Sea of meaning

In Estonian, the word for sea is meri, which always struck me as like German Meer, Latin mare, or Russian more. I thought the Estonians borrowed the word from other languages, but it could be the other way around.

“Based on different historical language sources, the use of the word ‘meri’ has been in the Estonian language for 10,000 years or more,” - Estonian Mythology for the Beginner (2023) by Marju Kõivupuu.

Strengthening this idea is the word in related Finnish, also meri, and in five different Sámi or Lappish languages: mearoe, merra, mearra, meera, and miarr. To the Livonians, the ultimate sea-people, the word is mer.

Things are slightly less clear when picking other Uralic languages at random. The word for sea in Hungarian is tenger; in Udmurt (western flank of the Urals), it’s zarez, while it’s mori in the Mordvin languages (mid-Volga catchment).

Being so ancient, it’s possible Finnic peoples brought the word, meri, with them in their western migration into Scandinavia and the Baltic some 3,000 years ago - along with skiing, the sauna, a dugout boat design, and, potentially, log cabin construction.

There could be something in this, because the word for sea in Greek is thalassa, in Persian, darya, and in Hindi, samudra, as examples to show that Indo-European languages have various words for the water that covers two-thirds of the planet.

If Latin speakers picked up a Uralic word for “sea”, then from whom?

Enter the Etruscans

This is where it becomes interesting to conjecture. Let’s say, the Etruscans, a people who lived in parts of Italy at least since Bronze Age times, and who were eclipsed by the Romans, disappearing by the beginning of the Common Era or shortly afterwards.

That’s not what they called themselves – “etruscan” has to do with building towers, derived from Latin, hence also the region, Tuscany. Their own word was Rasenna, derived from rasna, people. In Estonian, the word for people or nation is rahvas.

The scholarship presented in Wikipedia has the Rasenna language as Indo-European or proto-Indo-European, also admitting this is disputed.

A list of vocabulary runs to only a couple of hundred words, and, separately, the word for sea is mara (thanks to Copilot). Reading through this, Rasenna doesn’t resemble anything much. Many words are clearly borrowed from Latin or Greek, e.g. words to do with culture or technology, such as burial ceremonies and sacrifices to the gods. In other instances, there is no direct correspondence, e.g. Rasenna tulur, meaning boundaries, is the plural of tul, the word for stone, while Estonian uses piiri, and stone is kivi.

I did assemble the following list of interest (Rasenna, Estonian, English, Latin):

Ci - kolm – three - tres

Hinthi - hing – soul - anima

Kana - kink – gift - donum

Rasna - rahvas – people - populus

Sa - ise – self - ipse

San - surnud – deceased - mortum

Sath - asutama – to establish - instituere

Semph - seitse – seven - septem

Sval - elama – to live - vivere

Talitha - tüdruk – girl - filia

Val - vaatama – to look, see - vedere

Many words in Rasenna are completely different to Estonian, e.g. the number one is thi in the first, and üks in the second. Four is zar and neli, respectively. Equally, many Rasenna words differ from Latin or other Indo-European languages - and such differences are not unusual when it comes to languages, even related ones.

Turning to grammar, the Rasenna language was “agglutinative”, a feature shared with some other language groups, including the Uralic languages. So, where English usually has separate prepositions, such are joined together in agglutinative languages. The Estonian kokkupõrge literally means “together bump”, i.e. a crash, and iseseisvus, self-standing, means independence.

Rasenna lacks grammatical gender in contrast to Indo-European languages, and in common with Uralic languages. That said, nouns have only six case endings, compared with 14 in Estonian, of which two in Rasenna have an unclear function. (An example of case endings that still exist in English: I, my, me, to me.)

In Rasenna, adjectives are formed with a variety of endings, including -ne, -ev and -av, in common with Estonian.

The past tense is formed by adding -ce or -ke to the verb stem; compare that with Estonian, which adds -s (and then conjugates the verb, e.g. leidsin, I found; leidsid, you found).

Participles in Rasenna are formed generally by adding -thas or -nas to the verb stem, and in Estonian, this is done by adding, -tud, or -nud.

Where to from here?

On the balance of probabilities, Rasenna looks to me more like a Uralic language than an Indo-European one. Sorry, Wikipedia.

Having established this point, there’s already a known linguistic connection between Etruscans and Rhaetians, a people and language located to the north, in the Alps, who also disappeared at about the same time as the Etruscans. And while ancient Greek and Roman scholarship derive Rhaetian from the supposed original leader of the clan, it seems more likely that - like Rasenna – the word meant “people”.

The implications are before us. Uralic peoples and the languages they spoke were far more widely distributed in Europe than is generally supposed, going back to the Bronze Age. Speakers of Indo-European languages later supplanted the Rasenna / Rhaetians and others, of whom little trace remains, e.g. a wooden comb with a rune scratched upon it, found in a bog in Denmark.

What this means today is that for Europeans to explore the deep time of their past, Estonia is one place where a world view of old still exists. Long may this remain the case, as the arms race on both sides of the Ukraine war gathers pace.