Pax Augusta: Clearly not true that all Italian scholars come down on the side of an autochthonous origin, there are many examples of Italian scholars that support a invasionist or migrationist theory.
Italian linguists are generally more open to a invasionist or migrationist theory, Italian archaeologists not, just like in the rest of the world.
I think that's accurate.
In terms of van der Beeks, it's difficult to know precisely what he now thinks because he hasn't, as you point out, actually written on the subject since 2004. All we have are snippets from his reviews of other papers. The 2015 review only admits that Etruscan pirates
"may" have settled on Lemnos.
In a 2013 review he still says the following:
"In discussing genetic relations between Etruscan, Raetic and Lemnian in Chapter VI Canuti keeps all options open. This is wise, since a recent discovery of a non-Greek Lemnian inscription on a base may show that the third person verbal perfect ending in
-ke did exist. (
heloke probably means ‘he/they placed/erected/dedicated’; in Etruscan:
*heluce). Earlier only the third person verbal perfect ending
-ai was known in Lemnian (e.g.
aomai; in Etruscan:
amuce: ‘x was’). Since the
-ai morpheme is absent in Etruscan verb endings, Lemnian is supposed to be more archaic than Etruscan. The new discovery is a tiny indication that Etruscans may have settled on Lemnos in the archaic period, as C. de Simone has argued for decades.
3 Still, serious objections are possible: there are no Villanovan or Etruscan artifacts on the island; all Lemnian inscriptions and graffiti (c. 550-510 BC) show the vowel
o instead of
u (Etruscan has only
u); and the Lemnian alphabet is local and ancient authors do not mention migrations of Etruscans from Etruria to Lemnos.
4 In addition, Greek has non-Greek so-called substrate words like
opuioo (‘I take as wife’) and maybe
prytanis which are also present in Etruscan (
puia ‘wife’,
purth (a kind of magistrate)). These congruences are difficult to explain if Lemnian was a form of exported Etruscan."
http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2013/2013-09-09.html
So, I don't know if he has actually changed from this view on the matter. He would have had access to the 2011 Carlo De Simone article by the time he wrote this. It may be that he is now just more open to De Simone's analysis, but still believes the evidence is stronger for his position.
I'm not competent to judge as to the specifically linguistic arguments, although I don't see how there can be enough of a corpus of Lemnian from which to judge whether it is more archaic than Etruscan. Even if it
could be shown that it is archaic, I know that there are people who hold that languages remain more archaic at the periphery.
As to Meeks' argument that ancient authors don't mention migrations of Etruscans to Lemnos, I don't know that Etruscan pirates showing up on Lemnos would constitute a "migration", and Etruscan pirates in the Aegean are certainly mentioned. If it was a sort of polyglot Cartagena kind of area, the inscriptions might all be muddled anyway. The only one of van der Meeks' arguments which I think represent a real problem for De Simone's theory is that there aren't Villanovan or Etruscan artifacts on the island. You would think even pirates would bring some of their amphora of Etruscan wine with them.
Thanks for the link to the De Simone article. Have you taken a look at it yet? Does it answer some of these concerns?
If I can get a copy of "The Etruscan World" from a library, perhaps the discussion there by Ambrosiani will be more illuminating, but I'm beginning to doubt whether linguistics can settle this issue.
