Etruscans (was: minimal pairs)

[Douglas G Kilday]

Steve Gustafson (15 Jan 2001) wrote:

>But my understanding is that the business of the reconstruction of the IE
>noun case system reveals a number of both stillborn and fossil cases that,
>had they been generalised, would have added to the number of cases
>recoverable.  Moreover, my recollection is that the existence of languages
>with otherwise conservative morphology, like Greek, Gothic, and Hittite,
>that never seem to have had the full complement of Sanskrit cases, and the
>strongly different system that prevails in the Tocharian languages, has led
>some to suggest that the PIE cases may have been added to, rather than
>subtracted from.

Yes, Tocharian shows that (Early) PIE must have had a rich variety of
morphemes capable of forming case-suffixes and verbal endings.

>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?

>Moreover, the *bh- suffix has been fossilized in Greek words like -thyrephi-,
>"outside."  This was once a productive instrumental style case in Greek, as
>revealed in Mycenean ko-ru-pi, "with helmets," and po-ni-ki-pi, "using purple
>dye."

This suffix was still productive in Epic Greek; e.g. <hippoisin kai
ochesphin> 'with horses and chariots' (Hom. Od. IV.533).

>I may be a certifiable kook [and I cheerfully confess, no more than an
>interested amateur], but it seems that the Etruscan noun morphology --- though
>it has obviously been substantially reshaped --- does not rule out that there
>may be a common ancestor between PIE and Etruscan.  I would not speculate that
>Etruscan is a direct descendant of PIE.  Etruscan strikes me as interesting,
>in that it seems a logical place to -test- theories about super-families.

What I mean by "certifiable kooks" are those who derive Etruscan from
Hebrew, Serbian, Ukrainian, Turkish, etc. on the basis of arbitrary and
capricious impressionism. Serious comparative work requires systematic
tables of sound-correspondences. Kooks have no comprehension of seriousness
and their theories turn sound-change into a haphazard chaos which, as we
know from IE studies, does not reflect reality.

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.

DGK