Re: [tied] Etruscan and Nakh

Ed:

>I agree we are talking about the neolithic.

Thank you for agreeing.

>The Etruscans are said to originate from Anatolia.

_Western_ Anatolia.

>The Nakh are said to have moved into the Caucasus from Anatolia.

_Eastern_ Anatolia. (Way on the other side of Anatolia!)

>The Hurrians and Urartians were in Anatolia.

The HurroUrartian protolanguage is _Eastern_ Anatolian.

>Key elements of the Etruscan lexicon are widely acknowledged to be >non-IE.

Of course, as with any language, there are elements that have been later
fused, but non-IE is not a synonym for Nakh.

>Key elements of the Nakh lexicon do not correspond with those
> >reconstructed for those items in ProtoNEC based on the Daghestanian
> >lexical material.

Perhaps, but we need a list of vocabulary terms that offer credible
connections between Nakh and Etruscan. I haven't see anything worth looking
at yet. Can you supply a better list? To boot, Nakh is more likely to have
been affected by languages of EASTERN Anatolia and these languages alone are
numerous, some of which may have even died out with little to no trace.

>Hurrian/Urartian is not generally thought to be closely related to >IE.

True.

>Hurrian/Urartian is thought by some people to be genetically related >to
>NEC (such assertions including a share of correspondences with >Nakh).

True.

>There are similarities in art, architecture and religion between the
>Hurrian/Urartians and the Etruscans (and metallurgy, as Alexander >pointed
>out).

Cultural and technological similarities only, by way of general diffusion
out of Anatolia. Mythology would appear to me to be, at least at first,
coming out of Europe, but certainly later, with the rise of the
civilisations of the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, this direction changes.
Mythology is not the easiest points to prove linguistic contact.

>There are a number of apparent lexical similarities between Nakh, >Etruscan
>and Hurrian/Urartian.

If apparent as in "real", I say "false". If apparent as in "similar in
phonetics", I say "perhaps".

>The ancient ancestors of the Nakh are said to be a people called the
> >Tushba.

... which so far means nothing in the end because the foundation of this
Nakh-Etruscan hypothesis has not been layed with a how, a where, a when and
a list of connections that demonstrate that the contact must have taken
place. "Tushba" doesn't conclusively relate to the Etruscans either.

- gLeN

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