Trojan and Etruscan

iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu
Thu Feb 25 00:45:42 UTC 1999


	With regard to the idea that the resemblance between "Trojan" and
"Etruscan" is vague, no it isn't, not any more than in the case of other
words like "Tuscan" and "Tursenoi" that everybody admits are variants of
the same word as "Etruscan". The variations seen can be motivated by
various phonological considerations.  In order..

	/etruscan/ and /tuscan/ are two ways of getting out of */truscan/,
which must have had an unnacceptable onset as far as some folks were
concerned.  Such an onset would have been unnacceptable to at least some
Semites, for example, just to name one possibility for how such a
deformation might occur.  Metathesis of /r/, as seen in /tursha/ and
/tursenoi/ is another way out of the same problem.

	As for the occurence of /s/, /sk/, /sh/ (English value), and /y/
(again English value) to represent the third consonant, these are for the
most part various efforts to represent /sh/ in languages that did not have
that sound.  (Egyptian did.)  We see various apsects of /sh/ conveyed in
any one of the other renderings:  sibilance in /s/, palatality in /y/,
retraction from /s/ in /sk/.

	For the vowel, it is difficult to decide between /o/ or /u/, but
as /a/ occurs in some words that might be additional variants
(tarhuntassa, tauros, tarsus, tarquin), with lowering before /r/ being the
culprit in these, I favor /o/.  Thus the original form would be /trosha/.

	"Trojan" fits in with this as well as any of the others. Fairly
well, actually, once the linguistics of it is understood.  There is
nothing particularly vague about it.

					DLW



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