Etruscans (was: minimal pairs)

[Rick Mc Callister]

[snip]
	Looking at Adolfo Zavaroni's etymologies of words of putative IE
origin in Etruscan, you could easily come to that conclusion. Etruscan
seems to have stressed the first syllable and given secondary stress to the
3rd syllable. It had /a, e, i, u/ in alphabet but I'd guess that
probably/possibly had a schwa. It also seems to have often aspirated and/or
fricativized stops /p/ > /ph, f/ > /h/; /k/ > /kh, x/ > /h/ --at least in
its later stages.
	I'd like to see some sort of chronology regarding
aspiration/friciativization or if it was just a case of better writing
conventions

>I have wondered about whether the Etruscans are somehow related to the
>proto-Germans.  Like the Germans who must have spoken PIE with a terrible
>brogue, the Etruscans seem to have done great phonetic violence to Greek
>words they imported.  Klytaimnestra = Clutmsta,  Herakles = Hercle,
>Menelaos = Menle, Polydeuces = Pulutuk, Diomedes = Zimite.  These names also
>make you wonder whether their script was somehow inadequately supplied with
>vowels, or made heavy use of abbreviated forms.

>Much of Etruscan inflection and derivation, in so far as we can figure it
>out at this remove, looks like a well-worn IE language of relatively recent
>date.  So do most of their pronouns and particles.  It's the Etruscan
>vocabulary that no one has yet been able to figure.

[ moderator snip ]

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701