Re: [tied] Picene

In a message dated 30/08/02 15:16:57 GMT Daylight Time,
sciarretta@... writes:

> Why people likes this "pre-IE" ? Wouldn't it be better "non-IE" ? or even
> "post-IE" ? In other terms, we don't have evidence that the non-IE language

> of ancient Mediterranean (and we have real evidence only of two, Etruscan -

> if it is really non-IE as it seems - and Basque, in the West)

I agree. There is a problem in English in that "Pre-IE" is ambiguous:
it can either mean an early stage of IE, or a language spoken before
the Indo-Europeans arrived. Pfiffig described the Tyrrhenians as
"vorindoeuropäisch". The latter would have been meant, as this term is
not ambiguous in German.

> The theory that Raetic was together with Etruscan a
> remnant of the Villanovian people is due to a nationalist point of view
> defended mainly by the archeologists.

So in your opinion the Villanovans were speakers of Umbrian?

> The Pelasgians are associated to the Bronze
> age, the Tyrrhenians to the period of the "catastrophes" at the end of it
> and after. Their arrival (for the Dionysian autochthonists,
> 'manifestation') in Tuscany is dated few centuries after 1000 b.C.

They would need to have been fairly well established by 700 BC.

> A new
> theory defended by Massimo Pittau would see the Lydians/Tyrrhenians leaving

> around XII sec. b.C., staying in Sardinia for a while (2-3 centuries),
> building the Nuraghes, being known as Tyrrhenians 'the people of the
> towers' and then colonizing Tuscany subtracting it to the poor Umbrians. In

> the classical sources, the oldest distinguish the two peoples, the most
> recent say they were the same. I can provide a better reference to these
> sources later.

I have often wondered about the particular architectural inclination
for towers in Italy. If this is something that dates back to Etruscan
times, this is very interesting. There are grammatical features and
lexical material in Etruscan that are reminiscent of certain languages
of the Caucasus whose peoples have also shown an inclination for tower
building. And the dates for the Sardinian nuraghi (1500 BC onwards)
may be relevant.

> I am ready to change the term 'Pelasgians' into 'Tyrrhenians' if it will be

> proved that Etruscan was an Anatolian IE language, in which *g>k, *d>t and
> *b>p (and many other things).

But it wasn't, and when Etruscan borrowed from other languages it was
/g/ > /x/ (i.e. velar fricative), /d/ > /T/ (i.e. dental fricative)
and /b/ > /f/, or possibly aspirated stops instead of fricatives. I
think Pelasgian and Tyrrhenian have to be regarded as two different
things.

> Soon I will write about 'Ligurians' or, better, 'Liguro-Sicanians', another

> fancy result of the application of my (actually Georgiev-Zamboni-Duridanov)

> toponymy method.

Can you recommend any works on Ligurian?

> But, again, who cares about the little Picenes ?

Oh, I care about them, but I have just no idea who they were. The
fact that the word "sut" keeps popping up in a funeral stele is
interesting, but the morphology is nothing like Etruscan. If I
understand you correctly, you think they were pre-Italic (there's that
dreadful affix pre- again!) Where does "Illyrian" and the Messapic
language fit into your theory?

Regards

Ed.