Re: [tied] Lemnos stele and Polish semivowels

----- Original Message -----

From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Monday, January 22, 2001 1:52 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] Lemnos stele

>Some of the Etruscan formulas (as I quoted them here recently) are:

TLE 93:  avil-s ci-s zathrmi-s-c
TLE 144: avil-s huth-s celch-s
TLE 165: avils mach-s semphalchl-s
TLE 324: avil-s esal-s cezpalchal-s
TLE 325: avil-s mach-s zathrum-s

>*Both* numerals are *always* in the genitive case, as well as the noun
they qualify (here always <avil> "age; year").

>So the difference between <avil-s ci-s zathrmi-s-c> "of years three
and twenty" and a possible *<avil-s ci-s zathrmi-s-c avil-s> "of years
three, and twenty years" is merely stylistic, and both are perfectly
grammatical in Etruscan (and one may assume, in Lemnian).

 

You are speaking with unwarranted confidence. Since a "double avils" construction is nowhere attested in Etruscan, how can you know that it is possible, let alone "perfectly [??] grammatical". "Avils" is approximately equivalent to "at the age (of)". To say "at the age {of three and twenty}" is one thing, but to say "at the age {of twenty}, and at the age {[also] of three}" doesn't strike me as typologically natural, especially if, as in the stele inscription, the two parts of the "avis" phrase are not parallel in terms of word order. And I have yet to see an Etruscan inscription with the "twenty-three" rather than "three-twenty" order.

>Whether <mara> can somehow be equated with Etruscan <mach>, <muv-alch>
is a different question.  I have explored some possibilities [*], but
since Etruscan and Lemnian are *different* languages, and the measure
of their divergence is hard to determine based on the extremely small
Lemnian corpus, they are not required to share the same numerals (cf.,
again, Anatolian *maw-/*mew- [or whatever the reconstructed PAnat is]
"4").

 

Eichner (in J. Gvozdanovic "IE Numerals" 1992) argues that both *kWetw(o)r- and *meiwo- are reconstructible for Anatolian '4', the latter mainly in a collective function.

>Even if we identify <mara> with <marunu>/<maru> (an Italo-Etruscan
magistrature, cf. Latin <maro:>, Umbr. <maron->), which I don't think
is very likely, I doubt very much that Lemnian <mara> could mean
anything like "his investiture as a magistrate".  Cf. TLE 325: <Tutes
$ethre Larthal clan Pumplialch Velas; zilachnu ciz; zilcti purt$vavcti
lupu, avils machs zathrums>, "Sethre Tute, son of Larth and Vela
Pumpli; he was zilach thrice; died while zilach and prytanis, at age
25(!)".  Here the magistratures are expressed as locatives (zilc-ti,
purt$vavc-ti), and at least the second one has a more complex shape
than the simplex <purth> (etc.) "prytanis".

 

OK, but here the syntax is different: "as a zilach", not "in the (very first) year of his zilachcy". I don't insist on identifying *mara with maru -- just flying a kite.

>"He died in his fortieth year, in the year of X", where "X" could be
anything simple at all [say, "the year of the cat"], is in itself not
impossible (although I would expect a locative rather than a
genitive), but what could "X" be?

 

I'm lost. Which genitive? There are two here, avis and maras. Do you mean that "in the year ..." should be *avili? But Etruscan uses a genitive in expressions of time (avils), as do many other languages including Polish ("w tym roku" is a modern phrase; the older and still current expression is "tego roku"; "pewnego razu" = "once upon a time", and while we're at it, English once < OE a:nes is also an old genitive).

>Since I have a 90% probability of being right about the numeral being
a compound one, it would require some pretty good evidence for "X"
being anything else before one could accept it.

 

Good news for me. I'm 40 now, so I'm not likely to die this year :) But you are cheating here. If you pick at random a number between 1 and 100 there's an *a priori* probability or 0.9 that it won't be a full decad. But this is not what we are doing here. We are analysing a concrete word and trying to establish if it's a numeral or not. Imagine you find an English tombstone with the following inscription: "HERE LIES THE BODY OF THOMAS BELL WHO DIED AT THE AGE OF FORTY LIN... [illegible]". Would you argue that anybody who claims that "lin..." can't be a numeral must present very good evidence, because it's more likely to be forty-something than just forty?

 

> The main reason for posting that forgotten message after all was
the reference to Polish /awa/ >? /aa/, and I was hoping for an answer.
Prosze bardzo...

Yes, we do have this fast-speech "smoothing" of /aja/ and /awa/, not unlike the RP smoothing of "lion" and "tower". I don't think it's correct to represent the result phonemically as /aa/, since it's a surface phonetic phenomenon which hasn't resulted in a phonemic reanalysis as yet:

 

(1) The [a.a] forms are always perceived as disyllabic (this is borne out by their intonation contour) and occur only in fast or indistinct speech. I suppose most Poles use them casually, but not in slower and more controlled styles (if you did, you'd sound as if you were a little drunk). In other words, [a.a] remains a sloppy variant realisation of underlying /awa/.

 

(2) Even if you drop the semivowels, their phonetic effect on the adjacent vowels persists: "pajac" /pajats/ 'clown' and "pal/ac" /pawats/ 'palace' don't merge phonetically, the former having a clearly front vowel cluster, and the latter pretty back vowels.

 

Piotr