Phonetic Analysis of Consonant Mutations, ©gzb 2001

To demonstrate the phonetic analysis I have chosen two words: water and town. Both words, I am convinced, existed during the Iron Ages (when the Etruscans were already established in Italy). People, when they meet new ideas and technological developments from other cultures, usually exchange not only the new ideas, but the words describing them too. Because languages are different, usually the new words are adapted to old phonetic rules, undergoing on this way mutations. 'Water' is not a new concept, therefore it is unlikely, that it has been borrowed from other people's languages; on the contrary, it must have changed continually with the development of the native language itself (vertically), since the splitting time of the ancestral language. During this long period of development, the meaning always stayed the same.

Phonetic Regions for word 'water' Phonetic Regions for word 'town'

The word 'town' may however had a different development history (horizontal). We find not only different morphologic appearances of this word in different languages, but different meanings too. For example in English town means 'city, urban area', in German however Zaun means 'fence'. Which meaning is the original one? Not to enter any debates, we can call ancient references to help us: there are Roman records, that the Celts called they fortified villages dunum, like 'Singidunum' on the Danube. The meaning of this city was preserved long after the Celts disappeared from the region, till our days by the new peoples replacing them: 'Belgrade', which on Slavic languages means 'White City', or in medieval Hungarian 'Fejérvár', with the exactly same meaning: 'White Fort'. So, it is obvious, that the name has been preserved, though translated into different languages. Here comes the clue: 'dunum' had the meaning 'city, fort, fortified urban area, wall, fence, rampart' etc. In the times of Etruscans, all important cities were fortified, indicating a wide usage of this expression (Etruscan word ??). It is important to note, that the location of 'Singidunum' pinpoints the exact location on the shores of Danube, where the [D] phonetic region ruled in ancient times. Today this broad region curiously belongs to Slavic and Greek ethnic group. To the west however, where the German ethnic group prevails, rules the [Z] (pronounced ts!) region. On the outer west, next to the Atlantic however rules the [T] phonetic region.

Is this pattern a rule, or only accidental phenomenon? By examining many different words we can come to the conclusion, that despite of some anomalies and aberrations, this is a general rule in the region! The reason for this pattern is laying in the ancient past, which exceeds not only the Iron Ages, but reaches the Bronze-, the Chalcolithic-, even the Mesolithic Age, but I can not exclude the possibility, that the deep and original causes are going back to the Upper Palaeolithic Era.

If we examine only the case of 'water', we can easily notice, that the first consonant shows more unusual mutations than the second consonant (in English: water, Swedish: vatten, German: Wasser, Finnish: vesi, Hungarian: víz, Slavic: voda, Greek: hydor, etc.), so ¹[W=V=H], ²[T=TT=S=SS=D], and that the third consonant is not even present in every language. What does it all mean? The full analysis is far exceeding the scope needed for the Etruscan language. It all means, that the word 'water' is extremely old, and that the suffix -er, what was once an adjective formant for nouns, lost its original meaning.

But, let's limit our scope to the Etruscan problem. Not knowing the meanings of Etruscan words, I restrict the analysis to proper names only, like Zimite (Gk Diomedes), or Taitle (Gk Daidalos; Lat. Daedalus) etc. By comparison with the above said, we can see, that this language is more closely related to central and western phonetics, than to eastern. This all favours the theory of Dionysus of Halicarnassus about the origins of the Etruscans.

I wished to present this analysis to the reader, as a very powerful, though scarcely used analytic method. There is a wide field for further investigations, and for many more student-essays. If someone already made such an essay, and already put on the web, please let me know, so I can create a link to it (please only serious essays, with scientific aspirations).

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Note: You can reuse the above idea in your student essays, but I require, that you honour the academic custom to credit the source of information!

The Etruscan Contribution in Spreading the Word "Pizza".

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