Re: [tied] Lemnos stele and Polish semivowels

On Mon, 22 Jan 2001 12:24:19 +0100, "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<gpiotr@...> wrote:

>>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}"

It sounds more natural if translated "of twenty years and three
years".

>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.

But the stele is Lemnian, not Etruscan.

>>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.

Based on what evidence? (I don't have the book, and seem to recall it
was obscenely expensive).

>>"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).

Apparently the "locative" in these construcions is expressed in
Etruscan as an endingless absolutive (avil). (L. Bonfante: "Evidently
<avil> indicates a continous action [this is not terribly well
expressed, but we get the idea], "he lived for X years...", while
<avils> expresses a precise action or occurrence, "he died at
such-and-such a year" [example <... svalce avil LXIII ...> "... lived
for 63 years ..."]). There are similar cases in the Liber Linteus
(<eslem zathrum> "on the 18th") and the Pyrgi tablets (<ci avil> "for
three years" (Phoen. <s^nt s^ls^ III>), possibly <churvar> if it
translates Phoen. <b yrH krr> "in the month of KRR (dances?)").

>>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?

If English were as unknown to us as Lemnian (with only a little help
from obscure Etruscan), I would say that seeing "AT THE AGE OF FORTY
*AND* LIN..." (which is more like what we have in Lemnian) would
naturally suggest another numeral. There would of course be a 10%
chance of being wrong.

>> 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/,

Of course...

>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.

Thanks.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...