Etruscans

[David L. White]

         Upon further reflection, I think it likely that a possibility I was
aware of but did not mention before is probably right:  that "tuscan" is
from metathesis followed by deletion of /r/, not straight deletion of /r/
from something like /trusk-/.
        /tursk-/ and /etrusk/ look very much to me like two ways of getting
out of /trusk/, if this was considered unacceptable.  That there were
languages in the general vicinity that would have considered initial /tr/
unacceptable is beyond dispute.  Likewise it is beyond dispute that some
languages in the general vicinity have solved such problems by "pre-fixing"
an epenthetic (or prothetic) /e/.  If  /etrusk-/ is the result of such a
process, it is probably because the original inhabitants (let us call them
"Villanovans") altered an original /trusk-/ in such a fashion, and then
passed it on to the Umbrians and Latins.  Probably this is also the origin
of /tursk/, there being no necessary uniformity of opinion (among people who
were not united anyway) about what to do in such situations.  (I recenly
heard Russian /x/ borrowed as /h/, where /k/ is more usual.)  What would be
nice would be to find evidence of the posited tendencies, 1) rejection of
some clusters, and 2) epenthesis of /e/ as a resolution, in the Etruscan
area itself, rather than vaguely in Semitic and Western Romance.
        There is some.  Greek "Herakles" apears in early(?) Etruscan as
"Herecele", as if some substantial body of people within the language
community 1) did not like syllable-initial /kl/ (a cluster abstractly of the
same type as /tr/, obstruent plus liquid), and 2) solved the problem by
epenthesizing /e/.  Note that all this is quite contrary to the general
Etruscan tendency to delete vowels and create "difficult" clusters, and so
almost must have a different source (exluding for the moment the possibility
of hypercorrection).  The hypothesis that the Etruscan language was at one
point imposed on another language that reacted to unacceptable clusters in
the way posited for /etrusk-/ is therefore supported by evidence within
Etruscan itself.
        Of the seven Etruscan cities considered major by Grant, only one,
Tarquini, has a name that is relatable to what might be called the /trs^/
word. (Exactly how will be shown immediately below.)  This city is also
generally held to have been the first Etruscan city.  There is (very
roughly) only a one in seven chance that the first Etruscan city would just
happen to bear a name relatable to /trs^/, and therefore to Troy, if the
Etruscans did not arrive as colonizers from the Eastern Mediterranean.
(This is the view which they themselves accepted, by the way, celebrating
the figure of Aeneas in their art, so it is not true that we have only
Herodotus to rely on.)
        As for how /tarkw-/ is relatable to /trs^/, if we begin with
/tors^-/, lowering of /o/ to /a/ before /r/ is not problematic, resulting in
/tars^/.  As it happens, /s^/ often acquires rounding, in order to
accentuate the general lowering that differentiates it from /s/.  This gets
us to /tars^w-/, more or less.  Trilled /r/ and any palatal sound require
antagonistic gestures, which is why palatalized /r/ tends to be avoided even
in languages that make use of palatalization generally. Thus a movement from
the ich-laut position to the ach-laut position is also motivated.  That
yields /tarxw/, which since Latin did not have /x/ would be borrowed as
/tarkw/.
        It is not true that /s^/ is necessarily borrowed as /s/ by languages
that do not have /s^/.  For example, English "shop" has been borrowed into
Welsh as "siopa", with the /i/ evidently being an attempt to indicate that
the sound in question was not really /s/.  That the same sort of thing might
lie behind /tro(s)ia/ is hardly an unreasonable suggestion.
        A good question is why it is, if /tursk/, with a truly distinct
suffixal /k/, was really the name of these people, was not borrowed into
Greek as /turskenoi/.
        I do not and cannot regard any of this as "proven" (an over-used
notion anyway).  But the same righteous methodological standards that would
throw out the connections suggested above would also throw out connections
like "Antalya" <-> "Anatolia", and "Tarquini" <-> "Taraccina", which do not
seem to distress any significant proportion of observers.  So let's be
consistent about what we in effect dismiss as "irresponsible speculation".
        On the matter of the Tyrno-Lemnians, the alphabet that the nativist
crowd has them "adopting" in Lemnos (or Chalcide) is ancestral to the
alphabet used by the Etruscans in Italy.  Again, this is a strange
coincidence:  why would they feel compelled to settle in the area that their
native alphabet came from, then abandon this?  It makes more sense to think
that the reason they used an alphabet ancestral to the later Etruscan
alphabet was that they had been there all along, and simply never adopted
the later Italian innovations that define the Etruscan alphabet.

Dr. David L. White