Fluent Etruscan in 30 days! (was: Latin perfects)

[Eduard Selleslagh]

-----Original Message-----
From: Steven A. Gustafson <stevegus at aye.net>
Date: Tuesday, June 15, 1999 4:05 AM

>Rick Mc Callister wrote:

>> Past participle ending seems to be -u
>> which is passive if the verb is transitive
>> and active if the verb is intransitive

>Ergativity?  (Uh oh. . .)

>Etruscan would seem to me to be a perfect test for claims of Nostratic
>and other super-families.  It is a prime candidate because it is a
>language about which we still know relatively little.  It is not
>Indo-European, but it seems possibly related.  For example, we know that
>Etruscan had:

>1st sing. pronoun: nom. -mi-, acc. -mini-.

>Demonstratives -ita-, -eta- and -ica-, -eca-.

>Nouns seem to have had four cases.  In the singular, these include a
>genitive which often ends in -as or -ial, a dative in -l or -al, and a
>locative in -thi.

>If there is a language that cannot be classified as Indo-European, but
>can be related to a reconstructed common ancestor, Etruscan would seem
>to be a likely candidate.  In fact, if these features mentioned above
>were -all- we knew about Etruscan, it might have -been- classed as IE.
>Fortunately, we have a much larger body of texts.

>I've a pet crank theory that Etruscan might be related to the non-IE
>substrate spoken by the boat-people that seems to be present in
>Germanic.  This is a far-fetched hypothesis.

[Ed Selleslagh]

I have mine too: contact between Anatolian forefathers of the Etruscans
(before their migration by sea to Tuscany via Lemnos) and those of the (at
least North-East-) Germanic peoples on the shores of the Black Sea / Pontos
Euxinos (Crimea?).

Note that Miguel Carrasquer once made a nice, slightly speculative,
'Stammbaum' about this pre-PIE stage, that makes a lot of sense.

>There do seem to be some vocabulary coincidences:  -aisar-, Etruscan for
>"gods;" cf. ON -aesir-, "celestial gods."  Both Etruscan and Germanic
>had plurals in -aR, which in the case of Germanic represents *-az.

>When borrowing Greek mythological names and other words, the Etruscans
>did phonetic violence to 'em that resembles the Germanic sound shift.
>Specifically, Greek b, d, g > p, t, k in Etruscan.  Kastor stayed Castur
>in Etruscan, but Polydeukes became Pulutuk.  (And Pulutuk became Pollux
>in Latin.)

[Ed]

There is even more: p, t, k > f or ph(in certain positions), th , ch , like
in Neptunus > Ne(f)thuns, Polyxéne: > phulphsna, Acaviser > Achvizr. And of
course the apparently strong initial accent, held responsible for many of
the peculiarities of Etruscan pronunciation of foreign names. Etruscan also
shares quite a few traits of this kind with Lydian.
Note also that Etruscan too has an ablative/genitive of origin -ach, e.g.
Rumach = from Rome, Roman, or Velznach = from Volsinii/Bolsena (Lydian -ak;
Greek analogy : adjectives with -(i)akós). Cfr. our recent discussion about
the widespread -k(o) suffix, or part of suffixes. (Also in Slavic, as I
mentioned before,  and Uralic, e.g. as partitive-plural in Hungarian, which
points to the same Pontic region; these are my highly personal
interpretations!).

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