Etruscans

[David L. White]

 The argument that the Lemnians were from Etruria is convincing only if we
disregard one principle and three facts.  The principle is that shared
archaisms are not indicative of close connection.  To make it clear why this is
so, let us imagine that we have three groups, A-B-C, arrayed in approximately
that geographic order.  If group B then innovates away from groups A and C,
leaving these with (relatively) archaic features in common, then failure to
recognize the validity of the principle just given will result in the belief
that A and C share some close connection, when they do not.  I cannot resist
(re-)noting that the principle applies to living things as much as to languages
(and alphabets).  For example, recent opinion inclines toward the view that the
stripes of zebras are an archaism, that at some point in the past all equids
had stripes.  If this is so, then zebras (there are at least three species) do
not form a sub-group within equids, and are not to be connected with each
other.  The principle is therefore valid in a manner that might be called
"modality independent".

 The three facts are that 1) the use of a zig-zag sibilant, 2) the use of
"H" as a fricative, and 3) the use of vau (or anything) for /w/ are all
archaisms.  (The use of a psi-shaped sign for "chi" may well be too, I don't
know.)  The use of a zig-zag sign for a sibilant (apparently /ts/) appears
also in Mantinean, where to my knowledge nobody connects it with influence
from Italy, or even Euboea.  It is simply an archaism, due largely to
Mantinea's somewhat isolated position in the interior of the Peloponessus.
The innovations noted were all characteristic of what might be called Aegean
Greek, and there is no reason to think that they should have made it across
the language boundary into Lemnian, anymore than that they should have made
it into Italian Greek or Mantinean.   They are also too late to have much to
do with a posited migration from the Aegean (or its eastern coast) to Italy.
The Phrygians and the Trojans (or their displaced descendants) belong to
significantly different periods of NW Anatolian history, and there is little
reason to think that their alphabets would have showed any especially close
relation.  In any event, as MCV notes, the attempt to argue that because the
alphabet is Euboean it must be Italian is more than a little strained to
begin with.

 Furthermore, the view presented totally ignores the presence of the
Turshas, who seem to bear the same name as the Tursenoi, raiding in the Nile
Delta (and perhaps under the name Philistines similarly distresing the
Hebrews) during the Aegean Dark Ages, roughly 1200-800.  I have not exactly
memorized Egyptian historical records, but I think they rule out the
possibility that the Turshas were the descendants of Italian colonizers of
Lemnos about 600, and it is scarcely likely that true Tuscans were raiding
the Eastern Mediterranean at any period.  Under the view presented, the time
and place of the Turshas do not match up, for if one is right the other is
wrong, so that we are left with little alternative but to deny that there is
any connection between the names.

 The seemingly Italian features in Lemnian could be due, as MCV suggests, to
independent influences.  The change of /pt/ to /ft/ is fairly natural (is is
known from Icelandic) and could have occurred in virtually any IE language.
Likewise feminine /i/ is known from both Greek and Sanskrit, and so is
hardly a reliable indicator of Italian provenance.  Nonetheless, I would
guess that in this case the things noted are borrowing from Italian Etruscan
into Lemnian, due to continuned contact between colonies and "mother-city"
of a sort well-attested from this period. The Greek colonies generally made
a point of keeping in contact with their mother cities, and so did Carthage.
There is no reason to think that Lemnian (or "Turshan") colonies in Italy
would not have done the same.  In other words, just as with modern British
and American English, it is not necessarily the case that true separation
has occurred, and borrowings might well have jumped the gap.  It is a little
odd that a word for grandson/nephew should be one of them, since this would
appear to be a semi-basic kinship term, but there is no denying that English
borrowed its version of the word in question from French, so however strange
it may seem, such borowing has been known to happen.   And a change of /ft/
to /fot/ (if /f/ is what "ph" means) would not be that strange:  for vowels
to be inserted into sequences regarded as difficult, taking on the color (in
this case labial) of an adjacent consonant is fairly normal.

 But I return to the names.  If the original name was /trosha/ or /trusha/
(in a language that did not distinguish /u/ and /o/ there is no meaningful
distinction), then we might expect some difference of opinion about 1) what
to do with the /r/ in languages that did not permit /tr/, 2)  whether to
borrow with /o/ or /u/, and 2) how to render /sh/ in languages that did not
have /sh/.   Among the options for the first might be 1) to metathsize
(Tursha, Tursenoi (from Egyptian?)), to delete (Tuscan), or to prefix
(Etruscan, Etruria).  Among the options for the last might be 1) /sk/
(Etruscan, Tuscan), 2 /si/ (Etruria, Troia (with later loss of /s/), and 3)
/s/ (Tursenoi).   All these are variants of the same name.   To split off
"Tursha" and "Troia" from the rest is unwarranted.  They fit in as well as
any of the others, which are universally acknowledged to represent variants
of the same name.

 Nor is it necessarily naive to imagine that the legends in question, like
Icelandic sagas, medieval Saints' Lives, or for that matter the Homeric
epics, might well have a considerable element of truth in them, without
being wholly true.  It would be nice to imagine that such works could either
be regarded as wholly reliable or wholly unreliable, nice but also
simplistic.  The legends are evidence, just of an annoyingly equivocal sort.
 It should be noted as well that much of Herodotus is technically in
indirect discourse.  No particular disbelief is necessarily implied by any
given instance.

Dr. David L. White