i.e. vs. e.g.

Dictionary.com disagrees. The Latin word alia is an adjective, meaning simply "other." Without an object it can imply other things, other people, other ideas or anything else.

Et cetera is even more vague. It implies that there are more of whatever was originally stated, but for convenience and/or concision, they will not be identified specifically. Like et alia, this can be more things, more people, more ideas or anything else.

 

I've written several Wikipedia articles, so I'm familiar with the way it works. If I want information about words, I'll take it from Dictionary.com

 

Of course the Etruscans were the first civilization in Europe, but they left so few traces that, sadly, we really don't know very much about them. Not even their ethnicity, since no graves have survived for a DNA analysis. They developed a written language, but all efforts to link it to an ancestor have failed and sadly, so few examples have survived that we can't really read them very well.

Nonetheless, when the Greeks arrived, their civilization adopted much from the Etruscans, although, ironically, the Etruscan language borrowed more Greek words than vice versa.

But when the Romans showed up, the Greeks had already developed an advanced civilization with an enormous volume of written works. As the Romans built up their own civilization, they adopted much from the Greeks, and of course the related Greek words came with them. So the reason that so many Latin words resemble Greek is that they actually are Greek words, although Latin grammatical inflections replaced the Greek endings.

The Romans eventually conquered almost all of what we now call Western Europe. Most of the earlier Celtic tribes were Romanized and began to speak various versions of Latin. It was the Germanic tribes who managed to hang onto their own Germanic languages--which are related to Latin but no more closely than Modern English is to Russian.

And as ten minutes of browsing through a dictionary will make it clear that although English is a Germanic language, the Britons spent so many centuries under French rule that our language almost looks more like French than German, and certainly SOUNDS more like it!

 

Wikipedia cites Etruscan civilization to be fully developed by 800BCE. While the people who would become the Greeks arrived in southeastern Europe at about that time, it would be premature to call them a civilization yet.

As for the Minoans, well of course their civilization goes back about 6,000 years, and in fact was destroyed by the volcanic eruption and resulting tsunami at Thera (the island now known as Santorini) around 3500BCE, leaving a political vacuum that the second-tier civilizations fought about for centuries.

Nonetheless, historians do not generally regard the Minoans as European, since their cities were built on Mediterranean islands, although they obviously traded with the people on the nearby European, Asian and African shores.

A few stone writings of the era survive, but so few that it's virtually impossible to decipher them, much less to determine the family of which their language might be a member. That's unfortunate, because it would tell us much about their history and origin. However, a few burials have been discovered, and DNA analysis strongly suggests that the Minoans were, indeed, most closely related to the people who had recently migrated into southeastern Europe, specifically those who settled on Crete.

 

What's your point? My comment was specifically for Wikipedia articles about word origins which, in many cases, are extremely difficult to trace. Especially since there are often two or more earlier words with similar (but not identical) pronunciations and/or similar (but not identical) meanings.

English is a perfect example. When the Romans abandoned Britannia, tribes from Scandinavia, (what is now) Germany, (what is now) France and other regions moved in, each one speaking a different dialect or even a different (but related) language. Prior to the Norman conquest, there was no "standard" version of "Anglisc," and indeed a traveler would encounter significant differences in vocabulary, grammar and phonetics as he journeyed from county to county.

And of course this only got worse when the Norman French sailed over and conquered what is now England. Medieval French words entered the vocabularies of commerce, government and education--once again with no standard pronunciation.

A few centuries later, after the Norman overlords had intermarried so readily with the native population, Early Modern English slowly became the country's language. Yet the country still had the issue of myriad dialects.

Even today, although the "Queen's English" is regarded as "standard British English," there are plenty of dialects that challenge the comprehension of people from other regions.

It's a daunting project to sort these things out, and the conclusions can often be challenged.

In other words, I had no intention of denigrating the entire website.