A structural comparison of Etruscan with the Kartvelian languages (original) (raw)
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It has been forty-one years since I presented my initial work on the Etruscan language to the curator of the Louvre Museum in Paris, France. It was about this time of the year and at the time I was thirtyeight years old. The curator kindly met with me but was not able to help me beyond suggesting meeting with some professors at the Sorbonne University. I was looking, of course, for the scholastic world s interest in the work and help in pursuing it in detail. I went to the Sorbonne without any positive result. I had been working then on the Etruscan language for about ten years, having been curious about Michael Ventris decipherment of Linear B, a writing system used in Crete by the Mycenaean civilization. Having spent some time on it and Linear B (which continues to be undeciphered, I switched to the examination of a curious Etruscan lead tablet called the Magliano Disk which had an inscription in the form of a spiral or meander. The Magliano Disk has been date to be around 500 B.C. Another document like the Magliano Disk is the Phaistos Disk which dates to 2,000 B.C. The Magliano Disk prompted me into searching out all of the Etruscan texts I could find, the results of which are provided on my Etruscan Phrases web pages. All written documents are intended to be understood and assume that the reader knows the value of the characters used to communicate the ideas expressed in a document. The Etruscan characters posed a unique problem, since they are almost the same as the Roman or Western alphabet and one is tempted to assign the values we know and understand to the Etruscan writings. But there is a problem with this, since the Etruscan writing often did not separate characters, phrases, or sentences, and separating distinct words in the texts is a challenge. Complicating the reading of the texts is the problem peculiar to Phoenician and later Hebrew texts where vowels are omitted. The omission of vowels in the Etruscan texts, however, did not appear to be systematic. The values of the Etruscan characters turn out to be not the same as our alphabet. The V, for instance, is not the Roman v but used as a u and o. The Etruscan F is interesting since it serves both as a consonant and a vowel. It is a v and a u, as in the word for Dionysus, Bacchus, L. Euias, Euan, which is Etruscan EFAIS, Euais. Euan is Etruscan EFAN. These and other similar relationships will be seen in the Copeland-English-Etruscan Dictionary (as well as the Etruscan Glossary A). In any event, it is now October 17, 2022 after preparing the Introduction to the Etruscan Language and further pursing the draft findings of this document, identifying specific declension and grammatical applications, another document has grown out of the work which is the Copeland-English-Etruscan Dictionary. It has been compiled using a worksheet at the end of this document called the Etruscan Glossary. Since the Etruscan Glossary is an excel spreadsheet, it could be used to organize refine and translate the Etruscan words of the Etruscan texts. Associated with preparation of the Etruscan Glossary is my Indo-European Table1 which is in 11 parts, available on academia.edu at: Introduction to the Etruscan language 2 https://www.academia.edu/35148685/Etruscan\_Phrases\_Indo\_European\_Table\_1\_Update\_02\_06\_22\_ The purpose and function of the table can be easily discerned by one s first look at the table and its succeeding 10 parts. Its 11 parts can also be easily accessed at: http://www.maravot.com/indo-european\_Table.html. The Indo-European Table is not what I intended it to be, for it has grown into a table and worksheet on Eurasian languages. Each language represented in the Table reveals relationships that may be surprising. For instance, those who are interested in the origins of certain English words will see entries on origins (taken from The Concise American Heritage Dictionary, 1987 Houghton-Mifflin Company. Many of the English source or origin entries may not be correct, as will be seen in the Table. What does all this have to do with the Etruscans, who date from about 1,000 B.C. in Tuscany, Northern Italy? A good part of the English language derives from Latin, and Latin is very closely related to Etruscan (an older civilization that the Latin/Roman civilization). Civilizations influence on another, either by trade or conquest or both. We know the relationship of English-Latin, or French-Latin, etc. because of the Roman conquests. The Etruscan-Latin relationship is more perplexing, since the Etruscans had an established civilization long before, hundreds of years before, Rome came into existence. There were Latin-speaking tribes that were neighbors of the Etruscans but since the relationship between them and the Etruscans was before Rome came into existence we can t speak to the history of the Etruscans and Latin-speaking people. Could they understand one another? It s hard to say. We can assume that old Latin was closer to Etruscan than Roman Latin. The name of Hercules, for instance, in Etruscan is HERCLE, in old Latin it appears to be the same. In French the name of Hercules is Hercule. There is a possibility that we can write a history the Etruscan world from the Etruscan point of view and that is through the translation of the Etruscan texts. This leads you to the Copeland-English-Etruscan Dictionary, currently in preparation. There are 136 pages in the document and growing, as I convert the Etruscan Glossary A data into a working dictionary. The final Etruscan dictionary will be in excess of 300 pages, estimated to include about 3,000 words.
Essay of an Outline of the Formation of the Etruscan Language
The works of three Italian philogists throw much light on the question of the formation of this ancient mixed language. In turn their results allows us to get further information on the historical issues of the development and geographical location of the lender languages and their mutual relationships.
Annals of the University of Craiova: Series Philology, Linguistics , 2015
This paper provides a scientific survey on the proto-Indo-European root *kar- / *kal-, meaning ‘stone’, rock’, and on the related European Prehistoric toponymy according to a new convergent approach. The stem *kar- is considered, in this study, as a presumably pre-Indo-European root transferred (after the possible ‘arrival’ of the Indo- Europeans in their European territories) in the linguistic system of proto-Indo-European through a process of reuse and refunctionalization of roots and (loan-)words due to linguistic contact. Phonetically adapted to the (proto-)Indo-European standards, the root *kar- shows, at least in the Ligurian area, a variant *kal- (not an independent stem, but an alternative form) involved in the formation of a number of words and place names linked to the notions of ‘rock’ and ‘stone’ (in particular ‘friable, calcareous rock eroded by water’). The paper tries, moreover, to highlight a particular morphologic phenomenon of reduplication of the root *kar- (very peculiar, because the reduplication is not widely productive in Indo-European) in the Italian (Ligurian) place name Carcare (< Carcaris). NOTES a) An originally Italian version of this paper has been published in "Iter: Ricerche fonti e immagini per un territorio", (2008), 14 IV 2: 13-24; b) Another English version of this paper has been published in "Acta Linguistica: Journal for Theoretical Linguistics", (2015), 9 - 1: 33-48, http://www.actalinguistica.com/journal/index.php/al/article/view/64.
Etruscan_Phrases Indo-European Table 1, Part 2 (Update 4.10.22), 60 pages
(from a work published in 1981) This table shows an unusual spectrum of cognates: Indo-European - Sanskrit, Avestan, Persian, Belarusian, Croatian, Polish, Romanian, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Latin, Irish, Scots-Gaelic, Welsh, Italian, French, English, Etruscan, Hittite, Tocharian, Luwian;; in addition, Hurrian, Urartian, Akkadian, Georgian, Latvian, Baltic-Sudovian, and Finnish-Uralic. Overlaying the Semitic Sumero-Akkadian cognates in this table has produced an unusual Concordance. The Concordance is also part of our Copeland-Akkadian-English.Dictionary which integrates the findings in our Indo-European Table. Part 2 (http://www.maravot.com/Indo-European\_Table1A.html) includes our integrated Akkadian-Indo-European Table. Click on it for the most current version.
Etruscan_Phrases Indo-European Table 1, Part 6 (Update 10.28.2020)
This table shows an unusual spectrum of cognates: Indo-European - Sanskrit, Avestan, Persian, Belarusian, Croatian, Polish, Romanian, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Latin, Irish, Scots-Gaelic, Welsh, Italian, French, English, Etruscan, Hittite, Tocharian, Luwian;; in addition, Hurrian, Urartian, Akkadian, Georgian, Latvian, Baltic-Sudovian, and Finnish-Uralic. Overlaying the Semitic Sumero-Akkadian cognates in this table has produced an unusual Concordance. The Concordance is also part of our Copeland-Akkadian-English.Dictionary which integrates the findings in our Indo-European Table. Part 6 (http://www.maravot.com/Indo-European\_Table1B.1.html) is our first integrated Akkadian-Indo-European, Altaic, etc. Table, Click on it for the most current version.
Proof of a Greater Language Family: Indo-European, Baltic, Uralic, and Kartvelian (Update 04.15.18)
A work in progress, covering Etruscan Phrases Indo-European Table 1, Parts 1-6. I suppose it would be obvious that the migration of the Indo-Europeans into Europe from what was believed to be the Russian steppes or northern Anatolia and the Caucasus region put them in contact with other groups. Exactly when and where the migration took place and the various groups of people that were affected has been the subject of much controversy. *PIE (Proto-Indo-European) specialists have attempted to explain the interrelationships through speculation on the shifts from one language to another; to the extent that the rules that show shifts that took place in the separation of the proto-Indo-European language(s) tend to be the subject of great debate themselves. This document attempts to circumvent the processes that induce doubtful results by comparing the words of languages that would have been involved in the mix of the early Indo-Europeans and other communities they encountered, as they moved east to west (and in the case of red-haired, Scotch-plaid, kilted Tocharians west to east). One of the languages that stood out in an early stage of our study was the Albanian. Nestled in Eastern Europe between the Croatians and the Serbs, the anomalies seen in their language tend to be a good representative of Indo-European groups mixing with the Slavic, Baltic, Uralic and Kartvelian language groups. Albanian tradition suggests that they are the heirs of the ancient (now extinct) Illyrians, that their language is at least 3,000 years old. Nestled within Yugoslavia, before it collapsed, four of the six constituent republics, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro, shared a common language known as Serbo-Croat. (We use Croatian, together with Belarusian, in this document for comparison of the Slavic with other languages.) The Serbs also claim to have an ancient language. Other languages compared in our table that highlight the mixing of the selected languages include Persian, Avestan, Sanskrit, Hittite, where available Hurrian, and Etruscan. The Etruscan language is important, since it ceased to exist around the 3 rd century B.C. and is believed to have existed in northern Italy (Tuscany) since ~1100 B.C. We thus have in the Etruscan language a language that has been frozen in time, untouched and untampered with, as it were, since it ceased to be spoken, read and understood. We began our Indo-European Table with the purpose of comparing the Etruscan words we isolated in our research (since 1981) with other Indo-European languages. After having established a vocabulary of over 2,500 words, represented in over 600 Etruscan texts, it became apparent in our Indo-European Table that Etruscan is closer to Latin than even the modern " Romance " languages of French and Italian. Having observed over the years of the growing controversy over the relationships of Baltic, Uralic and Kartvelian language families to the Indo-European family, we thought to update our Indo-European Table to include representatives of those languages: Latvian, Finnish and Georgian. The addition of these languages is turning out to be a fascinating exercise, since it tends to explain some of the anomalies we have seen in Albanian. Are the Albanians rooted from ancient Illyria or could they have come into Illyria from the steppes, north of the Black Sea? Ancient Roman maps of the Eastern Roman Empire identify an area north of Armenia in the Caucasus on the Caspian Sea as Albania. Having seen these maps when they first appeared on the internet, courtesy of the University of Texas Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, we wondered whether the Romans had something
Proto-Indo-European-Uralic comparison from the probabilistic point of view [JIES 43, 2015]
In this paper we discuss the results of an automated comparison between two 50-item groups of the most generally stable elements on the so-called Swadesh wordlist as reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic. Two forms are counted as potentially related if their first two consonantal units, transcribed in simplified consonantal class notation (a rough variant of the Levenshtein distance method), match up with each other. Next to all previous attempts at such a task (Ringe 1998, Oswalt 1998, Kessler & Lehtonen 2006, Kessler 2007), our automated algorithm comes much closer to emulating the traditional procedure of cognate search as employed in historical linguistics. “Swadesh slots” for protolanguages are filled in strict accordance with such principles of reconstruction as topology (taking into consideration the structure of the genealogical tree), morphological transparency, typology of semantic shifts, and areal distribution of particular items. Altogether we have counted 7 pairs where Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic share the same biconsonantal skeleton (the exact same pairs are regarded as cognates in traditional hypotheses of Indo-Uralic relationship). To verify the probability of arriving at such a result by chance we have applied the permutation test, which yielded a positive result: the probability of 7 matched pairs is equal to 1.9% or 0.5%, depending on the constituency of the consonantal classes, which is lower than the standard 5% threshold of statistic significance or even lower than the strong 1% level. Standard methodology suggests that we reject the null hypothesis (accidental resemblance) and offer a more plausible explanation to the observed similarities. Since the known typology of language contacts does not speak in favor of explaining the observed Indo-Uralic matches as old lexical borrowings, the optimal explanation is seen in the hypothesis of Indo-Uralic genetic relationship, with the 7 matching pairs in question representing archaic retentions, left over from the original Indo-Uralic protolanguage. Published 2015; in: Journal of Indo-European Studies 43(3-4): 301-347. The file also includes the response to the subsequent discussion published in the same volume: Kassian, Alexei, Mikhail Zhivlov, George Starostin. 2015. Lexicostatistics, probability, and other matters. JIES 43(3-4): 376-392.