Rex:
>I also think by the time the Proto-Etruscans got to Italy, it was already
>known as Tyrrhenia..which Is why I have a problem with
>Glen's name for the group, even as he seems to support the link to
>Anatolia strongly. (No, Glen ..I will offer no alternative..I'll let
> >linguists name linguistic groups..I'll just scream when they don't >seem
>to fit. I have suggested that what we see in Etruscan contains >late
>surviving Aegean Pelasgian..but if so, however you define it..it >was not
>limited to Western Anatolia. :-)
Hmm, how do you define the "Aegean Pelasgian" again? It would almost appear
that I have inadvertantly concluded that it is one and the same with
"Tyrrhenian", in which case, no, it would not be limited to Western Anatolia
but existed in Greece and probably Crete as well. For lack of a better name,
I'll have to stick with the name Tyrrhenian, much to your ire.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Another thought, this time mythological came to mind recently. I wonder if
the List might swallow this or not :) Here goes.
Let's say the IE and the Tyrrhenians had been sittin' together side-by-side
one day about 7000 years ago (5000 BCE), as I've stated previously.
Tyrrhenians would be based firmly in the Balkans and West Anatolia while the
IE would sit way up top, around the north shores of the Black Sea
thereabouts. The Semitish influence, if it had existed, would have ended by
this time as the Tyrrhenian language, its belly bloated on the local
agriculture-fueled economy, began to engulf whatever remnants of a shrinking
Semitish landscape that had existed in the previous millenium. The
Tyrrhenians in effect would appear to be our mysterious sea-worthy
Pelasgians.
To boot, let's imagine that a widespread name of a certain goddess,
associated with love and the planet Venus, _did_ come from the IE at a very
early date. Let's pretend that the date of this spread occured starting at
5000 BCE during what I call the Late IE phase (5000-4000 BCE) when IE took
on its familiar characteristics. We might imagine for just a moment that
Piotr analyses correctly that IE *xste:r "star" is native, deriving from
*xes- "to scorch". *Xste:r, not only meaning "star" would have originally
signified to IE speakers the love goddess, Venus, the morning and evening
star, as she is known to this day.
With the Tyrrhenians side-by-side, one would expect some mythological
cross-over with the IE, among other exchanges. If the Tyrrhenians had taken
this name for themselves, we might imagine that they would pronounce it
something like *Hattor.
While I admit that this is getting into wild speculation at this point, note
that the Etruscan name is /Turan/. Now, Turan itself is probably divisible
into /Tur-an/ because of a billion-and-one other Etruscan god names with
this -an ending. Furthermore, while one may note that Etruscan appears to
conform for the most part to (C)V(C) structure with a regular initial stress
accent, it doesn't explain the occasional initial consonant cluster in
certain words (cf. clen "son"; fler "gift"). So maybe accent fell on the
second syllable under certain conditions in order to have produced a CCVC
pattern... like when, say, the vowel of the first syllable was Tyrrhenian
*a. So... clen < *k:alen & fler < *faler & Turan < *Hattor + -an. (BTW, I
should have written Tyrrhenian *moxala-kowa "fifty", not the earlier
preTyrrhenian form *maxala-kowa. A small but significant confusion in this
case. Sorry.)
With a Tyrrhenian goddess named *Hattor, the next chain of events would flow
naturally from here on end if Tyrrhenian was indeed a Mediterranean-based
language. Having control over this large and strategic area, people speaking
other languages like Egyptian and Semitic would be at their fingertips. I
feel strongly that while the MiddleEast brought agriculture to the
Europeans, the MiddleEastern religions that existed during the dawn of
history were somehow the offspring to a substantial prehistoric influence
from Europe. If not carried out by the earlier Semitish, this influence must
have flowed from the Tyrrhenians.
Now to the crux of the idea (finally!), *Hattor might then easily end up
docking in northern Egypt where the Egyptians, upon hearing the bizarre
name, would understandably misanalyze it as */Hat-Howr/ "House of Horus".
The fact that Hathor is a _cow_ goddess associated with the _sky_ and
_mother_ to the sun-pharoah should sound familiar to you IE mythologists out
there because it's a European myth rehashed to suit native Egyptian tastes.
Gee, that might explain the Greek association between Aphrodite & Hathor all
the more.
Tyrrhenians would easily be able to arrive on the Semitic doorstep as well.
The leap from *Hattor to *`ATtaru/*`ATtaritu is a small one and the apparent
gender confusion of this name might just stem from the fact that *Hattor,
being female but not ending in the Semitic feminine ending *-tu, gave much
distress to the Semitophones. Three solutions: Make her a male goddess
*`ATtaru and keep the name intact; Add the feminine ending to her foreign
name and keep her sex intact; Do both.
So, I guess that means that the IE _could_ have an influence (a very
indirect one) on the Middle East... but it would only be where mythology is
involved since technology was surely the Middle-Eastern domain.
- gLeN
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