Etruscans

[Douglas G Kilday]

David L. White (3 May 2001) wrote:

>Obviously colonizers, or exerters of control, will bring their
>language along with them, having little choice in the matter.

Yes, but the outcome can vary greatly. The natives _may_ adopt the intrusive
language, or the colonists _may_ adopt the native language, or both
languages _may_ co-exist. Every case must be examined separately.

>I fail to perceive any "hand-waving", beyond what is unavoidable
>given that the material culture of Troy was not (somebody out there please
>correct me if I am wrong) distinctive, and thus would leave no easily
>discernable trace anywhere.  I can see how this might seem very convenient
>(I would say "unfalsifiable", but that would be invoking a square wheel, now
>wouldn't it?) to those having a prior committment to the nativist view, but
>it is also, simply put, true.

I don't have a "prior commitment" to the nativist view. Every case must be
examined separately, and there are plenty of situations in which the
migrationist view cannot be sanely disputed (such as IE-speakers in North
America). In the particular case of the Etruscan language, the theory of
intrusion from Anatolia or the Aegean raises more questions than it answers,
so the nativist view is just more plausible.

And I certainly wouldn't use the Un-F-word to describe your postings. That
would make my own responses worse than meaningless; they would be pointless.

>There is no firm expectation when an elite is of one language and the mass of
>the population is not.  The case of the Turks in Anatolia seems fairly well
>established by modern genetics:  they were a fairly small elite, and the
>pre-Turkic population simply converted to Turkish over time.  (A lot of time
>in this case, but Greek was a very "proud" language, as "Villanovan" would not
>have been.)  I may note as well (again) the case of Latin America, which has
>largely been Iberianized in language despite the population being (with a few
>exceptions) largely Amerindian by genetic descent.

How "simple" was the conversion to Turkish? Weren't there Greek communities
in Cappadocia and elsewhere in Anatolia until recently? I'm not sure this is
such a good example.

Likewise, most parts of Latin America retain indigenous languages, despite 4
or 5 centuries of political and economic dominance by IE-speakers.

What specific features of Villanovan exhibit lack of linguistic pride? Was
it an untidy language, with speakers failing to perform the house-husbandry
of sweeping out the Fremdwoerter every week? For that matter, if "proud"
languages generally clobber "humble" ones, why aren't we all speaking
Trojan?

>En petite masse.  (My French is for reading knowledge only, so
>please forgive me if I did not get that right.)   A large migration would
>probably be logistically implausible, among other things.  I agree that the
>native population was not expelled or exterminated, and that there is indeed
>substantial archeoligical continuity.  But I thought we had agreed that such
>a population, as it went over to Etruscan over a period of perhaps several
>centuries (or perhaps less; stranger things have happened), would quite
>probably leave no inscriptional trace.

It's hard to leave inscriptions without a writing system. But the
petite-masse explanation begs the question of what happened to the _rest_ of
the Trojans after the war. Presumably there was a diaspora, and presumably
other places (mostly nearer to Troy) were settled, and presumably the native
speakers, like the Villanovans, had "humble" languages or were bedazzled by
the High Culture. So, if your Trojo-Tyrrhenian theory is valid, where is the
evidence for Etruscoid speech in the non-Etrurian part of the Trojan
diaspora (since we agree that Lemnian is too late to matter)?

>Place names are another question,
>but recent assertions that conquerors re-name places only when they have
>bureaucrats along for the ride are clearly falsified by the case of
>Anglo-Saxon England (among others, no doubt), where they conquerors surely
>renamed a great many water-courses (whatever we think had happened to the
>natives), despite not being notably well-supplied with bureaucrats.

I didn't suggest that re-naming occurred _only_ when conquerors had
bureaucrats in tow. I was referring to the ability of new regimes to
obliterate the old names completely, which seems to be the case in much of
Texas. That requires either bureaucracy (and writing conventions and
materials) or genocide. Normally, dominant intruders re-name _some_ of the
landmarks, resulting in toponomastic stratification.

>The linguistics does more harm than good to the nativist cause, as
>/turs^/ (as in the "turshas", reputedly from Anatolias) is surely closer to
>/turs-/ (as in "Tursenoi") than most of the Pelasgian phytonyms recently
>noted are to each other.  And at least we can explain the small variation
>seen, as Greek did not have /s^/.   No such luck (for the most part) with
>Pelasgian phytonyms.

That's comparing apples with giraffes (actually just _one_ apple, since you
allege that only one lexeme is involved in your turs-words).

>While on the subject I may note that the existence of "coffee" vs.
>"cafe", and "chocolate" vs. "cocoa" is not generally taken to "prove" the
>existence of a vastly-spread sub-strate language wherever these words are
>found.  Phytonyms can easily be wander-words, though I must admit I know
>nothing about the uses (if any) of the various "Pelasgian" plants in
>question.

Yes, psychotropic substances can spread like wildfire, along with the words
which denote them: hence the difficulty in finding the linguistic source of
"wine" (not to mention "hemp"). But now we're talking potonyms (and
capnonyms), not phytonyms. I wouldn't know whether roses, violets, and
hyacinths contain abusable substances. (Where's Timothy Leary when you need
him?) Anyhow, if any of the phytonyms referred to substrate by Lejeune,
Palmer, Devoto, Alessio, etc. were comparable to coffee, chocolate, tobacco,
etc. (with consumption occurring far beyond the native areas of the plants,
and specialized producers, refiners, and merchants), then the words in
question would not be restricted in distribution to the "Pelasgian" area,
and would be either regarded as Wanderwoerter or indistinguishable from
ordinary IE wordstock.

>That is a good point, but not, I think, given the scanty nature of
>the evidence, necesarily decisive.  What do we really know about Trojan, or
>Turshan religion?   I would expect it to be a mix of native, Aegean, and
>Anatolian elements.

That begs the questions of how "native" Trojan/Turshan elements are to be
distinguished from regular Aegean or Anatolian ones, and where their
homeland was if not Aegeo-Anatolian. You have repeatedly emphasized the
non-distinct nature of Trojan material culture, if memory serves.

The lack of Anatolian features in Etruscan religion has been pointed out
before. If the Trojans had recently arrived from the West to take over the
Troad, they wouldn't have had much time to assimilate Anatolian cultural
features. This in itself is reasonable enough. But the most plausible
scenario is that the Trojans (or their ruling class) were Phrygians who came
from Thrace. The Trojo-Tyrrhenian theory has to face not only the silence of
classical authors, but the absence of Etruscan linguistic evidence in
Thrace. We could, of course, always postulate that the Trojans originated in
Etruria (supported by Dardanus allegedly coming from Cortona?) and then
returned after the war, but then they would hardly be introducing a _new_
language.

>So now "one" is not only attorney but judge and jury too?  How nice, to
>triumph so convincingly through simple fiat.  Maybe it works for you, but
>when I, in my real job as house-husband, simply declare the dishes clean,
>my wife tends to doubt that very much has truly been accomplished.

Obviously I should have used different wording. I wasn't trying to usurp the
roles of judge and jury. When I refer to "dismissing" Anatolian-Etruscan or
any theory, it should be clear that I speak only for myself. I don't expect
the whole world to jump aboard the bandwagon.

>Why bother?  Why can't they [Etruscans] have arisen from the original
>post-agricultural population of the area?  And what is gained by dismissing
>one route as supportable only by "hand-waving", when all other possible
>routes are even more mysterious?  Ignotium per ignotius indeed.  Such an
>approach cries out for the creation of a term more vigorous than
>"hand-waving". I do hereby officially suggest "hand-flapping."

Before long we'll have Khrushchevian shoe-banging, unless a pact against
metaphoric escalation is implemented. So let's _not_ categorically dismiss
_any_ sane theory (please note that I never called the Trojan theory
"insane"). One theory is indeed the ultra-nativist one that Etruscan
represents the speech of the first anatomically modern humans to inhabit
Etruria. At the other extreme, ultra-migrationists have the Etruscans fresh
off the boat from Lemnos in 700 BCE. In principle, one could also theorize
Proto-Etruscan coming in with the first farmers, the first metallurgists,
the Proto-Villanovans, or none of the above. The answer (if it has not been
irretrievably lost, as a prominent defeatist suggests for pre-Greek) is in
the toponyms, phytonyms, glosses, and such relics as we have in extant
Etruscan texts. But unless one is a dogmatic dualist, there is no _a priori_
reason for narrowing the field to two choices.

DGK