Re: Etruscana (was: some Proto-Quendic grammar)

On Friday, November 21, 2003, at 12:25 AM, Doug Dee wrote:

> In a message dated 11/20/2003 5:00:14 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> ray.brown@FREEUK.COM writes:
>
>
>> As singular & plurals seem to be fairly
>> straightforward to spot,
>> I do not understand why Fred Woudhuizen thinks 'thu' is a plural numeral.
>
>
>
> I don't know either.  He does not seem to explain his reasoning in the
> book,
Um - if one is proposing something that is different from what most
scholars say,
I think one should give clear and sound reasons,

> but I understand it's not unheard of in some languages for some numerals
> > 1
> to be used with nouns of singular form.
Like welsh?  This true - but I've not come across this in articles about
Etruscan.

> It is conceivable that he succumbed to a bias: he believes Etruscan is
> related to IE, and there must have been a temptation to align "thu" with
> "two" and
> its cognates if he could find any way to do so.
This did actually to me also.  My own view is that one has to approach
Etruscan
without any preconceived notions of its relationship to any other language
and that
the soundest scholarship derives from an internal analysis of the Etruscan
texts
themselves, helped out, of course, with the odd bilingual and glosses
given by
Roman writers.

All the evidence I've seen so far points IMO to its being a language
isolate.
---------------------------------------------

P.S. Talking of isolates, what's happened to Piat?

Ray
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