From: Rick McCallister
Message: 60871
Date: 2008-10-13
> From: dgkilday57 <dgkilday57@...>Wow, that's an explanation.
> Subject: [SPAM] Re: [tied] Re: Salt, s-/h-
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Monday, October 13, 2008, 1:26 PM
> --- 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