Re: An Italic Europe?

Dear Douglas,

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@...> wrote:

> W. Hazlitt, _The Classical Gazetteer_ [1851], s.v. Veneti:
>
> "It is to be observed, that the various peoples in Paphlagonia,
> Italy, Gaul, and Germany, who were anciently called Veneti or
> Heneti, all occupied the same description of country -- marshy
> districts on the coast..."
>
> That is, the various peoples known as Veneti, or Weneto:s 'Beloved
> Ones' vel sim., occupied marginal areas in protohistorical times;
> this is consistent with the relics of the Bell-Beaker expansion at
> the end of the 3rd mill. BCE, mostly superseded and assimilated by
> later expansions.

Many thanks you for pointing this out. Despite my being born and
having always lived in Venice, Italy, I didn't know the name of my
town, Venezia (< Vulgar Lat. Venetiae) and that of my region, the
Veneto (< Lat. Venetia) both derive, via the ethnonym Veneti, from
an IE root which is cognate with Lat. venus 'love'! :^)

Thanks to Google books, I have found a useful paper on the ethnonym
Veneti by Italian historical linguist Paolo Ramat. It's at

http://tinyurl.com/5592sn

Since the paper is in Italian, let me briefly summarize its content:

1) The existence of various ethnonyms based on the IE lemma *wenet-o-
(or its close cognates) and designating peoples from Asia Minor,
the Balkan peninsula, northeastern Italy, Latium, central and
eastern Europe, Switzerland, and Brittany, does not imply that all
these peoples were ethnically related. Only in northeastern Italy
the term *weneto:s/-oi became an auto-ethnonym.

2) The *weneto:s/-oi (< PIE *wen- 'to love') would be 'the beloved,
those bound by kinship ties', with this indicating a separation
between the thus self-defined ethnic or kin group and the "others",
(the "excluded") similar to that hypothesized for Indo-Iranian *aryo-
(according to Paul Thieme, originally meaning 'stranger'). Other IE
parallels to this formation: the auto-ethnonyms based on the lemma
*s(w)e-bho-/s(w)o-bho- (meaning 'those belonging to their own
people'), like Sviþjoð (Swedes), Semnones (< *sebhnones), Sabi:ni:,
Sabelli, Samni:tes, Swa:ba: (Lat. Suebi). Also, Teutones and
Toutoni, meaning 'those belonging to their own *teuta:- (tribe)'.

3) In this perspective, the *weneto:s/-oi would be 'those belonging
to their own kindred' (*wen-ya:-, attested in Old Irish as fine-).

Best,
Francesco Brighenti