The Etruscan Contribution in Spreading the Word "Pizza", ©gzb 2001

Introduction: Pizza became world-wide known by the American Italian immigrants in recent times, and is a good example of spreading a word connected to a certain object. It hardly changed, no matter which language adopted it - but it is everywhere regarded as foreign word (it is an interesting phenomenon, that the elderly people of Hungarian speaking background avoid the original pronunciation with "ts" and replace it with "z", due to interference with a taboo-word in the region!). The Italians perhaps did invent the lovely dish called pizza, but certainly they did not invent the word, naming it! There are at least three more forms of this word, all originating from the same root: the English pie, French patê, Greek pita (píta), and Turkish pide, all meaning pastry, pie, flat-bread.

Phonetic Regions for word 'pizza' Phonetic Regions for word 'water'

Analysis: Again, we can see correlation in the phonetic regions of Europe (maps on right). They do not agree in covering the same geographic area, which is not a surprise, but they do reflect the same general distribution rule [T=ZZ=D]. The boundaries of the regions are uncertain, because they are limited not by another phonetic region, but by extinction zone of the word usage (dotted line). So, for example to the east, the word is replaced by Russian (pirog), which is not necessarily the same root. The English word pie however does belong to this word group, judged upon the general rule "egg-ei", "weg-way", etc, although the hypothetical word *pig can not be confirmed! (See: note!)

Timing: The most interesting problem in Palaeolinguistics is the question of timing. It is based on "time-markers", words related to some well defined periods of human prehistory. The linguistics itself is unable to yield absolute time-relation, but connected to archaeology, via the time-markers, it can obtain such information. Such words are names of metals, agricultural expressions, numerals, cultural references etc. The word "pizza" is certainly one of them. From archaeology we know, that the agriculture spread into Europe from south towards north, during a time span of 2000 years, from the 4-th till the 2-nd millennium BCE. This is a fairly broad time span, but in combination with other words, and other data, it can be further refined. We know, that the Etruscan language was spoken between 8-th century BCE and the 1-st century, before being replaced by Latin, and at that time, it already belonged to [Z] phonetic region. The map on the right seems not to be changed a lot, since that time. Although, we can not show the existence of the word "pizza" in the meagre, what we know, Etruscan vocabulary, the phonetic imprint reveals, that the Italians must have inherited the word from Etruscans.

Conclusion: The phonetic regions of Europe seem to developed in ancient prehistory, and since that time, seem to be fairly stable. Regional differences do exist, but are so typical and regular, that they can be used not only for tracing the origins of different word forms, but for their timing too. The word "pizza" belongs to the word group endemic to the Mediterranean and the shores of the Atlantic, and to the phonetic region so typical for Etruscans, that there can be no doubt, they are responsible for passing it down to Italians.

And so, taking everything into account, the Etruscans again defy to confirm their Eastern origin!

Note: I already finished writing this page, when my attention was drawn to the fact, that the word *pig is not at all hypothetical: it does exist in Irish pióg, and is most likely related to the Russian , if we acknowledge that [ÓG=RG]. This brings us to a new discovery, which pushes the dotted line in the above Phonetic Map further away, and introduces a new zone [G], which connects the Celtic word to Eastern Slavic phonetic region. Because we know, that the Celtic language is extinct from the Eastern regions since at least 2000 years ago, this gives some kind of timing frame to the age of the [G] form of this word.

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