etruscan

Torsten wrote:

Unfortunately, even if the endings can be etymologized as Germanic,
the root of the words can't, except possibly *borg- in Borgund, if
equal to the usual "castle, river bank, mountain" root, as one recent
IE root dictionary claims (I forgot the name again, but this one I
know where to find, if you're interested). But this root itself
supposedly has non-IE provenance.
I have also seen Venneman's equation somewhere but I disagree about
the route of the borrowing. In order to get into contact with other
peoples you must have some kind of business there. The most likely is
trade, in war you are not so interested in being understood by the
other side. In order to trade you must take stuff with you, the more
the better. Italy and the rest of Europe is divided by the Alps. If
you want to take stuff between the Mediterranean and the North
Sea/the Baltic, the safe way is up the Po, up the Ticino, across the
St. Gotthard and down the Rhine. But the St. Gotthard pass was opened
only in approx 1250. After that Switzerland and the Netherlands
became wealthy enough to be independent, at the expense of the
Northern French market towns, on the overland route from the Rhone.
This may be the route Venneman, being Dutch, imagines. The
alternative, crossing the Brenner pass takes you into the basin of
the Danube, and you don't want to be there if you are going to the
Northern Seas.
The important route then, I believe, was the Russian rivers. This
would take you directly from the Baltic to Lemnos and Troy. The
important thing was being able to drag your ship from one river
system to the next. They did some experiments here with Viking-age
type ships (loading capacity approx. 30 tons). It seems to work with
4 horses and rollers. Even at the height of Dutch power, the St
Gotthard pass was a mule track (Saumpfad), which must have been a
bottleneck for the trade.

BTW, talking of *tr(s)- and Tyrrhenians (not Thyrrenians, the h
reflecting the *s), the self-designation of the Lycians
was "trmmeli". The word for "tower", Lat. turris, Ge. Turm, Da.
tårn,
is, I believe, of Anatolian origin. And how about "Troy" itself?
I can't figure it out, but it is a lot of *tr-'s in one area.



An alternative trade route to the North Sea is by ship through
Gibraltar into the Atlantic Ocean. The danes and norse often chose
this route in the viking age (and probably hundreds of years
before.) The swedes more often went east, up russian rivers. Even
norse and danes chose such eastborne routes from time to time.

By the way the etruscans called themselves Rasna. They were called
tyrrhenians, tyrsenoi, trs etc. by other people.

Morten