First of all, I'd like to congratulate Miguel on his tour. I
have some comments to make on Etruscan.

Miguel's presentation of Etruscan is based on the traditional
standard view which, even when developed by scholars who did
not postulate a close relationship between Etruscan and IE,
was still very IE-centric in its thinking. I feel that his
description here does not always confront the assumptions
inherent in the traditional view, which have often been used
to claim a *CLOSE* relationship between Etruscan and IE (e.g.
by the likes of Adrados and Woudhuizen).

While for the most part Miguel's views on Etruscan are more
soundly based than those of Adrados and Woudhuizen, I think
it is worth pointing out the context in which Etruscan existed,
such as i) that the ethnic Etruscans were originally a ruling elite
who arrived from outside Italy and imposed their language on a
previously Umbrian-speaking population for some time before
Etruscan is attested in writing, and even if one thinks the elite
was autochthonous, they still did this too; ii) for some of the
period during which Etruscan is attested we are looking at
a language facing erosion and ultimately language death and
replacement at the hands of Latin; and iii) if Etruscan's
predecessor had an Anatolian origin, it is possible that it
was already heavily influenced by IE before its arrival in
Italy.

What is crystal clear, however, is that Etruscan's core
vocabulary (e.g. numbers, family relationships) is not IE.
It is possible that this was borrowed instead and not some
of the grammatical features, but this is not what normally
happens in areal influence, and where in Italy would the
vocabulary have been borrowed from? Etruscan's relationship
with Nostratic, if it has one, cannot therefore be implied
by virtue of a close genetic relationship with IE. My own
opinion is that a large portion of the apparent grammatical
parallels between IE and Etruscan is illusory, and that much
of the rest is borrowed. As for the vocabulary, I believe that
it indicates a relationship with Hurro-Urartian and
Nakh-Daghestanian. (Not that I don't believe that these in turn
are not ultimately related to IE, but that's another matter).

Therefore, in order to reconstruct the earliest stage of
Etruscan we have to separate out those grammatical features
that have been borrowed, and those that are genuinely part of
Proto-Etruscan (Proto-Tyrrhenian).

> The Etruscan verb is a largely unknown entity.  About all that is
> clear is that the 3rd. person preterite ended in -ce (/-ke/) with a
> passive form in -che (-kHe).
>
> The only personal pronoun known with certainty is the first person
> sg.:
>
> Nom.  mi
> Acc.  mini, mine, mene

The belief that there is a functional difference between /ke/
and /khe/ is traditional. Yet, for all other pairs of
unaspirated/aspirated consonants there is no such functional
difference, although there are geographical and diachronic
tendencies about which is used in a particular word, and often
they interchange unpredictably, and sometimes even in the same
text, so we may be largely looking at an orthographical
phenomenon. Although there is a tendency for inscriptions
beginning with <mini> to end in <-ce> and those beginning in
<mi> to end in <-xe>, this is not always the case and perhaps
the assumption of <mini> being the accusative is dubious. Take
TLE 625 for example:

mi vels' ati alce

Clearly the assumption that <mi> is nominative and <mini>
accusative, and the assumption that <-ce> is active and <-xe>
is passive, cannot both be true here. Perhaps neither of them
is true. The traditional scholars with their IE mindset have
been unwilling to draw further conclusions about the verb
because the Etruscan verb is so unlike the IE verb. The /-ke/
past tense is unknown in IE, except in Greek, and its absence
in the rest of IE must lead one to suspect that in Greek at
least, it is an innovation or borrowed. However, on the
Nostratic front, it can be found in Uralic.     

> Other pronouns also have an accusative:
>
> "this"  (early) N. ika A. ikan > (late) ca, cn
> "that"  (early) N. ita A. itan, itun > (late) ta, tn
> "which" N ipa, A. inpa
>
> The acc. suffix then seems to be *-n.  In the acc. of "me", *mi-n has
> perhaps been extended with a (deictic) suffix *-i or *-e.

If we look at forms such as <ecnas> and <cnl>, it is clear
that the <-n-> is part of the stem, and not an ending. In
other presentations of Etruscan grammar (e.g. Pfiffig) the
"accusative" is more correctly labelled the *definite*
accusative, and perhaps it is the the definite, or emphatic,
or deictic role of this ending in e.g. <mini> that is
important, as Miguel himself suspects, except that the
deictic portion is the -ni part, not the -i. If this is the
case, then it has a parallel in Hurro-Urartian, and not IE.
If this is not an accusative then the case for Etruscan's
inclusion in support of a Nostratic -n accusative is
weakened.

Miguel is also correct not to believe the widely suggested,
but unfounded idea that there is a 2nd person pronoun *<ti>.
This is simply an abbreviation for the name <Tite>. However,
he could have mentioned the widely accepted 3rd person
Etruscan pronoun <an> (which would indicate a Hurro-Urartian
affinity rather than an IE one, and is very probably relevant
to the correct understanding of the behaviour of the
demonstrative pronouns also). Also, both Helmut Rix and
Larissa Bonfante have proposed that Etruscan has a 2nd person
pronoun <un>, which incidentally also points to Hurro-Urartian
and Nakh-Daghestanian (cf. Hurrian /we/, Archi, Khinalug /un/,
Nakh /huo/, Proto-Lezgian */uon/ etc). 

> More is kown about the Etruscan noun.  According to Beekes '91, the
> following forms are found:
>
>          a-stems   e-stems   i-stems   u-stems   C-stems
...

This presentation is unnecessarily complicated. But at least
Beekes, thankfully, does not try to pretend that Etruscan
nouns have an accusative by appealing to words where the
*unmarked* form of the word ends in -ni (unlike Adrados).
There is no need to invoke different stems, which is a product
of the mindset of commentators on Etruscan who have an IE axe
to grind. The truth is evident in early Etruscan inscriptions
where most nouns ended in a vowel in the unmarked case, and
this was later dropped because of changes in stress. Etruscan
is an agglutinative language, and thus no need to list a
plural declension because it is almost completely regular.
Because it is agglutinative, this also means that we can get
more than one ending added to the end, so there is no need to
resort to a whole plethora of vague cases like (1) this and
(2) the other. Miguel, however, reflects the true agglutinative
nature of Etruscan in his reconstruction of the noun
"declension".

> There are two genitives, one in -s', the other  in -l.
...
> The genitive in *-si can be equated with the IE genitive in *-Vs(i),
> and with the Luwian adjectival suffix -assi-, which is used instead of
> the genitive in Luwian.
>
> The genitive in *-la is reminiscent of the Hittite pronominal genitive
> in -e:l (amme:l "mine", tue:l "your", ke:l "of this", kue:l "whose?").

Except that we can't reconstruct these two genitives as having
had this role in Etruscan in an earlier period. Why would
anybody want to have two genitives, unless, at least originally,
there was a functional difference between them? It is clear from
early inscriptions, and the related Raetic and Lemnian languages,
that Etruscan -s corresponds to an earlier agentive or ergative,
and -l to an earlier dative. Later on, we see these endings
being used in the formulae for names, part of the process of
Romanisation, and the acquisition of citizenship, where -s is
used in the patronym and -l in the metronym. This gives the
appearance of the genitive to those with modern attitudes of
sexual equality. The endings then took on a wider genitive role,
-s for masculine and -l for feminine, but things are occasionally
complicated by instances where they were still used with their
original meaning for words of the "wrong" gender. Genetic status
for the Anatolian parallels cannot therefore be assumed.

The early Etruscan genitive was -n, however, and this was used
in the Zagreb Mummy text. Perhaps this is a Nostratic parallel,
if we are looking for one?

Regards

Ed Robertson