Re: etruscan, Lydian and Greek inscriptions

--- In cybalist@egroups.com, "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...> wrote:

>
>
> Concerning the Etruscan genitive in /-n/, I said:
> > > It would appear to correlate best with Mid IE *-am (IE *-om).
>
> Torsten:
> >Why not Finno-Ugric gen. -n (or am I disturbing your circles?)?
>
> Circles? I don't make circles. >:( How do you mean? You are right

however.

> I'm almost certain that it relates to Uralic too. However,

Etruscan /-n/

> points to both *-n AND *-m and so I can't be too sure whether the
> IndoTyrrhenian ending should be reconstructed as *-am or *-an. I

suspect it

> was mainly a "partitive" case ending since *-óm is given a strictly

plural

> sense in IE from early on. Note that it's likely, based on the

messiness of

> IE plural declension, that the language only worked out plural case

endings

> relatively late in its development. This leaves us to ponder what

sort of

> "singular" origin underlies *-óm.
>
> I arrive at IndoTyr *-an instead of *-am somewhat arbitrarily for

now which

> I indeed feel is related to the Uralic genitive in *-n. I conclude

so far

> that the change from *-an to *-am occured some time in

IndoEuropean's line

> between 7000 to 4000 BCE and can be easily explained as a confusion

with the

> accusative case ending in *-m, which is certainly just as ancient

(Uralic

> *-m, Etruscan /-n, -ni/, IE *-m). Some authors make mention of an

IE

> connection between genitive *-óm and accusative *-m purely on

phonetic

> grounds, something that might easily be done with Etruscan as well,

but this

> is total hogwash in a grammatical context.
>
> - gLeN
>
>

I was just quoting Archimedes answer to the Roman soldier: Noli
disturbare circulos meos. There is one thing that has puzzled about IE
acc *-m, though. Sanskrit -m is weak, Latin -m disappears in poetry
according to metric rules, Greek says -m -> -n, and everywhere else
it disappears. Slavic nasalizes. So perhaps -m was only a
nasalization of the previous vowel? Note the use of -m in present day
Portuguese.

Torsten