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PUBLICATIONS
ETRUSCAN AS A COLONIAL LUWIAN LANGUAGE
Fred C.
Woudhuizen
Etruscan
is, with more that 10.000 inscriptions in sum, one of the major languages
in the Mediterranean region which still defies a proper understanding,
certainly in sofar as texts of some length are concerned. The reason for
this fact is that the underlying principles of the Etruscan language, its
grammar so to say, up to the present day remain unclear for the lack of a
valid and verifiable relationship to a better known language.
In
the present book it will be tried to show that the proper key to our
understanding of the Etruscan language is formed by its etymo-logical
relationship to the Luwian dialects of southwest Asia Minor, viz. Luwian
hieroglyphic, Lycian, and Lydian. To this aim, the gram-matical paradigm is
meticulously built up from scratch by working from the most elementary
inscriptions on portable objects and from graves to the longer texts. In
order to keep the risk of haphazard identifications to a minimum, the
longer texts in their turn are treated by starting with those providing the
most reliable data, namely the bilinguals, and continuing with those which
for their repetitive nature offer a highly transparent structure, and so
on. On every level, then, the results from our analysis are correlated to
the relevant evidence from the given Luwian dialects.
Even though the Luwian parent
language provides vital clues for our understanding of Etruscan, it must be
realized that as a colonial offshoot in an Italian milieu Etruscan became
subject to strong Italic and Celtic substrate influences alongside
similarly strong adstrate influences from Greek and Phoenician.
Accordingly, Etruscan is not identical to any of the given Luwian dialects
of Asia Minor but to be identified as a Luwian dialect sui generis.
Innsbrucker
Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft, Sonderheft 128.
2008. 500 pp.
& 42 figs. € 88,-. ISBN 978-3-85124-224-9.
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