Miguel:
> Why insist on using "lax" and "tense" in a meaning which is
> incompatible with what the words really mean in phonology?
I need to call it something but I can't be certain of the exact
phonetics of the phonemes. There are possibilities that need to
be weeded out and while I've figured out that ProtoSteppe most
likely kept the ejectives from Nostratic, I don't know whether
IndoTyrrhenian retained ejectives from ProtoSteppe. I'm not of
the camp that says that IE itself had ejectives. This takes the
typological arguement too far.
> Aren't you ignoring the fact that within the historically
> attested Etruscan texts there's a tendency for inaspirate
> sounds in the early inscriptions to become aspirates in the
> later inscriptions? I think this applies to the locative
> ending -t(h)i.
You think but you're not sure. I know about this tendency but we still
can see that stops were contrasted by aspiration regardless. There is
still a pattern even if it is occasionally obscured by later changes.
This is why inter-Tyrrhenian comparisons are vital to piecing together
the original Tyrrhenian protolanguage that no one to date seems to be
sufficiently interested in or brave enough to put together.
Me:
>It becomes /cH/ when preceded by consonant but /v/ when intervocalic.
Miguel:
> After -s', the collective/plural appears as -v- in the paradigm:
Yes, alright. That's a moot point. The point remains that it all
derives from *x, and *x becomes /cH(v)/ in some situations and /v/ in
others such as the clear alternation seen in /macH/ vs. /muvalcH/.
This now explains the alternation properly nonetheless. We can agree
that the alternation can only derive from one and the same phoneme.
Further, since we can say now that the plural /-(cH)va/, which
is also attested in Lemnian as -cHv- (cf. /sialcHveis avis/ "of sixty
years"), derives from *-xo, it's natural relationship to the inanimate
collective suffix *-x in IE via IndoTyrrhenian *-hWe further coincides
with Agostiniani's theory mentioned in the article you gave link to:
"Agostiniani ha formulado la hip¨®tesis de que los dos marcadores
de plural ¨Cr(a) y -cva/¦Öva/va no se distribuyen caprichosamente
entre los substantivos, sino que la presencia de uno u otro en
un determinado sustantivo es consecuencia del car¨¢cter animado
o inanimado del sustantivo: -r(a) es el sufijo formador de
plurales de los substantivos de referente [+animado] y -cva/¦Öva/va
el de los substantivos de referente [-animado]."
This is brilliant because we now see a relationship not only between
inanimate /-cHva/ and IE *-x but also a relationship between
animate /-r/ and IE *-es. Apparently, the gender system of animate
and inanimate had survived in Tyrrhenian. The occasional /-a/ at the
end of the animate plural still needs to be explained of course and
the Minoan plural might be /-ro/, not just /-r/, in the syllabic
Linear A texts. On the other hand, that /-a/ might simply be an added
case ending for all we know.
= gLeN