English.  But the /n/ isn't there in
Swedish -soeder-, and NGmc usually keeps it in this position (cf.
-sooth- with Sw. -sant-); nor was it there in the Frankish source of
French -sud-.])

>  It could not be excluded that -ve- (later -v) is due to Italic
> contacts.

Of course; but the Latin perfects in -vi &c. are themselves of somewhat
obscure origin, and don't seem to match anything that has been preserved
for us in other Italic languages; which is what got this discussion
started in the first place.

--
Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law
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