>The reason I raised this "Seren" point is that it seems just
>about the only Philistine word (non-Semitic) to have survived,
>other than some personal names.
It's funny. This /tarwannas/=/tyrannos/ thing looks a lot like
the word I reconstructed for Proto-Tyrrhenian, *Tarw��sena "Tyrrhenian,
person/people of Troy" from *Tarw��se "Troy; of Taru", built on *Tar��,
a deity of storm borrowed from the Hattic.
You say it means just "lord"? Funny, is all. I feel tempted to suggest
*tarw��na "one of Taru" as a tantalizing origin :) Just for fun at least.
Afterall, one site (
http://www.metrum.org/gyges/tyrannos.htm) mentions:
"No matter what was the original meaning of the word .us tyrannos, the
Greeks understood it as having the meaning of military leader,
specifically of leader of hoplite troops." Hmm, yes, a connection with
Taru is really, really tempting given a military connection.
>I rather doubt the Ph. were Mycenaean Greeks (despite the pottery
>argument). And their origin from "Kaphtor" (which doesn't necessarily
>stand only for Crete) remains obscure. All we know is that they suddenly
>appear in Egyptian records under their name (sometime in the first third
>of the 12th c. BC), that they are a component of the "People of the
>Sea"
Gee, sounds very Tyrrhenian. It seems to me that the Etruscans would
have travelled from Asia Minor to Italy in the following centuries to
come while other languages like Lemnian and Eteo-Cypriot lingered in
the area for a while longer.
To me, the "Sea Peoples" were a collection of peoples with differing
cultures and languages but I think that a major chunk of them were
Tyrrhenian-speaking peoples that dispersed around the time you mention
above, perhaps because of famine and perhaps also because of other
Indo-European peoples pushing them out.
Or so I thinks so far. Does everyone hate me now?
- gLeN
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