Talk:Rasenna

Etymology

Unreliable etymology, removed per a WT:RFV discussion which will be archived here soon: "connected with other peoples' self-designations: Rish (a people of India), Teresh, Rishathaim. Beyond the Jordan: Studies in Honor of W. Harold Mare. 2005. page 125-128."

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Mario Torelli and ‎Palazzo Grassi, in The Etruscans (2000), page 565, say: "Dionysius of Halicarnassus (I, 30, 3) tells us that the Etruscans called themselves Rasenna (rasna), which probably means 'those belonging to a community.'" Others suggest it simply meant "the people". Various scholars have noted the similarity of the name to Rhaetian and Tyrsenian. - -sche (discuss) 05:11, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

RFV discussion: January 2016

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Rasenna

Supposedly English. SemperBlotto (talk) 17:18, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

It now says Latin, but I'm not sure I know what it means. It is saying the Etruscans refers to themselves as 'Rasenna'? Perhaps it's attested in Latin and hence citable as a Latin word (albeit a loan from Etruscan). Anyway, let's cite it first and worry about the exact nature of the definition after that. Renard Migrant (talk) 18:23, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

It could plausibly pass in Etruscan if it's mention only as mentions don't have to be in the language in question. Renard Migrant (talk) 18:26, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

It uses the wrong script for Etruscan. SemperBlotto (talk) 20:29, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2011-08/Romanization of languages in ancient scripts would apply. Although in order to romanize it I suppose we'd need to know what the original script is. The proposal doesn't suggest what to do with anything that's only attested in the Latin script (like in Lain glossaries of Etruscan). Renard Migrant (talk) 20:49, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

I've read the article cited as a reference. It goes through ancient Near Eastern history and glibly links all kinds of superficially-similar names in order to "prove" that a particular view of the historical background of the Bible is the only possible interpretation. For evidence, it mostly says "if X is the same as Y, and it almost certainly is...". This source glosses over matters of what source and even what language a name came from, and the contributor is trying to convert this vagueness into dictionary entries, with rather bad results. The contributor seems to be using dubious sources such as this one as well outdated and laughable ones from a century ago to connect the Etruscans with the Hurrians and various "Altaic" peoples in Asia. I don't know if they're naively regurgitating someone else's fringe agenda or pushing it on their own, but this is all really shoddy stuff. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:02, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

The Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography has: "But one point of the highest importance has been preserved to us by Dionysius, namely, that the native name of the people was different from all these, and that they called themselves Rasena or Rasenna (Dionys. A. R. 1.30, where the editions have Ῥασένα, but the best MSS. give the form Πασέννα. See Schwegler, Röm. Gesch. vol. i. p. 255, note 8)." (what does Dionys. A. R. refer to?) DTLHS (talk) 01:09, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

I can confirm that this is the Etruscan word for "Etruscan" (the people, at least, not sure it applies to the language). I'll dig out some Etruscan books if necessary, as I've got two or three lying around somewhere. At least nobody should be worried that it comes from a crackpot web site or is only found in old sources. A. R. would be Dionysius of Halicarnassus' The Art of Rhetoric (English Title). P Aculeius (talk) 02:11, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Actually, it's his Roman Antiquities(Antiquitatum Romanorum quae supersunt), and it stands for Book 1, Chapter(?) 30, as seen here (third line from the top): Ῥασέννα (Rhasénna). I wasn't really concerned that this might not exist: the sources use real facts, but put them together in strange ways and mercilessly twist them to come up with extremely unlikely conclusions. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:45, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Ah, didn't see that title used when I checked last night. Thanks for the correction. I agree completely with the sentiment about source material being used for the weirdest of conclusions! Fortunately, we do have plenty of historical sources to fall back on, as well as reputable books on the subject. Etruscan Civilization: a Cultural History by Sybille Haynes (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000) has it at page 52, cited to Dionysius, Rom. Arch. 1.30.3–4: (quoting Haynes quoting Dionysius) "The Etruscans called themselves Rasenna 'after one of their leaders.' The Romans called them Etrusci or Tusci." Earlier in the paragraph, Haynes mentions that the Greeks called them Tyrrhenoi or Tyrsenoi. Oddly enough, Jacques Heurgon's Daily Life of the Etruscans, which cites frequently to Dionysius, doesn't mention Rasenna anywhere. P Aculeius (talk) 15:23, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

What WT:CFI#Number of citations actually says is "the community of editors for that language should maintain a list of materials deemed appropriate as the only sources for entries based on a single mention". The whole reason for that is to make sure dubious mentions don't automatically lead to entries being created. So there's no danger of this meeting CFI unless we want it to. Or of course unless it's actually attested somewhere. Renard Migrant (talk) 15:48, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

I don't think anybody wants to delete it. It's just a matter of determining how it should be listed. It's an Etruscan word, reported by a Greek author writing in Greek, which is used in English-language books about the Etruscans in Roman letters. A syncopated form, "Rasna", is apparently found in inscriptions, presumably using either Roman or Etruscan script, rather than Greek. CFI already indicates that for languages such as Etruscan, a single example can be sufficient attestation. I think the best solution would be to have entries both in Roman and Greek script, since the term is used in English-language texts using Roman letters, and in Greek by a Greek historian. I don't know that it should be listed as Latin, since at this point we don't have any Latin-language texts using it. P Aculeius (talk) 16:05, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Cited (Citations:Rasenna) in English and Latin, although someone who can read Latin better than I can will have to work out the grammar (is Rasenna a singular meaning "an Etruscan"?). google books:"les Rasenna" and google books:"Rasenna et" suggest it's also citable as French and Italian. I can also find some Latin citations where it might be one or more placenames instead. It's debatable whether the Greek-script form should be given under an ==Ancient Greek== header or an ==Etruscan== one. - -sche (discuss) 22:39, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks! I would be wary of typographical errors, since it could easily be a mistake for Ravenna in indexed Google books. Of course, the name of Ravenna is also believed to be Etruscan, but that's more interesting than it is helpful in this case. I also think the "etymology" given is not credible. So far all attempts to relate the Etruscans or their language to any other ancient people or language remain highly speculative and none is generally accepted. The source cited is an essay in a collection published by a theological seminary engaged in Biblical research, which attempts to relate the name to other names in Egyptian, Hittite, and even Indian languages. The last time I checked, the only good leads on the origins of the Etruscans are a small number of inscriptions found in the eastern Mediterranean that look like Etruscan or perhaps a related language. That's a far cry from the claim made by this essay. The Etruscan language is very poorly known, and has no demonstrated affinities with any other language (although there are a lot of borrowings between Latin, Etruscan, and Greek), although classical scholars have tried to prove hare-brained theories about it for centuries. Anyway, I'd delete that etymology. We have no idea where the word really comes from. P Aculeius (talk) 00:55, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

I checked the books themselves, and they do all use "s" (so, they're not OCR errors), although they could still be typos -- but the "Rasennae vel Turasennae", "Rasenna (ut uid., ex -ni) regis ex Etruria", and "Tyrrheni, vel Rasennae" ones clearly intend this sense. The placename(?)-looking ones I'm not sure what to make of; e.g. one is giving "Rasenna" as the birthplace of someone named Michaelangelo (but the artist wasn't born in Rasenna or Ravenna). - -sche (discuss) 19:54, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

I've worked out the declension, at least of the plural... I wonder if the singular really exists (in Latin); I only find one citation of "Rasenna" and I don't find any relevant ones of "Rasennus". Perhaps the Latin entry should be moved to Rasennae and made a plural-only entry. - -sche (discuss) 20:04, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Possibly. I don't think there's any chance of Rasennus since that's a second-declension form, and Rasenna seems to be a first-declension form (it can hardly be second declension neuter). Of course, it's basically a foreign word when it appears in Latin, and as such might be expected to retain its natural declension from Etruscan (as Greek words often did). I don't know if we know our Etruscan declensions well enough to guess what the singular should be. I've always taken it to be plural to begin with, but in Latin this ending would only occur in the plural if it were neuter, which it wouldn't be (although I suppose it could be treated as an exception, much as Venus is the only feminine third-declension noun ending in -us, -eris, all others being neuter; here the natural gender of the noun trumps the normal gender of nouns of this type). I admit that I have no idea how to treat it in Latin without more examples, which evidently are rare, since the Romans usually used other words for the Etruscans instead of the Etruscan word for themselves. Should the entry be classified as "Etruscan" in addition to English and Latin? It's definitely an Etruscan word, but I don't know whether we have entries for Etruscan. P Aculeius (talk) 04:56, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Not unless it can be cited in Etruscan, as opposed to a mention in a Greek text. DTLHS (talk) 05:01, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Various books mention (but don't provide enough information to find) Etruscan inscriptions that use the forms rasna, rasnas, rasneas, rasnal, ras'nes', and ras'necei (but not rasenna), so they may exist. Etruscans condensed a lot of words: it's possible Rasenna existed (even if not in a CFI-meeting way), or it's possible Etruscans only used the condensed form Rasna but the Greeks expanded it to Rasenna based on their word Τυρσηνοί. In any case, Rasenna has been cited as English and Rasennae has been cited as Latin; I suppose that resolves this RFV. - -sche (discuss) 05:23, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

There's an Etruscan inscription TLE 87 (Tarquinii, 4th century BCE) which reads zilaθ amce meχl rasnal, which was initially interpreted as zilaθ = some office, rank; meχl = people, rasna- = Etruria / [all] the Etruscans, -l = genitive marker; but there is another inscription which reads mechlum rasneas clevsinsl zilachnve (clevsinsl is "of Chiusi"), which doesn't make sense if rasna means "all Etruria", which lead to the interpretation that rasna just means "the people" (compare many North American tribes' autonyms). In any case, 𐌓𐌀𐌔𐌍𐌀 (rasna) seems to be attested in Etruscan: the bare word in Liber Linteus 11.xxxiii / 11.f5 (θui arai mucum ... rasna hilar), and a variety of inflected forms elsewhere (demonstrating that it is a noun). - -sche (discuss) 04:50, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

As I understand it, words in languages whose script isn't widely known or used can be entered in Roman type, with native script given as alternatives. Etruscan characters are the forerunners of the Roman alphabet to begin with, but were inconsistently used (note that for centuries the alphabet was written/recited including letters that the Etruscans seldom or never used), and won't be familiar to modern readers. Besides which, it's not a direct 1-to-1 equivalent with Roman (or for that matter, Greek) pronunciation; the Etruscan theta could be pronounced as t, th, or s, while the chi seems to have been the rough equivalent of qoppa, which was dropped by the Etruscans although obviously retained in their alphabet long enough to become part of Roman script, and the Etruscans used o for u sounds; not to mention that Etruscan writing shows a marked tendency to drop vowels altogether. Hence Etruscan inscriptions give us Arnθ, Larθ, Θanχvil, Tolonios, Rasna for Arruns, Lars, Tanaquil, Tolumnius, Rasenna. Notice missing vowels in four of those, which were evidently pronounced in speech but omitted in writing (perhaps assumed, as vowels are often dropped in some written languages, where only one pronunciation is likely or possible), two different ways of rendering theta (I think I have seen Velθur rendered in Latin as Velthur, which would demonstrate the third); and o used for both o and u in Tolonios, a name quite familiar to the Romans! Also I think that c could be substituted for chi, so chi in Etruscan may have been much closer to Latin c or q than to modern ch in loch or Bach.

As for the meaning, that sounds quite likely, as it would have many equivalents in other languages. Not just in North America, either. Note that the German word for German is Deutsch, earlier Teutsch, from Teutonische (Teutonic), ultimately from the same root as Thiuda- ("people") found in personal names like Theodoric. This is of course also the source of Dutch, even though the Dutch don't consider themselves ethnically German anymore. P Aculeius (talk) 15:51, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

The native-script form is usually lemmatized and the romanized spelling points to the original-script entry, per this, but otherwise things are as you say. (The fact that certain Etruscan letters can be romanized a number of different ways is one reason for putting the main entry at the Etruscan spelling and not a romanization.) - -sche (discuss) 17:12, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

The English section has been cited, the Latin has been moved to Rasennae and cited, and an Etruscan entry has been created; I say this is RFV-passed. Btw, re the mystery placename at Citations:Rasenna: I figured out that in the one mentioning "Michaelangelus a Rasenna" working in Naples, it's Resina (Rasina), Italy, now called Ercolano. The "habuit Rasenna" citation mentions Auniacum (Augny) in the same paragraph, and several other Germanic placenames, so it seems to be somewhere in Alsace/Lorraine. - -sche (discuss) 17:12, 31 January 2016 (UTC)