Miguel on the Amathusan bilingual:
>In fact, I'm beginning to suspect that the whole thing is in Greek.
Reasons why Miguel is crazy:
- The text is _already_ written partially in Greek (Attic dialect)
- Specialists in Greek would have discovered this long ago,
if it were true.
- The Eteo-Cypriot text was written in the old syllabary, not
the Greek alphabet.
- Eteo-Cypriot is definitively non-Greek, non-IE & non-Semitic
- The name occurs twice in both versions strongly suggesting
that the text is pretty much the same in both languages
(... well, except for the second sentence which doesn't
match the Greek side. I think reads something to the
effect of "this object was comissioned by the 'kaili-poti' or
king.")
If the genitive looks "Greek" to you, we may as well say Etruscan
is Greek too.
I have to rely on memory but the Greek side looks something like:
"He polis he Amathousion Ariston Aristonax eupatriden." The
expected verb "dedicated to" is implicit and unwritten.
The last name in Eteo-Cypriot is written:
A-RA-TO-WA-NA-KA-SO-KO-O-SE
Cyrus Gordon mentions a dialectal variant of Aristonax which
is Artowanax. The explanation suffices because surely this
is the ECyp representation of the name in the Greek text.
Nothing and I repeat NOTHING in the Eteo-Cypriot text can be
construed as Greek and the verb U-MI-E-SA-I (umesi) is clearly
"dedicate" firmly attested in Etruscan /um-uce/ and Lemnian
/aumai/ (look at the Lemnian Stele). The phonetics are even
predictable since Lemnian tends to diphthongalize pure vowels.
Scrool down this site...
http://etruskisch.de/pgs/gr.htm
...and you'll also see mentioned the gloss /une/, the locative of
/un/ "libation" which correlates with the Minoan /una kanasi/.
Hell, Minoan even shows the plural /unar kanasi/ at times! You'd
have to be dropped on your head if you think EteoCypriot and
Minoan are anything but Tyrrhenian given all that evidence.
Unlike Cyrus, I'm not picking small pieces of text and making
a mountain out of a molehill. I've taken the ENTIRE text and
succesfully compared the vocabulary, grammar and phonetics
to other known Tyrrhenian languages. Forget Greek.
Now, for some strange reason, I can't find any mention of the
bilingual EteoCretan/Greek text on the net. I believe it used to be
on the indoeuropean-turned-porno-site but I know the text dates to
the 4th century BCE and is mentioned in "Forgotten Scripts" by
Cyrus Gordon (again, I must stress, no relation!) :P
- gLeN
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