Re: was Picenes

From: mothorno
Message: 15951
Date: 2002-10-05

From: Antonio Sciarretta <sciarretta@...>
Date: Thu Oct 3, 2002 6:52 pm
Subject: was Picenes


Ciao Ed (since you know some Italian...)
I bring back this discussion (it was about
Picenes) on the cybalist,
since
we had some requests

I strongly encourage you to keep with your work
on the relationship between
Etruscan and HU/ND, which seems to be a very good
direction.

About the fricatives, I am realizing that it is a
question of great
importance. Let assume that our "suspicion" is
correct, and that the
letters of the Etruscan alphabets usually
transcribed with <tH, pH (f),
kH>, were voiced stops instead. This would
explain many borrowings
especially from Greek, but also Italic/Etruscan
correspondences.
How came that the Etruscan did not take the
corresponding Greek signs for
the voiced and used the aspirated ? Has someone
on the list any idea ?



(MT): An explanation might be that the Etruscan language did not have
these b, d, and g sounds?
Nevertheless their west Greek Euobien model alphabet had, + o as well.



The
first Arcaic Greek scripts should go back to XI
century. If it was first
brought in Italy by the Georgiev's "Pelasgians"
(whose language lost the IE
voiced stops but acquired the aspirated in a
different process than the
Greek), instead of by the Rhodians or
Chalcidians, the Etruscans at their
arrival could have found an alphabet without
signs for <b,d,g> and then
could have taken the signs for the aspirated,
that they did not have, for
their voiced stops. Another problem is <f>, which
in any case should have
been in the Etruscan phonetic system, because it
is present in all the
Italic languages and the Etruscan needed it to
borrow at least personal
names, place names, etc. But in this case, isn't
there one alphabet sign
missing ?

I suggested for the theories of Massimo Pittau,
professor at the University
of Sassari, his pages
http://web.tiscali.it/pittau/Etrusco/etrusco.html
and
http://web.tiscali.it/pittau/Sardo/studi.html
(for those who can read
Italian).
The article in which Pittau talks about the
Etruscan numerals is

http://web.tiscali.it/pittau/Etrusco/Studi/dadi.html
but I can tell you in advance that his
argumentation is extremely
unconvincing, as you can see from his conclusive
table where he relates
<thu> to Sanskrit <tva>, <zal> to some Germanic
<zwa>, <ci> to some Iranic
<sih>, <huth> and <quattor>, <makh> and <magnus>
'five=the big (hand)'.


(MT): Sounds very strange.

In general, Pittau is not an IE-ist, but a
scholar of Romance languages,
usually very precise and accurate when he talks
about Sardinia and
Sardinian. I read two books of him, one about the
place names of Sardinia.
He relates the well known "Proto-Sardian" stratum
to the staying of the
Etruscan in the island (say, XI-IX c.) before to
land in the Umbri's (and,
in my opinion, Pelasgi's) Etruria. In general he
allows himself for any
comparison between words of unknown origin in
Latin and Greek, but also
word with clear IE etymology, because in his
opinion Etruscan and, then,
"Proto-Sardian" were more or less the same.

Which is the evidence for Greek "pyrge" being of
Caucasian origin ? This
word is very important for my reconstruction,
because it is considered as
one of the clearest evidences of the features
postulated for this Pelasgian
language: 0) zero grade *bhRgh- 'high, elevated',
1) dissimilation of
aspirated stops --> *bRgh-, 2) vowelization of
sonant /r/ --> *burgh-, 3)
stop shift --> *purg-.
It is the same process that, in my opinion, gave
the name <turris> 'tower'
and then <Tyrrhenian> from the root IE *dhergh|s-
'spike, thorn', which fits the semantics. Here is
the process as I
reconstructed it:

>0) zero-grade *dhRgh-s-, 1) dissimilation of the
aspirated stops -->
>*dRgh-s-, 2) sonant /r/ vowelized
>as /ur/ --> *durg-s-, 3) shift /d/>/t/ -->
*turgs-, 4) simplification of
>the cluster --> *turs-, which gave the name of
the *Turseni. Then, it can
>be the name given by the Pelasgians to the
Etruscans, who called themselves
><ras-na> or something similar, a word that is
related to Hurrian according
>with your table.

(MT): Could you please explain this?



But where the Pelasgians saw the turres of the Tyrrheni ?
>If the Pittau's Sardinian connection fits, those
turres were the nuraghes.

Antonio