Etruscans (was: minimal pairs) Ref Hercle, Zimite

[Katherine Cummings]

Attic cognates in Etruscan

1
Herakles = Hercle

 Hercle is a mild profanity in the plays of TERENTIVS. This demotic form was
considered to derive, not from Lt HERCVLES, but from Gk Herakles,
Approximately, Godammit! / Bloody Hell!
 But is it Etruscan?
 Did Roman citizens of the mid-2nd BPE all swear in Etruscan?

2
<it may be that "Zimite" represents something like /(d?)zi:
<m. i te/, with something like syllabic /m./ as the second syllable,
<preserving the four syllables of the borrowed Greek word.

 Is there any known language which has intervocalic syllabic continuants? In
what way would this be different from a lengthened consonant:

/dzi:m:ite/
, as in Modern Italian
dimmi
/dim:i/
?
 This would lose the syllable count of the, er, borrowed Greek word.

But it's exactly the syllable count that is the first thing to go in borrowings
between languages, as borrowing alters the phonology. English schwah, uniformly
centralizing unstressed vowels, can effectively reduce

Peru to one syllable
Portugal to two
and Barcelona to three

. Just as epenthetic vowels in Brazilian Portuguese can make five syllables out
of Uzbequistao, with a tilde on the a, meaning Uzbekistan:
/uzibekistau/
, with the /a/ nasal.

 The last thing to expect from any borrowing is preservation of the syllable
count.

 The name of Diomedes as a warrior in the Mycenean force against Troy could
logically be billed as a borrowing from Gk into Et. Equally logically, though,
both forms could derive by descent or borrowing from an outside source. Crete
shows that names of Homer's heroes had been common coin. Is there evidence that
Homer's heroes had newly-minted names?

 Respects

Chester Graham
Chester at britanic-ih.com.br