Marco:
> Can you prove that this /oite/ is really a word for "mother"?
Well, of course, it's gonna be hard with so little to go on but
thankfully we know for certain that Etruscan /ati/ does mean "mother".
That's the base of all this.
I realize that the unrelated Cyrus Gordon had been convinced that Minoan
was Semitic by badly splicing the ancient language into whatever he
wanted. His analyses, only a minority of which could still be relevant,
have always irked me because my gut instinct knows that they are wrong.
I've become certain that Minoan is Tyrrhenian based on entire phrases,
not just snippets of text, and that the entire Eastern Mediterranean was
swarming with Tyrrhenian tongues before 1200 BCE. The connection between
Etruscans and Minoans can even be seen culturally, religiously and
architecturely so I don't feel ashamed making the connection
linguistically as well. Herodotus even backs me up on this.
In Minoan, the Libation Formula seems to normally start with /atai tewai/
which could very well be "mother of gods" if the second word is a Greek
loan of /theoi/. This goes well with a name correlating with Asherah, a
fertility goddess, further down. The word /atai/ is sometimes also
combined with other words that I can't even begin to make a guess on yet.
Don't forget examples like "Demeter" which incorporate "mother" into
a divine title. This seems to be commonplace in the Aegean.
I can conceive of the Minoan religion being very metropolitan and
inclusive, ultimately based on a simple balance of the male and a female
principle, the two both having as many names as the cultures that
interacted with Crete. If one were Greek, one might call the male
principle "Dionysos" and the female "Aphrodite". If one were Babylonian,
a connection with "Baal" and "Ishtar" would be appropriate. Holy phrases
to describe the two principles would have been numerous as well. So
the male and female principles could even be thought of as the divine
"father" and "mother" of the universe. However, I have a bet that while
the female principle was divine and non-physical, the male principle
was the opposite -- tangible, embodied in the very ruler of the people
himself.
So, the word for "mother" looks to me to be not just a kinship term
but a religious keyword. In the EteoCypriot inscription in question
as displayed under "No 3" of
http://phaistos.narod.ru/Ana.htm , it
shows:
oite imikani
oite tako enemina
oite taravo enemina
The repetition here tells me that this is all feel-good religiobabble
like that in the excessively repeated Minoan inscriptions. So if the
two languages are related, and related in turn to Etruscan, then there
is a good chance that /oite/ is none other than the EteoCypriot reflex
of Etruscan /ati/ and Minoan /atai/. This makes sense for above and
we are then given a hint as to what it's saying. In the Libation Formula,
the meaning is clearer when we interpret /atai tewai/ as a locative
(which would be expected to be in -i anyway). Based on comparison with
Etruscan which uses -na to form adjectives, I'd say that /enemina/
is an adjective placed after the noun in the typical Etruscanoid order.
The words /tako/ and /taravo/ may be nouns and /imikani/ may be marked
with a locative in -i. That -i is a case ending in this language is
apparent by comparison between No.2 and No.3 where we have an alternation
of /taravi/ and /taravo/. It's also possible that -vo is a collective
ending related to Etruscan /-cHva/, making /taravo/ an inanimate plural
noun. In fact, /taravo/ could be "gifts" based on Etruscan /tur-/ "to
give" + /-(cH)va/ [inanimate plural]. So, I'd say it says something like:
to mother, by/via NOUN
to mother, NOUN ADJ (are given?)
to mother, gifts ADJ (are given?)
Just a thought.
Marco:
> I'm also definitely skeptical about a development /ai/ > /a/ in
> Etruscan.
Yeah, perhaps you're right considering Etr /ais/ "god". So I guess *ati
should suffice. This would then imply that *a- becomes /oi-/ in
EteoCypriot. In fact, considering that genitive *-ase becomes /-ose/ in
ECyp (as in the first inscription of the above mentioned link) it would
seem to indicate that *a often becomes *o in that language anyway.
= gLeN