Re: [tied] Caveat, ye Etruscanologists!

glengordon01@... writes:

Be forewarned that etymologies or translations marked with [az96]
are 99% garbage. If you take a look under "Bibliography" you will
learn of a Mr Adolfo Zavaroni who "posits that Etruscan /z/ in
most cases corresponds to IE /st/ at the beginning and in the
middle of a word"... which is nonsense since the earlier stages of
IE could simply not have had initial consonant clusters, clearly
only later caused by heavy stress accent. It would almost seem that
Zavaroni has a vested and antiquated interest in making Etruscan a
language *within* the Indo-European family - something that can no
longer be taken seriously without radically redefining the word
"Indo-European". I ignore Zavaroni altogether since his opinions
are often at odds with educated consensus. Examples include
cautha "the sun" (Zavaroni: "the god of heat"???) or cerine "built"
from cer- "to make, build" (Zavaroni: "image, vision"???!). I
honestly don't know where he gets this all from and I don't care.

To be fair to Zavaroni, it should be stated that he is not seeking to prove a
genetic relationship between IE and Etruscan. Sure, this is implicit in his
claimed etymologies, but what he is concerned with is interpretation, not
relationships. He merely claims that, *for the purposes of interpretation*,
his etymological approach 'works'.

If inevitably it does sometimes appear to 'work', this IMO could only be
because of the large number of borrowed IE words that entered Etruscan, plus
a large percentage of chance resemblances. From a historical linguistic point
of view his method is flawed, and like Glen, I believe his etymologies should
be taken with a pinch of salt.

However, he has produced some worthwhile documentation, both in his book "I
Documenti Etruschi" and on his web site:

http://web.infinito.it/utenti/e/etruscan/home.htm

BTW, there was misprint in your reference to Rick McCallister's Etruscan
Glossary site. This should have read:

http://www.muw.edu/~rmccalli/EtruscanV.html

Ed Robertson