Re: [tied] Etruscan and Nakh

Infamous Ed posts:

>>I believe 3000 BCE is more likely to have been the general date of
>>_fracture_ (not arrival) of Kartvelian.
>
>Yes, I agree we cannot push this event much further back than this.
>Now why would a language want to fracture into dialects? Expansion, >no?

I'm not sure on the details but I presume so. Or displacement. One or the
other.

>I don't rule out a remote connection between IE and NEC. You probably
>know John Colarusso has put forward the idea that NWC and IE
>together form a 'Pontic' macrofamily. You probably have something to
>say about this, which I would be interested in. At least we all think
>NWC and NEC aren't that closely related. Sorry, Sergei.

NEC and IE? Seperated by some 40,000 years. NWC and IE? Yes, I have
something to say about this. First, this "Pontic macrofamily" is already
called Dene-Caucasian. The genetic seperation of NWC from IE (via Nostratic)
would be on the order of some 30,000 years. However, I agree with what
Bomhard says about a later NWC influence on preIE. This influence would have
occured between 9000 and 7000 BCE as both NWC and IndoTyrrhenian travelled
westward from Central Asia together. That would explain why preIE stages
appear to have only two vowels (just like in NWC).

>[...] Etr. /-asa/ [...] Cf. Chechen /-ash/ progressive
>participle (present and past) or simultaneous converb.
>[...]
>I think you mean adjective ending? Cf. Chechen /-en/ [...]
>[...]
>Also Etr. /-an/ verbal noun, cf. Chechen infinitive /-an/,
>[...]
>Cf. Chechen /-(i)na-/, inferential past, stem for desiderative.
>Also /-un-/ future attributive participle (oblique stem).

What can you say to a person that thinks in terms of individual items
instead of systems to arrive at his counter-archaeological,
counter-linguistic conclusions?

>Very few independent adjectives in Nakh, just as in
>Etruscan.

And IE.

>Yes, that's Uralic; /-ce/ doesn't seem to have a correspondence in IE
>and neither does the 'passive' related to it, /-xe/. The two endings
>everybody is 100% certain of the meaning of. Cf. Chechen past >temporal
>converb: /-cha/.

Ha! So you're saying that Etruscan /c/ (pronounced [k]) relates to Chechen
/-cha/, eh??

>Correspondences with no obvious IE parallels:
>
>Etruscan medio-passive participle for transitive verbs /-u/, cf.
>Chechen normal present tense for transitive verbs, /-u/.

The present and the mediopassive a teensy bit different. May as well include
French "voulu", "tendu", "tenu", "tordu", etc.

>Etruscan plural (and pluralis tantum as in /tular/) /-ar/, cf.
>Chechen verbal noun (also some abstractions) /-ar/.

Again, plurals and "verbal nouns" are two very different things. Sad. Very
sad.

>Etruscan passive participle of necessity /-(e)ri/, cf.
>Chechen desiderative /-?ara/.

This ending /-eri/ is probably related to the same ending used as "for" as
in /methlumeri/ "for the people", meaning that the connection to Chechen is
a fragile one.

>> nominative [unmarked] [unmarked] (inanimate)
>> honorific -s (male deities) *-s (animate nominative)
>> accusative -n (pronominal) *-m
>[...]

>Only Lydian has morphological redetermination, i.e. l + s like
>Etruscan. I would suggest therefore that this is an areal feature in
>Lydian due to Etruscoid influence.

Quite right, opt for the less likely option. That's what Occam's Razor is
for. To destroy, to maim, to twist, to contort to one's own feelings.

>Morphological redetermination is
>also present in Nakh to form new nouns from oblique cases e.g. Etr.
>/Uni/ 'Juno', /unial/ 'Juno's temple' (lit. 'of Juno'), cf. Batsbi
>/cu/ 'oats', /cun/ 'bread' (lit. 'of oats').

This can be found in IE as well. So what?

>In Chechen, /-l/ is used for the comparative case, while /-alla/ is >used
>for deadjectival abstractions, e.g. /xazalla/, 'beauty'.

Hmm, I guess it must be relatable to Latin then (cf. abilis, nominalis,
habilis, etc).

> > locative -thi *dhi
> > locative -pi *bhi
>...

Ah-hah! This is the thing you've purposely ignored. The parallels are just
too obvious here. Both IE and Etruscan patently have the same locative
particles. Period.

>What about /tinscvil/? That sounds genitive without needing an -a-.

What about it? It's a derivative formation of /tins/, not /tinas/.

>A 'nominative' ending that only gets used sometimes sounds >dangerously
>like an ergative.

You obviously don't have a clue what an ergative is used for and you don't
have a clue about Etruscan. No one would be so daft as to propose such a
thing for Etruscan /-s/. And like I say, it's used for _male_ deities. It
wouldn't make sense that female deities lack an ergative given that Etruscan
has no grammatical distinction between masculine and feminine (just animate
and inanimate like in IE).

>Hmmm. Your -s 'nominative' (male Gods) and -n 'accusative' (a handful >of
>words) are so non-mainstream that they could either be i) recent
> >innovations, or ii) archaic relics in which case Etruscan would be a
> >daughter of IE, which it patently isn't, [blah, blah, blah]

Look, listen for once. There are many languages including IE and Dravidian
where pronominals and demonstratives are given different case endings than
the regular nouns. This is simple first-year linguistics. Etruscan /-n(i)/
happens to be the pronominal-demonstrative accusative, not found in regular
nouns, not found in the "mainstream" as you so put it in laymen's terms.
There is nothing to upset oneself about. No competent Etruscanologists feel
very concerned either. No one is proposing that the male -s honorific is an
ergative either. You can believe what you want.

>> ... Vac-al tmia-l avilchva-l amu-ce pulumchva snuia-ph.
>> (Notice both the verb /amu-ce/ and the locative /-ph(i)/ at the >> end.)
>
>Not everybody agrees there is a locative /-ph/ at the end. In fact
>there are many interpretations for /snuiaph/, although the sense of
>the rest of the sentence is clear. What do you think it means?

Treating /snuiaph/ seems so absurd to me. By seperating it properly into
/snuia/ (with a familiar -ia ending) and -ph (a common locative ending) we
get closer to the truth. Perhaps it means something like "The yearly temple
libations were (put) beside the tomb vaults of the ancestors." I can't for
the life of me figure out how /pulumchva/ is translated as "stars". Maybe
others on this list will know?

>I know, resistance is futile, etc. However, it could be it came into
>Nakh from Hurrian *we rather than from IE.

The contact between Nakh and IE is unquestionable. But what about the
contact between NEC and Hurrian. Is this as likely? It doesn't appear to be.
Why choose it? Ah, yes. I forgot. You get enjoyment out of contorting
Occam's Razor.

>Is that it? That's hardly the Tyrrhenians having deep roots in the
>Balkans. In any case, while I go along with you on /Ytte:nia/, some
>Greek scholars doubt whether the 'tell-tale' /-sso-/ and /-ntho-/
>endings are actually pre-Greek at all.

Can these words and names be analyzed in Greek terms?

>Setting aside the architectural
>and religious similiarities, there is also the matter of the
>Latin/Etruscan bilingual TLE 455/CIE 272 which reads:

This is too offensively fantastical to comment on.

>We're talking about Etruscan ethnogenesis. In eastern Anatolia. And
>about who else might have been around at the time.

If you don't have a hypothesis, you don't have a point.

>I find a relation between Etruscan /acila/ 'handmaiden' and Latin
>/ancilla/ 'servant girl' eminently plausible. I can't understand what
>problem there could be.

There's no problem with the connection as far as I can tell but it's the
added assumption that Etruscan must therefore have had nasal vowels that
irks my sense of logic.

- gLeN

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