Etruscans (was: minimal pairs)

[Steve Gustafson]

Douglas G. Kilday wrote:

>> The Sanskrit, Celtic, and Latin cases that are formed in the plural on *-bh-
>> seem to be elaborations on a common suffix, at least somewhat comparable to
>> the Etruscan cases.  Germanic and Slavic apparently used a different suffix,
>> *-m-, and Slavic may have worked it the same way.  This suggests to me, that
>> the PIE cases may once have had agglutinative features, and that we can
>> still see part of the process by which they were built up.

> This is certainly reasonable; some of the suffixes look like composites.  The
> real puzzle is why PIE (or its descendents) should have abandoned
> agglutinative morphology in favor of a mixed bag of suffixes, apparently
> discarding perfectly good composites. Do any Uralists have examples of
> agglutinative languages moving toward "fusional" case-morphology? Or perhaps
> PIE was never fully agglutinative, the process of establishing composite
> suffixes as case-markers being interrupted before completion?

Early Latin shows at least one further Etruscan-like feature.  Pronominal
genitives like -cuius- (OL -quoius-) which in CL functioned as genitives
only, were in early Latin pressed into service as adjectives, so that where
in one instance you had -quoius servos-, elsewhere you could see -quoia
serva-.

Of course, in the personal pronouns, the paradigmatic genitives are scarce
in CL, and in their place you have the various possessive adjectives.
Homeric -emeio- would seem to point to *Hmesyo, which in Latin would
probably yield *meis or *mis; the attested -mei- is apparently the genitive
of the o-stem adjective -meus-.   Syntactically, it is only reasonable to
expect some confusion between genitives and adjectives.

[Vedic mama, Avestan mana, OCS mene, and English mine, would seem to be made
from entirely different stuff.]

This raises questions about the many derived Latin adjectives, like all the
gentilics in -ius; Furius, Tullius, &c.  You also have all of the Latin
derived nouns in -al, -alis/-ale; this suffix resembles the Etruscan
"genitive" in -(a)l both in form and function; you also have the
Etruscan -ac(h) ending that might be paralleled in many Latin formacions
in -ax, -acius and so forth.

Of course there is nothing un-IE-looking about any of these Latin suffixes.
Their similarity in both form and use to the Etruscan might merely be
coincidence, or even some kind of mutual reinforcement.  Or it could be that
in pre-PIE, you had all of these floating morphemes that could be combined
and nouned; PIE took one tack, and made some of them "special" as case
endings to which no further fancy could attach, while Etruscan preserved the
same elements but kept the freedom that PIE's ancestor once had.

> This is certainly reasonable; some of the suffixes look like composites.  The
> real puzzle is why PIE (or its descendents) should have abandoned
> agglutinative morphology in favor of a mixed bag of suffixes, apparently
> discarding perfectly good composites. Do any Uralists have examples of
> agglutinative languages moving toward "fusional" case-morphology? Or perhaps
> PIE was never fully agglutinative, the process of establishing composite
> suffixes as case-markers being interrupted before completion?

My suspicion would be that the freedom of combination was somehow lost,
perhaps due to a sound change that fused and obscured the elements in
question.  It seems plausible that some kind of relationship existed between
the verbal ending -mi and the pronoun -me-, or the verbal ending -ti and the
pronoun *to-; the verbal ending -mos may represent -mi plus another plural
suffix; and perhaps the same is true of *-nti.  If this is the case, the
attested features of PIE represent the draws from a grab bag of
agglutinative suffixes that once could be combined with more freedom.

> Wherever the Etruscans may have been between (say) 2500 BCE and 700, when
> their inscriptions started, it is likely that they were never very far from
> communities of IE-speakers. Etruscan words that look like IE may have been
> borrowed from IE. This is why I say that a "deeper knowledge" of the
> Etruscan vocabulary is required. In order to set up sound-tables between
> PIE and Proto-Tyrrhenian, we need a set of words which we reasonably believe
> to be "native" Etruscan, so that we are not just comparing PIE sounds with
> their own reflexes in borrowed form.

> I think that not only Etruscan but also pre-IE substrates must be taken
> into account when attempting to construct super-families which include IE.
> Neglecting these lesser-known languages amounts to (pardon the expression)
> not playing with a full deck.

I don't disagree.  OTOH, I fear that curiosity is always going to be several
steps ahead of the available evidence.