Re: Etruscan -na (was Re: [tied] Affects of ... etc.)

In a message dated 11/08/01 20:05:35 GMT Daylight Time,
glengordon01@... writes:

>It is quite possible that -na derives from a genitive in Pre-Etruscan,
>[...]

Yes, I don't disagree with a Uralic connection of an original
essive case ending in *-n

...
The IndoTyrrhenian counterpart would have most likely been
*-ane, I think. In Early LateIE after the final vowels had been
lost, *a became *o, causing *-án > *-ón. Afterwards, the final
*-n was changed to *-m due to labialisation from *o, as well as
due to its analogical association with the accusative *-m. That
much is solved to my little heart's content.

You can't go trying to prove that Etruscan and IE are closely genetically
related by appealing to analogies and similarities in Uralic. Or to what may
well be a non-existent accusative. Assuming that Etruscan is genetically
related to IE does not make it so.

>while -s and -l may have come from a previous ergative and dative
>respectively

This part is out on a limb because it assumes that IE and Etruscan
both come from an immediate ergative ancestor even though they
themselves are not ergative languages. The likelihood is that
IndoTyrrhenian was _also_ an accusative language and indeed, we
can reconstruct accusative *-m with confidence since they
are present in both languages with this same function (Etruscan -n
and IE *-m). Even, remotely related proto-Uralic has an _accusative_
*-m without any signs of ergativity. This all shows strongly
that even though it probably existed, this much-talked-about
ergative stage entirely predates IE, Etruscan and even
IndoTyrrhenian.

I didn't assume Pre-IE was ergative. I think Lehmann makes a good case for it
having been active. You're putting the cart before the horse by assuming that
-s in Etruscan and -s in IE have the same genetic origin. What you have to do
is cast out your Greenbergian "I-don't-have-to-do-internal-reconstruction"
attitudes and look at the data in Etruscan. It is clear from archaic Etruscan
and Raetic that -s derives from an earlier ergative or ablative -esi and -l
from an earlier dative -ale. Given that the Etruscan root al- means "give"
(Cf. Hurrian ar-, Nakh =al-), there are whiffs of lexical economy here,
indicating a creolising language contact situation. Which is in fact what we
did have, in that Etruscan and Lydian (and to a lesser extent other Anatolian
languages) have *borrowed* grammatical features from one another, just as
happened with Balkan languages more recently. While I do not rule out a
connection between Etruscan and its relatives on the one hand and IE on the
other at a greater time depth, it is clear from core vocabulary that Etruscan
cannot be closely related to IE.

The same applies to your assumption of the existence of an accusative in
Etruscan. In the one noun it apparently appears in, spureni, it inexplicably
(from your point of view) is in the form of an ending -ni. (Not -n, not -m,
but -ni). In any case, it could well be being used here for emphatic purposes
rather than accusative ones. In the determiners it (apparently) appears in,
the -n- often has other case endings added after it. This is maybe not an
accusative, but the remnants of an article. (Cf. Hurrian -ni). The
interpreters of Etruscan have constantly (whether consciously or
unconsciously) tried to fit Etruscan into an IE mould, perhaps because that
was all they knew, or perhaps to try and "prove" it was the language of a
"great" indigenous civilisation. The truth is that, like every other ethnic
group on the planet, the Etruscans were originally immigrants. Time to open
the horizons a bit wider.

Ed. Robertson