Etruscans

[David L. White]

[ Moderator's note:
  David White is responding to a posting by Douglas G Kilday dated 04 Feb 2001.
  --rma ]

> Not all believers in Anatolian Etruscans are fixated on the date of 1200 BCE
> for the presumed migration. One respondent suggested a range of 1300-600.
> The discrepancy between Lemnian and Phrygian alphabets argues directly
> against any such migration during 800-600 and casts doubt on a moderately
> earlier one, since Anatolians would still consider Anatolia their homeland
> and would keep up Anatolian contacts. A sufficiently early migration
> (1300-1200) indeed makes the alphabetic issue irrelevant, but runs into the
> problem of absence from Epic tradition and historical records, as I have
> already discussed.

        I am not "fixated" on 1200 as the date for anything other than the
approximate ruin of the most famous Troy.  It could well have been several
centuries before emigrating Trojans wound up as far west as Italy.  I never
suggested a migration (significantly) after 800.  Epic tradition is not
reliable for conveying anything that does not get a poet his room and board,
i.e dramatic stories.  Precision about ethnic identities does not
necessarily serve a poet's purpose.  The historical records alluded to are
consistent with the idea that the "Trojans" went first to Thrace (as in the
Aeneid), and there began to fuse with the natives, in the process taking
over Lemos.  By the time of Strabo (roughly 0), such a process must have
been compete, but that means nothing about the situation a thousand years
earlier.

> More important is the question of how a Tyrrhenian
> community on Lemnos could have maintained its cultural and linguistic
> identity during 600 years of comings and goings of Thracians, Pelasgians,
> Minyans, Athenians, etc. Even if I were a true born-again believer in
> Anatolian Etruscans, I would have grave doubts that the Lemnians who erected
> the stele could possibly be the remnant of a Mycenaean-era migration. It
> would be more remarkable than stumbling into an enclave of Dutch-speakers in
> the heart of New York City.

        I never said the migration was "Mycenean era" (defining this as
ending with the onset of the Aegean Dark Ages).   For people to maintain an
ethnic identity over several centuries of "troubles" is not at all unsual.
One may point to the Goths in the Crimea, the Wends and Kashubians in
Germany and Poland, the millenium-long "Turkicization" of the Greeks in
later Anatolia, etc.  A process of the Lemnian Trojan/Etruscans being slowly
assimilated to the Thracians has nothing at all improbable about it.  (And
if I have ever been "born again", it is news to me.)

> I'm no Egyptologist either, but you seem to be hanging a very heavy
> conjecture (the identity of Tursenoi and Tw-rw-s' = "Tursha") on a very
> slender peg. Furthermore, the Egyptian record does not specify a precise
> homeland for these raiders; presumably they had access to the Mediterranean,
> of course. The Philistines (Pw-r-s-ty) are mentioned in a later Egyptian
> record. They were most likely Pelasgians from Crete, later driven out by
> Dorian invaders (ca. 1100) and forced to resettle in Palestine.

        It is not so heavy.  The word Tursenoi almost has to have been
borrowed from some non-Greek source, as /rs/ is not a native Greek sequence,
and /turs/ is a form we might expect foreign /turs^/ to take in Greek.  An
Egyptian source works perfectly well.

> The oldest attested Etruscan (early 7th c.) does not use /i/ or /ia/ to
> produce feminine names, but retains the native suffixes -tha and -thu for
> this purpose. The adoption of the IE morphemes from Italic, not from Greek
> or Sanskrit(!), is hardly debatable.

        My point was that "feminine /i/" is wide-spread in IE, not that
Lemnian feminine /i/ could have come from Sanskrit.  It could have come from
any IE language that developed feminine /i/, as all the (well-known) IE
languages (Italic, Greek, Indo-Iranian) in the general area did.

> You may well counter that Lemnian could
> have borrowed independently of Italo-Etruscan. A feminine suffix perhaps,
> but the whole PN-GN-MN system is very unlikely to be independently borrowed
> or created.

        As I said, I think the similarities in question are most probably to
be attribted to continued contact.  Certainly the later glories of the
Etruscans would have made them "high-prestige" back in any mother country
they had.  Is there evidence that the Etruscan naming system was a very
recent innovation?  If not, then why is it evidence of anything on this
point?  And if so, then why could the system not have been borrowd by the
Lemnians?  Naming practices do change, and are subject to fashion, or none
of us would have last names today.  Fashions can be borrowed.

> Now that you have Etruscans bringing Etruscan from Italy to Lemnos, what
> function does the rest of your theory serve?

        No, I do not "have Etruscans bringing Etruscan from Italy to
Lemnos".  I suggest merely that the mother (or perhaps aunt) polity was
subject to influences, both cultural and linguistic, from its more glorious
daughters.  One may compare (very vaguely) the popularity of what is
historically American music in Britain, post 1962.  If Britain can be
Americanized (and it has been, in a lot more than music), then Lemnos can be
Etruscanized.

> First, a word of advice: you should not characterize something as
> "universally acknowledged" unless you have read everything that has ever
> been written about it. In most cases this is a practical impossibility, so
> it is prudent to avoid such superlative phrases. In this case, Etrus- is not
> "universally" accepted as a prefixed form of anything. Alessio, for example,
> derived Etruria from *Etro-rous-ia 'land of the others' from the Umbrian
> viewpoint. This may not be entirely correct, but since Etruria and Etrusci
> are "other-names" a connection with an Italic term for 'other' is not
> implausible, and certainly better than slapping on an arbitrary prefix
> whenever the urge strikes.

        It is not a prefix.  It is an epenthetic vowel, as in Spanish
/escola/ or French /ecol/.  I would hope that anyone who attempts to deny
that "Tuscan" and Etruscan" are variants of the same word would not have
many followers.  I hereby correct "universally" to "near universally", but
do not think it much matters.
        Furthermore,  "land of the others" does not make much sense as an
ethnonym.  Most people are surrounded by "others" (thus the "Middle-Earth"
syndrome:  we are in the middle of the earth), so that such a term would
necessarily have been vague.  And such basic words as "same" and "other",
almost pronouns (certainly closed class words) are not to my knowledge
ordinarily used in coining ethnonyms.  More garden variety adjectives and
nouns are more normal.  The Greeks, for example, did not name any
neighboring group the /heteroi/, and it would have verged upon bizarre if
they had.  (Those that might have been called /heteroi/, in terms of
practical meaning, were in fact called /barbaroi/.)  Latin /alieno-/ is
effectively a legal term, not an ethnonym.

> The basic root behind Tyrsenoi, Tusci, and probably Thouskoi is Tursk-,
> which appears in Umbr. Turskum (numem) = Lat. Tuscum nomen 'the Tuscan
> nation', and in the Arch. Etr. GN Tursikina. The /k/ of Etrusci does not
> belong to the root (cf. Falisci, Falerii <- *Fales-).

        If the root was /(e)trusk-/, then any additional /k/ would be
invisible, since /-skk-/ would be reduced to /sk/.  That the word could, by
its form, be from a root in /s/ rather than /sk/ does prove that it
necessarily was.

> As for Troia, the Etruscans had no trouble with the initial cluster, as
> shown by Truials 'Trojan' (lit. abl. 'from Truia') and names like Trepu =
> Lat. Trebonius (prob. from Umbr. 'carpenter').

        I am not saying it was the Etruscans.  But unless /tuscan/ and
/etruscan/ truly were different words, which would be an amazing
coincidence, then it certainly looks like someone in the vicinity did not
much like initial /tr/, and felt the need to get rid of it one way or
another.  Semitic languages (I am not sure about Egyptian) do not tolerate
initial clusters, and this is probably what lies behind /turs^a/ and
ultimately /tursen-/.  In Italy, I would guess that one of the original
pre-IE pre-Etruscan languages had a similar restriction.

> Your "Tursha" might have been
> Trojans, since they are reported from the late 13th cent. BCE,

        But once we connect ethnonyms as different as these, in vowel and
position of /r/, there is no linguistic reason to throw out the others.
They all fall within a motivatable range of variation.

> but there is
> no basis for connecting either "Tursha" or Troia with Tusci or Etrusci.

        I have given the basis.

> Other than "spelling pronunciation" I have never heard of anyone using /sk/
> to represent /s^/. Those who cannot acquire /s^/ will substitute /s/, as I
> have personally observed;

        If /sk/ can change to /s^/, regardless of front vowels, as in Old
English, then there is enough similarity between the two to motivate
possibly rendering /s^/ as /sk/, if speakers of a given language for
whatever reasons feel so inclined.  /s^/ is back of /s/, and /k/ is back.
Stranger things have happened.  It is a reasonable trans-linguistic
mangling, as such manglings go.  Native reaction to non-native sounds or
clusters can be quite diverse.  To expect a uniquely determined or
universally favored outcome is naive.

> Besides, Etruscan had three
> sibilants <s>, <s'>, <z> and in the opinion of many specialists <s'> (sadhe)
> in South Etr. orthography was very close to /s^/ (Eng. ship).

        I fail to see what this has to do with anything.  Obviously I am not
claiming that a people who named themselves (so I take it) with a word
having /s^/ in it did not have /s^/ in their language.  That the word in
question was native, and therefore encountered separately by the various
peoples that the posited Trojan/Etruscans came into contact with, is just
about the only explanation (other than extraordinary concidence) for the
resemblances seen.  As far as I know, the various words have no known
meaning, other than the name of a people, in any of the languages where they
occur.  One would expect that if the people in question had been given an
"other-name" by the Egyptians, for example, that this word would have an
Egyptian etymology.  Likewise for the Greeks, or Romans, or any other known
possible namers.  No such luck, as far as I know.

> In sum, your
> attempt to derive all the names from *Tros^a/*Trus^a doesn't have a leg to
> stand on.

        I think it has both legs to stand on, for the reasons noted.  It is
speculative, as is well-nigh unavoidable when dealing with such matters, but
I think it is well within the bounds of reasonable possibility.

Dr. David L. White