Re: [tied] Internal reconstruction and PIE

In a message dated 16/08/01 18:29:42 GMT Daylight Time,
glengordon01@... writes:

Point is, there is no */as/ meaning "god" in Etruscan and even
so, reconstructing */as/ for EtruscoLemnian is down right idiotic
since it ignores the *attested* diphthong. The l-ending in
Etruscan is usually called a genitive, not a dative, and
Rhaetic is poorly understood, so, Ed, can you provide
justification for your claims using Rhaetic and Etruscan texts
showing that indeed the genitive is a dative?

Look, I keep telling you I never suggested /ais/ < /*as/!
It was somebody else. I *agree* with you!

As for the dative, in Etruscan we often get

X (male)-s Y (female)-l

as people's patronymic and matronymic respectively. This is conventionally
translated as:

X (male)-of Y (female)-of

However, the Etruscans did not live in our modern egalitarian world. Despite
some enlightened attitudes to women compared with some other cultures of the
time, the Aristotelian theory of reproduction prevailed, and what they really
meant would have been:

X (male)-from Y (female)-to

Much as even today we still use the formula

by X (male) out of Y (female)

when referring to racehorses.

This dative is clearer in some other inscriptions. Let us take CIE 698 for
example:

vel : velsi : atinatial

Now, unless there was a lot of incest going about in Etruria that I haven't
heard about, Vel McVel is dedicating something TO his grandmother.

We see the same thing in votive offerings PID 210 and PID 191 in Raetic:

upiku pheluriesi phelvinuale
paniun laSuanuale upiku perunies sxaispala

These are offerings *from* X *to* Y, or *made by* X *for* Y. Either way,
we've got a dative.

Back to Etruscan. Here's another one, a bronze statuette TLE 625:

mi velS ati alce

which Vel is giving to his mother. The relationship of -al (dative suffix)
and al- (verb 'to give') is obvious. This isn't like the grammar of a
flexional IE language, this is like a creole.

Ed. Robertson