--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "dgkilday57" <dgkilday57@...> wrote:
> The name <Tirol> remains unexplained, in my opinion. Also, I am not
> convinced that what Rix calls "Rhaetic" is not really "Rhaeto-
> Etruscan", that is, a colonial variety of archaic Etruscan spoken
> in Padania but not native there. The true "Rhaetic" was more
> likely an IE language of the Illyrian type, I think.
I agree, and I'd like to add to this etymological discussion an analysis which was first proposed by some Italian linguists (Carlo Battisti, etc.) about 50 years ago, but which doesn't seem fashionable any longer today, barring a few relevant exceptions -- see, e.g. at
http://tinyurl.com/mm62zo
and at
http://tinyurl.com/n6y9f8
It is surmised that Tyrol (attested A.D. 1142) ~ Tiról (with accented /o/), the name of the castle near Meran from which the name of the region Tyrol derives, best compares to the toponym Zirl, name of a locality in the Inn valley in present North Tyrol. Zirl is identified with the castle of Teriólis mentioned (in the locative case) in the _Notitia dignitatum_ (4th century A.D.). In A.D. 799 it is mentioned as Cyreola, in 1151 Cirle (later > Zirl). Battisti (et al.) derive both Tiról and Zirl from the Roman toponym Teriólis, with the difference that the name of the Teriólis castle in the Inn valley was Germanized soon after the fall of the Roman Empire (possibly due to Alamannic and, later on, Old Bavarian linguistic influences) through /t/>/z/ consonant shift and retraction of the accent onto the first syllable, while the name of the other *Teriólis castle, the one near Meran, would have preserved the old accent and the initial t- with being Germanized as Tiról (< *Teriólo?) at a much later date.
The toponym *Teriólis itself is generally regarded, in this interpretation, as a pre-Roman one, although an older etymology would derive it from Latin terra 'earth' -- see, for instance the website of the Schloss Tirol Museum itself (!):
http://www.schlosstirol.it/content.php?id=3600&lang=2
"The very name of the place, which later became the name for the whole land, is associated, according to some philologists, with the Latin word 'terra', and denotes, in this case, a location which is clearly visible from a distance. The castle hill, surrounded by 'earth pyramids', [is ] itself a sort of large 'earth pyramid'..."
I have seen through a Google Books search that *Teriólis is, on the contrary, generally connected with an Illyrian or (IE) Rhaetic (Rhaeto-Illyrian?) substrate language of ancient Rhaetia.
Best,
Francesco