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Etruscan language

Etruscan (/ɪˈtrʌskən/ ih-TRUSK-ən)[3] was the language of the Etruscan civilization in the ancient region of Etruria,[a] in Etruria Padana[b] and Etruria Campana[c] in what is now Italy. Etruscan influenced Latin but was eventually completely superseded by it. The Etruscans left around 13,000 inscriptions that have been found so far, only a small minority of which are of significant length; some bilingual inscriptions with texts also in Latin, Greek, or Phoenician; and a few dozen purported loanwords. Attested from 700 BC to AD 50, the relation of Etruscan to other languages has been a source of long-running speculation and study, with it mostly being referred to as one of the Tyrsenian languages, at times as an isolate and a number of other less well-known theories.

The consensus among linguists and Etruscologists is that Etruscan was a Pre-Indo-European[4][5][6] and Paleo-European language,[7][8] closely related to the Raetic language that was spoken in the Alps,[9][10][11][12][13] and to the Lemnian language, attested in a few inscriptions on Lemnos.[14][15]


The Etruscan alphabet is similar to the Greek one. Therefore, linguists have been able to read the inscriptions in the sense of knowing roughly how they would have been pronounced, but have not yet understood their meaning.[16] A comparison between the Etruscan and Greek alphabets reveals how accurately the Etruscans preserved the Greek alphabet. The Etruscan alphabet contains letters that have since been dropped from the Greek alphabet, such as the digamma, sampi and qoppa.[17]


Grammatically, the language is agglutinating, with nouns and verbs showing suffixed inflectional endings and some gradation of vowels. Nouns show five cases, singular and plural numbers, with a gender distinction between animate and inanimate in pronouns.


Etruscan appears to have had a cross-linguistically common phonological system, with four phonemic vowels and an apparent contrast between aspirated and unaspirated stops. The records of the language suggest that phonetic change took place over time, with the loss and then re-establishment of word-internal vowels, possibly due to the effect of Etruscan's word-initial stress.


Etruscan religion was influenced by that of the Greeks, and many of the few surviving Etruscan-language artifacts are of votive or religious significance.[18] Etruscan was written in an alphabet derived from the Greek alphabet; this alphabet was the source of the Latin alphabet, as well as other alphabets in Italy and probably beyond. The Etruscan language is also believed to be the source of certain important cultural words of Western Europe such as military and person, which do not have obvious Indo-European roots.

Geographic distribution[edit]

Inscriptions have been found in northwest and west-central Italy, in the region that even now bears the name of the Etruscan civilization, Tuscany (from Latin tuscī 'Etruscans'), as well as in modern Latium north of Rome, in today's Umbria west of the Tiber, in the Po Valley to the north of Etruria, and in Campania. This range may indicate a maximum Italian homeland where the language was at one time spoken.


Outside Italy, inscriptions have been found in Corsica, Gallia Narbonensis, Greece, the Balkans.[28] But by far the greatest concentration is in Italy.

The , which was later used for mummy wrappings in Egypt. Roughly 1,200 words of readable (but not fully translatable) text, mainly repetitious prayers probably comprising a kind of religious calendar, yielded about 50 lexical items.[77]

Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis

The (the inscribed tile from Capua) has about 300 readable words in 62 lines, dating to the fifth century BC. It again seems to be a religious calendar.

Tabula Capuana

quality, -u, -iu or -c: ais/ais-iu, 'god/divine'; zamaθi/zamθi-c, 'gold/golden'

possession or reference, -na, -ne, -ni: paχa/paχa-na, 'Bacchus, Bacchic'; laut/laut-ni, 'family/familiar' (in the sense of servant)

collective, -cva, -chva, -cve, -χve, -ia: sren/sren-cva: 'figure/figured'; etera/etera-ia, 'slave/servile'

Vocabulary[edit]

Borrowings from and to Etruscan[edit]

Only a few hundred words of the Etruscan vocabulary are understood with some certainty. The exact count depends on whether the different forms and the expressions are included. Below is a table of some of the words grouped by topic.[121]


Some words with corresponding Latin or other Indo-European forms are likely loanwords to or from Etruscan. For example, neftś 'nephew', is probably from Latin (Latin nepōs, nepōtis; this is a cognate of German Neffe, Old Norse nefi). A number of words and names for which Etruscan origin has been proposed survive in Latin.


At least one Etruscan word has an apparent Semitic/Aramaic origin: talitha 'girl', that could have been transmitted by Phoenicians or by the Greeks (Greek: ταλιθα). The word pera 'house' is a false cognate to the Coptic per 'house'.[122]


In addition to words believed to have been borrowed into Etruscan from Indo-European or elsewhere, there is a corpus of words such as familia which seem to have been borrowed into Latin from the older Etruscan civilization as a superstrate influence.[123] Some of these words still have widespread currency in English and Latin-influenced languages. Other words believed to have a possible Etruscan origin include:

Combinatorial method (linguistics)

Corpus Inscriptionum Etruscarum

Etruscan alphabet

Etruscan civilization

Liber Linteus

Etruscan mythology

Etruscan numerals

Lemnian language

List of English words of Etruscan origin

Raetic language

Helmut Rix

Tyrsenian languages

Adams, J. N. (2003). Bilingualism and the Latin Language. Cambridge University Press.  0-521-81771-4. Available for preview on Google Books.

ISBN

Agostiniani, Luciano (2013). "The Etruscan Language". In (ed.). The Etruscan World. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 457–477. ISBN 9781138060357.

MacIntosh Turfa, Jean

Belfiore, Valentina (2020). [Etruscan]. Palaeohispanica (in Italian). 20 (20): 199–262. doi:10.36707/palaeohispanica.v0i20.382.}

"Etrusco"

Benelli, Enrico, ed. (2009). Indice lessicale. Thesaurus Linguae Etruscae. Vol. I (2nd ed.). Pisa/Rome: Fabrizio Serra Editore.  9788862271356.

ISBN

Benelli, Enrico (2020). Etrusco. Lingua, scrittura, epigrafia [Etruscan. Language, Scipt, Epigraphy]. Aelaw Booklet (in Italian). Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza.  9788413400556.

ISBN

Bellelli, Vincenzo; Benelli, Enrico (2018). Gli Etruschi: la scrittura, la lingua, la società [The Etruscans: The Script, the Language, the Society] (in Italian). Rome: Carocci Editore.  978-88-430-9309-0.

ISBN

; Bonfante, Larissa (2002). The Etruscan Language: an Introduction. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. ISBN 0-7190-5540-7.

Bonfante, Giuliano

(1990). Etruscan. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07118-2. LCCN 90031371. OCLC 1285554699.

Bonfante, Larissa

(1979). The Etruscans: A New Investigation (Echoes of the ancient world). Orbis Pub. ISBN 0-85613-259-4.

Cristofani, Mauro

; et al. (1984). Gli Etruschi: una nuova immagine [The Etruscans: A new picture] (in Italian). Florence: Giunti Martello.

Cristofani, Mauro

Facchetti, Giulio M. (2000). L'enigma svelato della lingua etrusca. Rome: Newton & Compton.  978-88-8289-458-0.

ISBN

Facchetti, Giulio M. (2002). Appunti di morfologia etrusca. Con un'appendice sulle questioni delle affinità genetiche dell'etrusco. Rome: Olshcki.  978-88-222-5138-1.

ISBN

Facchetti, G. (2000) Frammenti di diritto privato etrusco Florence: Olschki.

Hadas-Lebel, J. (2016). Les cas locaux en étrusque. Rome.

Maras, Daniele (2013). "Numbers and reckoning: A whole civilization founded upon divisions", in The Etruscan World. Ed. Jean MacIntosh Turfa. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 478–91.

Pallottino, M. (ed.) (1954) Testimonia Linguae Etruscae. Firenze.

Pallottino, Massimo (1955a). . Translated by Cremona, J. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. LCCN 56000053. OCLC 1034661909.

The Etruscans

Penney, John H. (2009). "The Etruscan language and its Italic context", in Etruscan by Definition. Eds. Judith Swaddling & Philip Perkins. London: British Museum, pp. 88–93.

Pfiffig, A.J. (1969) Die etruskische Sprache, Graz.

(1991). Etruskische Texte. G. Narr. ISBN 3-8233-4240-1. 2 vols.

Rix, Helmut

Whatmough, M.M.T. (1997) "Studies in the Etruscan loanwords in Latin" (Biblioteca di 'Studi Etruschi' 33), Firenze.

Rix, Helmut (1998). Rätisch und Etruskisch. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft.  3-85124-670-5

ISBN

(2004). "Etruscan". In Woodard, Roger D. (ed.). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 943–966. ISBN 978-0-521-56256-0.

Rix, Helmut

Rodríguez Adrados, Francisco (2005). "El etrusco como indoeuropeo anatolio: viejos y nuevos argumentos" [Etruscan as an Indoeuropean Anatolian Language: Old and New Arguements]. Emerita (in Spanish). 73 (1): 45–56. :10.3989/emerita.2005.v73.i1.52. hdl:10261/7115.

doi

Steinbauer, Dieter H. (1999). Neues Handbuch des Etruskischen. Scripta Mercaturae.  3-89590-080-X.

ISBN

Torelli, Marco, ed. (2001). The Etruscans. London: Thames and Hudson.  9780500510339.

ISBN

(2008). Zikh Rasna: A Manual of the Etruscan Language and Inscriptions. Beech Stave Press. ISBN 978-0-9747927-4-3.

Wallace, Rex E.

Wallace, Rex E. (2016). "Language, Alphabet, and Linguistic Affiliation". A Companion to the Etruscans. pp. 203–223. :10.1002/9781118354933.ch14. ISBN 978-1-118-35274-8.

doi

Wylin, Koen (2000). Il verbo etrusco. Ricerca morfosintattica delle forme usate in funzione verbale [The Etruscan Verb. Morphosyntactical Research of the Forms Used in Verbal Function] (in Italian). Rome: "L' Erma" di Bretschneider.  8882650847.

ISBN

Carnoy, A. (1952). "La langue étrusque et ses origines". L'Antiquité classique. 21 (2): 289–331. :10.3406/antiq.1952.3451.

doi

the Newsletter of the American Section of the Institute for Etruscan and Italic Studies.

Etruscan News Online

Center for Ancient Studies at New York University.

Etruscan News back issues

the website of Dr. Dieter H. Steinbauer, in English. Covers origins, vocabulary, grammar and place names.

Etruscology at Its Best

at the Wayback Machine (archived December 7, 2002).

Viteliu: The Languages of Ancient Italy

Archived 2012-02-11 at the Wayback Machine, the linguistlist.org site. Links to many other Etruscan language sites.

The Etruscan Language

prepared by Murray Fowler and Richard George Wolfe. University of Wisconsin Press: 1965.

Materials for the Study of the Etruscan Language