Talk:Lars Porsena

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Needs Work

Consider the following:

Larousse stated in 1963/1965/1973 that "Roman myths ... frequently appear in the guise of history"[cite this quote] (based on the work of Georges Dumézil). This would seem to support a most recent theory (yet to be officially "verified") that Lars Porsen(n)a may be a confounded Roman cognate of the Greek war god Ares which has cognate correspondences in other Indo-European branches. However it has been claimed that the name Lars comes from a word meaning "overlord".

Nowhere do we get the name of the historians, literary scholars, archaeologists, classicists, or Etruscologists who propose the "most recent theory" (which I assume is neither Larousse nor Dumézil, who aren't recent) or who claim anything about the derivation of the name "Lars." Beware such use of the English passive: there's no way to trace this summary back to its sources, and thus it's of no help to people using Wikipedia to pick up research leads. To improve these three sentences, rewrite them so a scholar's name takes the place of the anonymous passive construction: "X, however, claims that the name..."

The use of "verified" in quotation marks, when it does not form part of a quotation, is quite inappropriate. If the quotation marks exist to alter the tone of the sentence, perhaps the tonal shift was unnecessary in the first place. Further:

Significantly, that the Etruscan war god Laran had recently, previously been identified with Ares (again yet to be "verified"), noticing that y/j sometimes interchanges with l in Italic/Romance/Latin languages. The name Lars moreover seemingly bears a resemblance to Mars.

The same notes apply here: there are no sources cited. Who recently or previously identified Laran with Ares? The identification doesn't seem farfetched or invalid, but it needs a footnote to give it some strength. The parenthetical remark about validation needs to be deleted -- it has no place in the article. Moreover, does the possibile equivalence of the names here make a difference -- even if Laran and Ares do not share an etymological derivation, the fact that Laran is an armed god should be sufficient to make the point that Porsinna might be cognate to an Etruscan war god. In fact, the argument that he's a shadow of an Etruscan myth makes more sense than him being taken from Greek mythology, especially given that he's an Etruscan. Let the article on Laran try to make connections to other cultures if it needs to, and let this article focus on Porsenna; that will avoid duplicating effort in the two articles, make maintaining both easier should new information come to light, and avoid streching out an already theoretical section of this article into tenuous ground that doesn't really pertain.

A suggested rewrite:

The name Lars may have its origins in that of Laran. [reference a source in a footnote]

The trivia section needs to go -- that belongs to Clusium, not to Porsenna, as does the bit about Sulla. Information from Livy and other sources should be added to flesh out how Porsenna was received in ancient literature. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.163.228.116 (talk) 00:11, 5 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Pursenna /Pursna

His name must be Larth Pursenna (Larth Pursna) in Etruscan... (because the Etruscan language has no "o" sound!) Böri (talk) 13:03, 13 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]