Mater theia

What's wrong with you people!? :)

All this time, I'd been talking about my hunch about Minoan
being Tyrrhenian and related to Etruscan. All this time I had been
talking about the fact that the opening of the Libation Formula
starts with /ati teuya/ which I said probably translated as "Mother
(of the) gods" and no one was kind enough on this list to tell me
that the _exact_ Mycenaean correlate of this phrase has already been
found in Pylos! Ugh.

Mycenaean: MA-TE-RE TE-I-YA
mate:r theia

Minoan: A-TA-I TE-WA-YA
ati teuya

It took me a while to put two and two together, I'm afraid, with my
mind on so many other things outside of linguistics lately.

So I think this calls for a celebration because it looks pretty clear
to me at this point that Minoan is related to Etruscan. We have a
correspondance between Greek /mate:r/ and Minoan /ati/ (identical to
Etruscan's "mother" word). The second word could be a Greek loan into
Minoan. In other words, a partial calque. Therefore it wouldn't be
proper to translate it as "[To] mother [of the] gods (theoi)" but
rather "[To] mother goddess (theia)" in light of this. That narrows
things down, I must say.

The only thing I can't understand is why the Minoans were borrowing
this phrase from the Greeks and not vice versa. Then again, if Minoan
religion were less polytheism and more 'dualism', then a term
like 'goddess' (ie: 'one of many female deities') would be somewhat of
a non-Minoan concept, I suppose.

Then again, another possibly that I had thought of earlier is that
it's the Greek phrase that is the partial calque and that TE-WA-YA
means 'earth' based on an interpretation of the name "Demeter" as yet
another partial calque ironically relatable to MA-TE-RE TE-I-YA. The
problem with that idea however is that I'm unaware of another Tyrrhenian
word for 'earth' that looks like TE-WA-YA. Etruscan /muntH/ signifies
'tomb', not 'earth', even though it seems to be the basis for Latin
/mundus/ 'world'. The matter is open to debate on that one.


= gLeN