Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days!

[Eduard Selleslagh]

-----Original Message-----
From: Steven A. Gustafson <stevegus at aye.net>
Date: Friday, June 18, 1999 6:30 AM

[snip]

>(-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-.])

[Ed Selleslagh]

Maybe it has something to do with left-handed people being called
'southpaws', as all Americans are supposed to be looking west ;-). Remember,
left is 'sinister', so much that in Castilian they considered 'siniestro' a
taboo word and replaced it by a Basque loan word (ezkerra > izquierda).

Ed.