Etruscan language

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Etruscan was a language spoken and written in the ancient region of Etruria (current Tuscany) and in parts of what are now Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna (where the Etruscans were displaced by Gauls), in Italy. However, Latin superseded Etruscan completely, leaving only a few documents and a few loanwords in Latin (e.g., persona from Etruscan phersu), and some place-names, like Parma.

History

Drawing of the inscriptions on the Piacenza liver, see haruspex.

The Etruscans are thought by some to be indigenous people of Italy, living there before the Indo-European migration and the arrival of the Latins, around 1000 BC. Herodotus (Histories I.94), however, describes the Tyrrhenians as immigrants from Lydia in western Anatolia, led west, fleeing famine, by their leader Tyrrhoeus, to settle in Umbria [1]; the Tyrrhenians of Herodotus are sometimes identified with the Etruscans, although there is no material cultural evidence to back this up. Literacy was fairly common, as can be seen by the great number of short inscriptions (dedications, epitaphs etc). Though, in the 1st century BC, the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus noted that the Etruscan language was unlike any other, the Etruscans had a rich literature, as noted by Latin authors.

With the rise of the Roman Republic that conquered Etruria, Latin hegemony hastened the decline of the Etruscan civilization, and by 200 BC, Etruscan was already replaced by Latin, except perhaps among some isolated mountain or fenland communities and, in a field that was more accessible to Latin authors, in the traditional contexts of religious cult. By the late Republic, however, only a few educated Romans with antiquarian interests (such as Varro) could read Etruscan. The last person known to have been able to read Etruscan was the Roman emperor Claudius (10 BC – 54).

Livy and Cicero were both aware that highly-specialized Etruscan religious rites were codified in several sets of books written in Etruscan under the generic Latin title Etrusca Disciplina. The Libri Haruspicini dealt with divination from the entrails of the sacrificed animal, the Libri Fulgurales expounded the art of divination by observing lightning. A third set, the Libri Rituales, would have provided us with the key to Etruscan civilization: its wider scope embraced Etruscan standards of social and political life as well as ritual practices. According to the 4th century Latin writer Servius, a fourth set of Etruscan books existed, dealing with animal gods, but it is probably unlikely that any contemporary scholar could have read Etruscan at such a late date. Christian authorities collected such works of paganism and burnt them during the 5th century; the single surviving Etruscan book, Liber Linteus, being written on linen, survived only by being used as mummy wrappings.

Etruscan had some influence over Latin. A few dozen words were borrowed by the Romans and some of them can be found in modern languages.

Classification

The majormost consensus is that Etruscan is related only to other members of what is called the Tyrrhenian language family which in itself is isolate, that is, unrelated to other language groups as far as we can tell. There is no doubt that Rhaetic and Lemnian are among this family. In his Natural History (1st century AD), Pliny wrote about Alpine peoples: "The Rhaetians and the Vindelicans border with these [Noricans], all distributed in numerous cities. The Gauls maintain that the Raetians descend from the Etruscans, pushed back under the leadership of Raetus." Based on this and linguistic data it's clear that Etruscan ought to be related to Raetic. However, beyond these known facts, there is ample debate and hearsay that follows.

Debate continues on concerning the relationship of Eteo-Cypriot, Eteo-Cretan and Minoan to this family. The Amathus bilingual written in Eteo-Cretan shows important structural similarities bearing what appears to be a genitive in -O-SE (Etruscan <-as> and Lemnian <-š>) as well as a 3ps animate pronoun A-NA (Etruscan <an> 'he, she'). The meagre text however makes it difficult to prove a kinship for certain. Eteo-Cretan likewise shows grammatical similarities and vocabulary terms but again the number of texts are meager. Since Minoan texts are also few and far between, any grammatical similarities with Etruscan are always tentative. However it has been noted by some online that the oft-repeated Minoan U-NA-KA-NA-SI and U-NA-RU-KA-NA-SI may bear resemblence to what would be written in Etruscan as *unχva cenase "bearing libations" which is surprisingly reasonable considering that the objects on which this is consistently written are in fact libation tables. (The value of <un> as 'libation' is proven by its repeated usage in the Liber Linteus.) Time will tell whether these connections bear fruit.

Some modern scholars have claimed that Etruscan as part of a larger Tyrrhenian family is distantly related to Indo-European, citing similarities in grammatical endings and vocabulary. By extension, because Indo-European is a classified as a Nostratic language by some, it is therefore presumed if related that Etruscan and its family are also Nostratic. Nothing yet can be ascertained considering the paucity of texts in general other than those of Etruscan. For now, many remain conservative and consider Tyrrhenian to be isolate. A connection with IE is merely one of the strongest possibilities so far but not proven by a long-shot.

Other less accepted theories

The interest in Etruscan antiquities and the mysterious Etruscan language found its modern origin in a book by a Dominican monk, Annio da Viterbo, "il Pastura" (1432—1502), the cabalist and orientalist who guided Pinturicchio's allegorical frescoes for Pope Alexander VI's Vatican apartments. In 1498 Annio published his antiquarian miscellany titled Antiquitatum variarum (in 17 volumes) where he put together a fantastic theory in which both the Hebrew and Etruscan languages were said to originate from a single source, the "Aramaic" spoken by Noah and his descendants, founders of Etruscan Viterbo. Annio also started to excavate Etruscan tombs, unearthing sarcophagi and inscriptions, and made a bold try at deciphering the Etruscan language.

It is long ago been disproven that Etruscan can possibly be on its own a member of the Indo-European branch of Anatolian languages because of the discovery of the Lemnian language, which backs up Herodotus' ancient account of an eastern origin of the Etruscans and their language. Furthermore, Etruscan is very different from IE languages, having a 1ps mi while Indo-European languages have *h1ego:. It also lacks any pronominal endings, a thematic class of verbs in *-e-, ablaut between *e and *o in the verb stem, and other clear features that are specifically those of the IE family. While there is debate about Etruscan and the Tyrrhenian family being *related to* IE, the debate about Etruscan *being* an IE language is very much dead now.

The obscurity of Etruscan's roots continue to attract further investigation. A recent (2003) study by linguist Mario Alinei has proposed the idea that Etruscan may have been an archaic form of Hungarian. While this theory is considered controversial, and is not widely accepted in academic circles, nevertheless there are a number of similarities between Etruscan and Hungarian that provide the basis for Alinei's theory: similarities between certain words (magistrature names), agglutination, vowel harmony, construction of personal pronouns when used together with prepositions, etc. Alinei's theory is consistent with archaeological findings that established a connection between the Villanovan culture and the Urnfield culture that originated in the Carpathian basin (as concluded by archaeologist Hugh Hencken).

Geographic distribution

Etruscan was spoken in north-west and west-central Italy, in the region that even now bears their name: Tuscany, and in the Po valley to the north of Etruria.

Related Languages

One language certain to be very closely related to Etruscan is the language once spoken on the island of Lemnos before the Athenian invasion (6th century BC), aptly named Lemnian. A stone tablet called the Lemnos stele was found there written with a script related to Etruscan and is dated to approximately 600 BCE. We know that the inhabitants actually spoke this language due to the plethora of ceramic pieces with inscriptions written with this same alphabet. However, we do not know when or how speakers of this dialect arrived on this island.

It is probable that Rhaetic, a language attested in Northern Italy, is also related to Etruscan, sharing with it some common features such as grammatical inflections and vocabulary, although the number of inscriptions in this language are few.

The most notable inscription in a language known to linguists as Eteocypriot is the Amathus Bilingual, so named because it bears a partially translated version of the Eteocypriot text in the ancient Attic dialect of Greek. Like Lemnian, it bears similarities in vocabulary and grammar to Etruscan and is likely to be part of the same family.

Tentatively, some note a possible relationship with Minoan (aka Eteocretan) to Etruscan, written in the Linear A script. While this may seem too bold for some, this view would be perfectly in line with Herodotus' account in Histories that Etruscans originate from Asia Minor, suggesting that an entire family of now extinct languages may have once existed in the area extending from Greece and neighbouring islands to Western Turkey. Indeed, this in turn may remind us of the theory proposed by Beekes of a pre-Greek substrate present in some Greek words of otherwise obscure "non-Indo-European" origin.

In all, the old view that Etruscan is an isolated language can be put to rest. In modern times we see that Etruscan is part of a larger linguistic family that is now known as Tyrrhenian, based on the Greek name for the Etruscans, "Tyrrhenoi".

Sounds

The reconstructed phonemes of Etruscan (IPA encoding):

Vowels

/a/ letter: A
/e/ letter: E
/i/ letter: I
/u/ letter: V
/w/ letter: F

Consonants

/h/ letter: H
/p/ letter: P
/pʰ/ letter: Phi
/t/ letter: T
/tʰ/ letter: Theta
/k/ letter: K
/kʰ/ letter: Khi
/ts/ letter: Z
/s/ letter: S
/ʃ/ letter: San
/f/ letter: 8, FH
/l/ letter: L
/r/ letter: R
/m/ letter: M
/n/ letter: N

Rix (see Refs.) postulates several syllabic consonants, namely /l, r, m, n/ and palatal /l, r, n/ as well as a labiovelar spirant but this is not the view shared by most Etruscanologists. Some scholars (see Cristofani et al.) also view the aspirates as palatal rather than aspirated.

Texts

Helmut Rix, Etruskische Texte, works as a kind of incomplete thesaurus, a main key to studying the Etruscan language.

First of all Rix and his collaborators present the only two unified (though fragmentary) texts available in Etruscan: the Liber Linteus used for mummy wrappings (now at Zagreb, Croatia) and the Tabula Capuana (the inscribed tablet from Capua).

All the rest of the recovered inscriptions follow, grouped according to the localities in which they were found: Campania, Latium, Falerii and Ager Faliscus, Veii, Caere, Tarquinia, Ager Tarquinensis, Ager Hortanus, and finally, outside Italy, in Gallia Narbonensis, in Corsica and in North Africa. (Two inscriptions from Sardinia, published in 1935, escaped Rix.)

Less precisely identified inscriptions follow, and finally inscriptions on small movable objects: bronze mirrors and cistae (boxes), on gems and coins.

Archeological inscriptions in Etruscan include inner walls and doors of tombs, engraved stele, ossuaries, mirrors and votive gifts.

Inscriptions are highly abbreviated and often casually formed, so that many individual letters are in doubt among the specialists.

The Pyrgi Tablets are a short bilingual text in Etruscan and Phoenician.

Some surviving Etruscan inscriptions appear on thin gold sheets. A "book" of gold sheets bound with gold rings went on display in May 2003 at the National History Museum in Sofia, Bulgaria. It consists of six bound sheets of 24-carat (100%) gold, with low-reliefs of a horseman, a mermaid, a harp and soldiers, with text. It was claimed to have been discovered about 1940 in a tomb uncovered during digging for a canal along the Strouma river in south-western Bulgaria, kept secretly and anonymously donated by its 87-year-old owner, living in Macedonia. Museum director Bojidar Dimitrov confirmed its authenticity with Bulgarians and experts in London. Bulgarian linguist Vladimir Georgiev is working on a translation of the text.

About 30 single golden sheets with Etruscan inscriptions are known, according to the Sofia museum's curator of archaeology, Elka Penkova.

BBC News report

Vocabulary

See the list of Etruscan words and list of words of Etruscan origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary and Wikipedia's sibling project

Due to its isolation, no significant certain translations from Etruscan into modern languages have been produced yet, however we can be fairly certain of how the language was pronounced as the Etruscan speakers wrote using a variant of the Greek alphabet.

Latin borrowed a few dozen words from Etruscan, many of them related to culture, like elementum (letter), litterae (writing), cera (wax), arena, etc.

Some of these words can be found in modern languages, especially in Romance languages. Some English words derived from Latin — e.g. people, person, population — are considered to be of Etruscan origin.

Writing system

The Latin alphabet that is used in English owes its existence to the Etruscan writing system, which was adopted for Latin in the form of the Old Italic alphabet. The Etruscan alphabet employs a Euboean variant of the Greek alphabet using the letter digamma (or "F") and is ultimately of West Semitic origin.

External links

The Etruscan Texts Project A massive online database open to the public which contains all known Etruscan texts known to date. A valuable resource for budding Etruscanologists.
Etruscan grammar (pdf) A detailed explanation of the grammar of the related Etruscan language by Micheal Weiss of the Cornell University.
The Languages of Ancient Italy
An Etruscan Glossary
Etruscan Glossary
Another Glossary
Etruscans on the Web: Language links here are divided between 'Mainstream' with the professional linguists, and 'Alternative,' where you can read up on connections between Etruscan and Ukrainian, Turkish, or Slovenian.

References

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