--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...>
wrote:
>
> --- On Thu, 10/9/08, Arnaud Fournet <fournet.arnaud@...> wrote:
>
> > From: Arnaud Fournet <fournet.arnaud@...>
> > Subject: Re: [SPAM] Re: [tied] Re: Salt, s-/h-
> > To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> > Date: Thursday, October 9, 2008, 3:05 AM
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Piotr Gasiorowski"
> > [...]
> > >
> > > On 2008-10-09 01:16, Rick McCallister wrote:
> > >
> > >> Let me risk a pie in the face on this one. The
> > *turs- forms are often
> > >> related to a word for "tower.". What is
> > the chance they could be a
> > >> bastardization of *etrus- > *trus- > *turs-
> > ?
> > >
> > > Why the metathesis? (Etruscan speakers had no
> > particular problems with
> > > /tr-/). Why should the initial vowel heve been lost?
> > Is there any
> > > evidence of *tru:s- anywhere? (the vowel should have
> > been long at this
> > > stage, as it was in <etru:s->).
> > > Piotr
> > =============
> > The form tursk may be the name Etruscans adopted for
> > themselves from their
> > neighbours.
> > lost of initial e : because Etruscan has stress on initial,
> > the e must be
> > discarded to stress tursk on the first.
> > metathesis : because out of etrurousk, variants like
> > etrursk > etursk have
> > existed.
> > It may not be a metathesis but a different simplification
> > of -uru:-
> > short u : because Etruscan had no long vowel.
> >
> > I'm very sceptical about the idea of rejecting any
> > connection between etrusk
> > and tursk.
> > It seems impossible. Toscana and Etruria are more or less
> > the same place, or
> > not ?
> >
> > Arnaud
> > ============
> I'm neutral on the idea but want to hear what people think.
> The Etruscans, BTW, called themselves Rasenna > later Rasna.
> And some people go togreat lengths to shoehorn this into the other
forms as well.
In addition to the phonological difficulties mentioned by Piotr,
there is a chronological one. The form Turs- 'Tuscan, Etruscan'
is found already ca. 600 BCE in the gentilicium Turs^ikina
identifying the giver of the golden fibula of Clusium (TLE 489;
reading of Buonamici corrected to <zamathi mamurke mulvenike
turs^ikina> by Heurgon; I would further correct the praenomen to
<mamarce>, taking the ligature as <ma>; H. read it as <mu>, B.
<nu>). This gentilicium has an Italic base with an Etruscan suffix;
presumably a member of this family was known as *Tursiki(o)s by the
Old Umbrians, from *Turs(i)k(o)s 'Tuscan', and -na was appended to
the base for Etruscan use. "Ein typisches Grenzprodukt!" 600 BCE
is awfully early for *Et(ro)rous- (or even *Etru:s-, if one
dismisses Alessio's haplology) to have been jumbled around into Turs-
, no matter how open one is to ad-hoc phonological processes.
Rasna is not a late syncopated form of Rasenna. The long spelling
comes from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, while the short one comes
directly from Etruscan texts which are significantly older than
D.H. (There is also a hamlet called Rasenna in the Appennines; if
the name is ancient, this is probably another Grenzprodukt.) What
we have here is a long syllabic nasal [n:] in Etruscan which had to
be rendered -enn- in Greek and Latin. Similarly, Volaterrae is the
Latinized form of Velathri (attested abundantly on coins) which must
have had long syllabic [r:], and Watmough has convincingly shown
that Lat. <satelles> 'bodyguard, attendant, lackey' is borrowed from
Etr. <zatlath> literally 'hard-axer, one who strikes hard with an
axe, securi percussor', in technical sense 'lictor, bodyguard of
Tarquinius Superbus'; probably the word was borrowed while T.S.
ruled at Rome, and the Etr. original had long syllabic [l:].
The basic sense of <rasna> is 'public', not
specifically 'Etruscan'. The signs reading <tular rasnal> can
hardly mean 'border of Etruscan (land)' when the border was in fact
the Tiber and there is no corresponding Umbrian sign. Instead the
signs must mean 'border of public (land)', this being 'ager
publicus' open to public grazing, in contrast with private
agricultural land. Likewise Rix rejects the sense 'Etruscan
confederation' for <mech rasna>, taking 'res publica' as the sense,
and this is borne out by the Tabula Cortonensis, which dates to post-
Hannibalic times when there was no meaningful Etruscan
confederation; <zilath mechl rasnal> must be something like 'praetor
rei publicae', the highest civil magistrate at Cortona, which was by
that time already allied with Rome.
From <rasna> 'public' one may reasonably extract an Etr. noun
*ras 'people', but the only thing this has in common with Etru:s-
and Turs- is an /r/ followed eventually by an /s/. The folks with
the 20-inch cast-iron shoehorns might as well jam in English
<hearse> (we all know the Etruscans were obsessed with death),
<Rastafarian> (they were deeply religious), and <truss> (they were
small-boned and had trouble with heavy lifting). Better yet, these
folks could have a Battle Royal with their shoehorns.
Ennius's scansion of the Etruscan king's name as <Vi:be:> (Etr.
<Vipe> with regular voicing of intervocalic simple stops)
contradicts the popular notion that Etruscan lacked long vowels.
The matter of Etruscan prosody is complex and beyond the scope of
this posting, but it should be noted that the strong syllabic timing
which can be deduced for Recent Etruscan does not preclude the
presence of long vowels in open syllables, which indeed are forced
upon us by the Latin forms of certain proper names. Also, certain
Etr. verbal forms like <thesane> with unsyncopated short /a/ must
have had non-initial stress.
Douglas G. Kilday