Etruscans (was: minimal pairs) Ref Hercle, Zimite

[Chester Graham]

  Hercle is a mild profanity in the plays of TERENTIVS. This demotic form
was considered to derive, not from Lt HERCVLES, but from Gk Herakles,
Approximately, Godammit! / Bloody Hell!
  But is it Etruscan?
  Did Roman citizens of the mid-2nd BPE all swear in Etruscan?
  	
2
<it may be that "Zimite" represents something like /(d?)zi:
<m. i te/, with something like syllabic /m./ as the second syllable,
<preserving the four syllables of the borrowed Greek word.

  Is there any known language which has intervocalic syllabic continuants?
In what way would this be different from a lengthened consonant:
/dzi:m:ite/
, as in Modern Italian
dimmi
/dim:i/
?
  This would lose the syllable count of any word borrowed from another
language.

  But it's exactly the syllable count that is the first thing to go in
borrowings between languages, as borrowing alters the phonology. English
schwah, uniformly centralizing unstressed vowels, can effectively reduce
Peru to one syllable
Portugal to two
and Barcelona to three
. Just as epenthetic vowels in Brazilian Portuguese can make five syllables
out of
Uzbequistao, with a tilde on the a, meaning Uzbekistan:
/uzibekistau/
, with the /a/ nasal.

  The last thing to expect from any borrowing is preservation of the
syllable count.

  The name of Diomedes as a warrior in the Mycenean force against Troy
could logically be billed as a borrowing from Gk into Et. Equally
logically, though, both forms could derive by descent or borrowing from an
outside source. Crete shows that names of Homer's heroes had been common
coin. Is there evidence that Homer's heroes had newly-minted names?

  All the best

Chester Graham
Chester at britanic-ih.com.br