Latin perfects and Fluent Etruscan in 30 days!

[Eduard Selleslagh]

-----Original Message-----
From: petegray <petegray at btinternet.com>
Date: Friday, July 09, 1999 11:03 PM

>Ed connected Latin amicus and ambo, and suggested a derivation of them both
>from Etruscan.

>Max and I both pointed that ambo has a good PIE pedigree, so this can't
>work.

>Ed then said:

>>And I don't see why any relationship with 'amicus', 'amare', etc. should be
>>excluded a priori: ....  Couldn't it be a double
>>transfer: early Lat./IE 'amb(i)-' > Etr. 'am(e)-' > later Lat. 'am-'?

>Anything's possible!  But it's easier to take the word we know to be IE as
>IE, and leave open the possibility of an Etruscan origin for amicus, if you
>want to explore that.   Don't be mislead by the initial "am-".   In ambo it
>derives from syllabic /m./, which cannot be the case in amicus.

[Ed Selleslagh]

There seems to be a slight misunderstanding here: with "later Lat. 'am-'" I
meant the beginning of words like 'amare', 'amicus', etc. , i.e. without
the -b-, which - according to the reasoning above - would have transited via
Etruscan, as opposed to those that came straight from PIE and preserved the
(a)m(.)b-.

Apart from all that, I never suggested that 'ambo', ambi-', Grk. 'amphi'
(and Cat. 'amb', which proved to be unrelated) etc. were of Etruscan origin,
only that they should be added to the data pool when looking at possible
relationships of Etr. 'am(e)-' and Lat. 'amicus' etc. It seems to me that
this led to an interesting discussion that yielded the possibility of the
existance of two parallel paths: one 'directly' from PIE to Latin and one
via Etruscan.

Ed