Joy of joys! I hadn't come across this until I specifically checked some
things out but apparently there is a Lemnian /nafoth/ "nephew" equivalent to
Etruscan /nefts'/! You see, if both Lemnian and Etruscan BOTH have the
"nephew/grandson" word, it becomes harder to dismiss Etruscan as just a
Latin borrowing. Afterall, Latin /nepo:s/ isn't even phonetically
reconcilable with /nefts'/ anyway! How joyous to my theory that PIE *p =
PTyr *f (bilabial fricative)! Happy, happy, joy, joy. Tralalalalei!
So, I'll reconstruct with pride Tyrrhenian *nefotta (the expected, perfectly
regular reflex of IE *nepo:t as of late). Of course, Tyrrhenian *nefotta and
MidIE *nepat:a (IE *nepo:t) should derive from IndoTyrrhenian *nep-at:a,
another compound showing the bizarre reverse order ("child-father" ->
father's child) that pops up in my other IndoTyrrhenian reconstructions like
*k:al-axwa "female in-law; woman-brother" and *Laxeu-T:exan "River People;
people-river" (phonetics recently adapted, btw).
I might have a two better theories now to account for this. These compounds
would have to have formed in _Early_ IndoTyrrhenian or earlier, at a stage
when postpositions were used instead of later declensional endings. So to
properly say "People of the River" in Late IndoTyrrhenian one would say
*[Laxeu T:exanese], as I said, but in an earlier stage, it would have been
*[Laxeu T:exan se]. In an even earlier more Steppe-like stage, possibly
*[Laxeu T:exan].
I just noticed that I've been lacking a real genitive case in Steppe. Maybe
I'm trying to tell myself something. Maybe the genitive was actually formed
as in Semitic. Except, there is no special "construct formation" in Steppe,
only the bare stem, afaik.
PS: And to my surprise, the Lemnians were even more sea-worthy than I had
realised. It seems they even got as far as Staten Island, New York! Wow!
http://www.hri.org/lemnian/staten_island_lemnians.htm
Giggle, giggle :)
- gLeN
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