Re: On the origin of the Etruscans

From: tgpedersen
Message: 48161
Date: 2007-04-01

> R.S.P. Beekes, _The Origin of the Etruscans_, Amsterdam, Koninklijke
> Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2003; the booklet, which
> seems to be a fundamental philological study in my profane eyes, can
> be downloaded in PDF format at
>
> http://www.knaw.nl/publicaties/pdf/20021051.pdf
>

Palmer, The Greek Language, p. 113:
"
The poems attributed to Theognis of Dorian Megara, whose floruit was
the middle of the sixth century B.C., are in fact a collection of
elegiac verses and sympotic songs from various hands, and there
appears to be no way of sifting out what is authentic. The language
conforms to the conventions of Ionian elegy but with greater
receptivity to non-Ionic Homerisms. A few Doricisms have been
detected: genitive Euró:ta:, paiá:no:n 779, the infinitives phéugen
260 and e~men 960. Doric words are le:~i, 'wishes', 'wants' 299 and
mo:~sthai 'covet' 771.
Above it was noted that linguistically little or nothing distinguishes
the elegiacs of Archilochus from the 'iamboi'. More clearly separated
are the two genres in Semonides of Amorgos (second half of the seventh
century B.C.) if it is correct to attribute to him the elegiacs Fr. 29
Diehl (ascribed by Stobaeus to Simonides) which offer the Aeolic
Homerisms éeipen, ge:rasémen and potí. His iambics adhere closely to
the Ionic dialect (there are no genitives in -010, datives in -essi,
etc.) and, unlike Archilochus, he uses hókou, kot(e), hoke:, and hóko:s.
Archilochus and Semonides are linked by Lucian (Pseudol. 2) with
Hipponax of Ephesus (sixth century B.C.), another writer
of 'iamboi', who gave the iambic trimeter a twist by making the last
foot into a spondee, thus inventing the kholíambos ('lame iambos'),
also called skázo:n ('limping'). His language comes closer to the
everyday speech of the Ionians who had imposed themselves on a mixed
native population with various ethnic elements such as Lydians,
Carians, and Maeonians. Hipponax betrays some knowledge of Maeonian in
Fr. 3:
ébo:se Máie:s pai~da Kullé:ne:s pálmun
Erme:~ kunágka Me:oniotì Kandau~la.
po:ro:~n etai~re, deu~ró moi skapardeu~sai
'He called upon (ébo:se, with Ionic contraction of ebóe:se) the son of
Maia, the Lord of Cyllene, "O dog-strangling Hermes, called Kandaulas
in Maeonian, Companion of Thieves, come back me up".'
Here skapardéuo: is evidently a native word having some such meaning.
The Greek epithet kunágka ('dog-strangler') appears to be a
translation of Kandaulas, which is open to etymological interpretation
as a compound of kan- 'dog' and an l-derivative from the root *dhau-
'strangle' that is reflected in O. Sl. daviti 'strangle'. Another
foreign intruder is pálmus 'king', this time from Lydian, as is káue:s
'priest', 'soothsayer' (cf. kaves´ on a Lydian inscription from
Sardis). The last occurs in Fr. 4 Masson in a verse which gives an
idea of the tang of this linguistic hotchpotch: Kíko:n o pandále:tos
ámmoros káue:s, 'Kiko:n the broken-down, luckless priest'. Kíko:n is a
Thracian ethnic, and two epithets in the grand manner qualify the
Lydian káue:s: pandále:tos links up with de:léomai (cf. phrenodalé:s
Aesch. Eum. 330), while ámmoros is taken straight from Homer.
"

This doesn't look good for Maeonian being of the Etruscan family, as
Beekes wants it to be. Unless Hipponax is pulling our leg by
mock-translating words that were known by his audience to have a
different derivation (dog-strangling?!).


Torsten