Etruscans

[Stanley Friesen]

At 09:43 AM 2/21/01 -0600, David L. White wrote:
>         Not counting the Lydians and the Aeneid.   /truia/ occurs in
>Etruscan, where I would imagine it must be taken as a Greek borrowing.  But
>since Greek has what might be called "invisible /s/" in some circumstances,
>/truia/ might have been /trusia/.  That is not very far from either /trus-/
>or /turs-/.  No, I am not saying "it is proven", but we have a very
>suspicious coincidence here, especially once the Turshas are thrown into the
>mix.

Especially since the origin of many of the Sea Peoples - or at least those
that attacked Egypt - seems more to have been Anatolia.

>> As for Tw-rw-s "Tursha", without the informed opinion of a competent
>> Hamitist, we are playing ping-pong in the dark with the phonology.

>         I admit I do not know why "TWRWS" and "TRWS" are anglicized as
>"Tursha".  Perhaps because that is the only version that would have been
>phonotactically acceptable in Egyptian?

Actually, it may be more a matter of traditional transcriptions.  The early
decipherments of Hieroglyphics were based on the late, Ptolemeian, variant
of that writing system, often colored by the even later Coptic
vocabulary.  The glyphs signifying 'W' were often treated as 'u' between
"hard" consonants by Egyptologists.   (Note, there may be some validity in
doing so, as Hebrew waw does sometimes indicate 'u' or 'o'). Part of the
problem is that prior to the adaption of demotic, writing of Egyptian
followed the Semitic practice of not indicating most vowels (though, as in
Hebrew, the "soft" probably consonants sometimes actually represented
vowels).  A more modern transcription would probably be "tewershewesh", but
that is just a convention for adding vowels to make Hieroglyphics
pronounceable in English, and is not intended as a true suggested
pronunciation.

Or "Tursha" could simply be the Coptic form, since Coptic often lost final
consonants from earlier Classical Egyptian, and weakened post-tonic
vowels.  (As witnessed by Coptic '-e' for the classical feminine ending
'-Vt' [vowel quality unknown]).

>   It looks as if an attempt was made
>to borrow the word as heard ("Ngaio"?), only to reject this as
>"unpronounceable" by Egyptian mouths.  (Similar things would probably have
>happened in Carthaginian mouths.)  Be that as it may, I can only presume
>that the Egyptologists know what they are doing, and that there is good
>reason to believe that a borrowed ethnonym /turs^-/ existed in Egyptian.
>That in turn is not very far from /turs/.

Given that Hieroglyphic 'W' probably does sometimes represent a back
rounded vowel rather than a consonant, it is certainly a good possibility.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com