Joao, influenced by me suggesting Etruscan /usil/ is 'night',
not 'sun':
> What are the another IE cognates of this root *wes-? What are the
> cognates of Germanic *sku:raz "shower" and Russian sever "north"?
Hmm, I never considered a link between *wes- and /usil/ yet. Thanks!
As for how IndoEuropean the root is, I think very. There's also *wesr
'spring' and I think the root suggests "darkening". In spring, we see the
greenery 'darkening' as it were.
I was most interested so far in determining a more secure translation of
a number of taken-for-granted words dependent more on their contextual
environment rather than any ad hoc links to other languages, the latter
method being the most relied upon and the one that is absolutely
plaguing the credibility of Tyrrhenian studies and hampering them.
I had arrived at a translation of "night" for /usil/ because of the
opposition of /tHesane/ and /us(i)lane/ in the Zagreb Mummy text firstly.
If /tHesane/ is "morning", which it appears to be upon my own review
(in fact, *tHes- appears to mean "to rise" based on its derivatives),
then the other word would more naturally be "in the evening" (usil,
*usilan = "night, evening") rather than the current translation of "at
noon" (??!). Thus:
Cis=um, tHesan-e uslan-e=c, mlacH-e luri zeri=c zec atHeli-x [...]
"And on the 3rd, in the morning and in the evening, [they] blessed
'luri'(?) and 'zec zeri'(?) for 'atheli'(?) [...]"
Don't ask me what /luri/ is but they apparently blessed it :)
Also, the text /tiur usils/ on a haruspex, at least as indicated by the
Etruscan books at the public library immediately available to me,
would then not be just two floating words meaning "moon" and "sun"
respectively, but rather a phrase "moon of the night" (usil-s, with
genitive ending).
So, this being explained, it would be tempting to expect *wes- is
related to a root *us- considering that so much of the grammar in
Tyrrhenian languages is uncannily evocative of older stages of IE.
Other words in /-il/ exist in Etruscan too, notably /avil/ 'age, year'
which some have connected with the IE root *xeiu-. However, I would
have expected that a root like *wes- in IE would be reflected as
Etruscan *ves- ~ *vas-, not *us-. Then again, I don't really know
how IE words with *wV- should surface in any related roots in Tyrrhenian
anyway. Considering *usilan is in the same form as other deverbals
like /tHesan/ "morning" (literally "rising"), /turan/ "Venus" (literally
"giving") and /alpan/ "willing, being generous", it's conceivable that
the word means "darkening (of the day)" and that the simpler form /usil/,
being identical in meaning would be of the form like /avil/, itself
a verbal derivative of *us- 'to darken'. I like the idea. Thanks Joao!
= gLeN