Etrscan alphabet (was: Value of Latin _x_)

At 8:39 am +0000 14/4/01, Raymond Brown wrote:

[snip]
>6 was certainly occasionally used [in Etruscan] as /f/, but this probably
>came about from
>the convention of using FH (i.e. {wh}) to denote /f/ rather than an actual
>sound change.  We know from inscriptions that the early Romans did the
>same.  Later, when the original pronunciation of F is forgotten, the H is
>simply dropped from the spelling.
Gosh - I thought something wasn't quite right when I wrote that.  It was
the Romans who first used FH = /f/ and then dropped the H, writing just F.

The Etruscans, in fact, retained F = /w/.

It is true that at first they wrote /f/ as FH, but later invented a special
symbol for /f/ which they placed at the end of their alphabet, namely:

>But, in fact, /f/ is more commonly
>denoted in Etrscan by a symbol remarkably similar to our {8} of unknown
>origin and placed by the Etruscans at the end of the alphabet.
As there's been so much interest in the Etruscan alphabet (even tho the X
with which this thread began wasn't taken by the Romans from the Etruscan
alphabet!), I thought this might help.

I've looked more carefully at my sources.  The Etruscans adopted an a late
8th cent. BC version of the western Greek alphabet from Euboian settlers in
Italy.  This was a very early version of the western alphabet and retained
many archaic features, in particular the right-to-left direction of writing
which the Etruscan retained throughout their history.

The western Greek alphabet, if you recall, retained all the Phoenician
symbols except _samk_ with the addition of the symbol for /u/ which was
common to all Greek alphabets anf placed after _tau_.  In addition the
western Greeks had three more signs denoting /ph/, /ks/ and /kh/ (the
eastern Greeks used the same symbols for /ph/, /kh/ and /ps/ respectively).

The Etruscans adopted this late 8th western Greek alphabet, but dropped
/b/, /d/, /o/ (the Etruscan had only one back vowel which they denoted as
/u/) and /ks/.

To begin with, they used FH ( i.e. {wh} ) to denote /f/, but soon devised a
separate sign _8_ to denote this sound.

So:
   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8  9  10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
A: ? b g d h w z X\ t` j  k  l  m  n  s  ?\ p  s` q  r  S  t
B: a b g d e w z h  th i  k  l  m  n  -  o  p  s  k  r  s  t
C: a - k - e w z h  th i  k  l  m  n  -  -  p  s' k  r  s  t

   23 24 25 26  27
A: -  -  -  -   -
B: u  ph ks kh
C: u  ph -  kh  f

Where:
A shows the values of the original 22 Phoenician letters
B shows the values of the western Greek alphabet
C shows the values of the Etruscan alphabet

The symbols are SAMPA except that:
(a) Semitic emphatic are shown as t` and s` rather than t_?\ and s_?\; also
_shin_ is conventionally shown as /S/ tho Steg suggests it might have been
a lateral sibilant, i.e. SAMPA [K], Welsh {ll}
(b) the Greek & Etruscan aspirates are shown as /th/, /ph/ and /kh/ rather
than /t_h/ etc.
(c) 18 is shown conventionally in Etruscan as /s'/ since it is usually
transcribed as s-acute.  We do not know what the difference was between the
two sibilants 18 and 21 in Etrscans, except they do appear to be
phonemically distinct.

/s/
18 and 21 were used indifferently by the Greeks to denote /s/; the
Etruscans used them for separate sounds as I said above.

/k/
The Greeks (both western & eastern) originally used 19 before /o/ and /u/,
and 11 elswhere.  Later, they dropped 19 entirely, and used 11 exclusively
for /k/.
The Etruscans used 19 before /u/, 11 before /a/ and 3 elswhere.  Eventually
they dropped 3 and 19, using only 11 for /k/.

Finally:
The Roman X = /ks/ has nothing to do with the later standard Greek ksi,
which was an eastern Greek development of 15; neither the western Greeks
nor Etruscan used this symbol.
The Roman letter is 25 which was used by western Greek settlers in southern
Italy, but dropped by the Etruscans.

Ray.




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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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