I said:
>Sounds like someone was thinking of "Larth", with a final aspirate dental
>stop, which is indeed an Etruscan name, although unrelated I'm pretty sure.
Miguel:
>I rather suppose it's a reference to Laris (> Lars).
Piotr agreed with me, so nyah :P
Anyways, upon looking for instances of Laris, I found a woooonderful German
site on Etruscan that I hadn't come across before. It's at:
http://etruskisch.de/pgs/og.htm
I've added to my Tyrrhenian page of links and info at:
http://members.tripod.com/~glen_gordon/LANGUAGE/NOSTRATIC/STEPPE/tyrrhenian.html
The eery thing about it is that it's actually confirming some things that
I've arrived at through pure extrapolation based on the scanty facts
available to me. In fact, it's actually knocking my socks off and I'm
trying to contain my excitement.
For instance, it states that /per(a)/ is the Etruscan word for "house",
confirming the existence of my already existant reconstruction of *para.
I suspected this word's existence for some time because it, for one,
strongly appears to me that this is one of the major Eastern Mediterranean
wanderwords of the neolithic. (The same word, aside from being
reconstructable in Tyrrhenian, also appears in Egyptian *para-w (> Coptic
/pei/), Hattic /pel/ and Anatolian *parn-!) Another reason is that I had
already crossed paths with the Etruscan words /par/, /parnicH/ and /parcHis/
which were already acknowledged to relate to government functions. Based
on the two above facts, I hypothesized that it was not unlikely for these
words to literally refer to a "house" in much the same way as we refer
to government entities as "houses" nowdays (eg: The White House, the
parliamentary house, the House of Commons, etc). Based on /per(a)/,
I must now reconstruct *pera... my bad. There are other suspect
wanderwords that I still have to determine.
But another thing that threw me into a tizzy of ecstasy was the admission
of /un/ as a "pouring" or "libation"!!! Why does that matter you ask?
Because
this was the translation I suspected for not only Etruscan where there is an
instance of /un trin/ (which I took to mean "give him/her/it a libation" but
I
also gave this same meaning to instances of /un/ found in Linear A as I was
examining it.
There are a fair amount of examples in Linear A artifacts of text fragments
like U-NA-KA-NA-SI which I take to be two words */un ken-asi/, the first
being
"libation" and the second being a marked verb, probably a gerundive or
aorist (Etruscan /-asa/). I assume it means something to the effect of
"offering libations" and funny enough, we also see instances of the
alternative
phrase U-NA-RE-KA-NA-TI which I take to be */unar ken-ati/. If I'm correct,
this
shows *un in a Tyrrhenian plural, *unar.
Now I don't want to be so bold as to say that Linear A is an ancient dialect
of the Tyrrhenian family, preceding both Etruscan and Lemnian, but I think
I will :) That's probably the big reason why no one can classify or
translate
it to this day.
I also notice some tasty words I hadn't seen before that confirm a
relationship
with IndoEuropean. The word for "self" is listed as /sa/ (*swe), the word
for
boy is /mariS/ (*maryo-), "she raised (a child)" is listed as /ar-ce/
(*hWer-).
There are of course words like /laiva-/ "left" which is a blatant loan from
Latin
/laevus/ or Greek /lai(w)os/ but I don't think all IE correspondances can be
explained away this way. Some level of relationship exists between
Tyrrhenian
and IndoEuropean languages.
- gLeN
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