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Etruscan language

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Etruscan
Native toAncient Etruria
RegionItalian peninsula
Extinct1st century CE
Language codes
ISO 639-2und
ISO 639-3ett
Languages in Iron Age Italy, 6th century BC

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 However, Latin superseded Etruscan completely, leaving only a few documents and a few loanwords in Latin (e.g., persona from Etruscan phersu), and some place-names, like Parma.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 (in Herodotus' time the Greek name for the Etruscans) as immigrants from Lydia in western Anatolia, who, fleeing famine, were led west by their leader Tyrrhoeus, to settle in Umbria [1]. 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 – AD 54), who compiled a dictionary (now lost) by interviewing the last few elderly rustics who still spoke the language.

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 majority 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. Since Rix (1998) it is widely accepted that Rhaetic and Lemnian together with Etruscan are part of 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.

Some modern scholars (Steinbauer 1999) have claimed that Etruscan as part of a larger Tyrrhenian family is distantly related to the Indo-European family, citing similarities in grammatical endings and vocabulary. 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.

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 has 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 first person singular nominative mi while Indo-European languages point to *h1egô instead. 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. Alinei's theory is based on similarities between certain words (magistrature names), agglutination, vowel harmony, construction of personal pronouns when used together with prepositions, etc. This theory has not been widely accepted in academic circles, and it has been rejected by practically all specialists of Uralic comparative linguistics. Critics accuse Alinei's work of being the product of mass comparison, a methodology that is not accepted by comparative linguists.

Geographic distribution

Etruscan was spoken in north-west and west-central Italy, in the region that even now bears their name, Tuscany (from Latin tuscī "Etruscans"), as well as around Capua in Campania and in the Po valley to the north of Etruria.

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

In the tables below, conventional letters used for transliterating Etruscan are accompanied by likely pronunciation in IPA symbols within the square brackets, followed by examples of the early Etruscan alphabet which would have corresponded to these sounds:

Vowels

Etruscan had a simple vowel system consisting of four distinct vowels. Vowels "o" and "u" appear to have not been phonetically distinguished based on the nature of the writing system where only one symbol is used to cover both in loans from Greek (e.g. Greek Template:Polytonic kōthōn > Etruscan qutun "pitcher"). Based on the same considerations, length contrast must also have been non-distinct.

Front Central Back
High i
[i]
I 		u
[u]
U
Mid e
[e]
E
Low a
[ɑ]
A

Consonants

The Etruscan consonant system primarily distinguished between aspirated and non-aspirated stops. Voiced stops such as English "b", "d" or "g" were non-distinct from [p], [t] and [k], respectively.

Bilabial Dental Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
Stops p
[p]
P 		φ
[pʰ]
Φ 		t, d
[t]
T D 		θ
[tʰ]
Θ 		c, k, q
[k]
C K Q 		χ
[kʰ]
Χ
Fricatives f
[φ]
F 		s
[s]
S 		ś
[ʃ]
Ś 		h
[h]
H
Affricates z
[ʦ]
Z
Nasals m
[m]
M 		n
[n]
N
Laterals l
[l]
L 		r
[r]
R
Approximants v
[w]
V 		i
[j]
I

Based on standard spellings by Etruscan scribes that appear otherwise to lack vowels or that have strings of clusters that as they occur seem phonetically impossible to pronounce, as seen in words like cl "of this (gen.)" and lautn "freeman", it is likely that "m", "n", "l" and "r" were sometimes written for syllabic resonants. Thus cl /kl̩/ and lautn /'lɑwtn̩/.

Rix (see Refs.) postulates several syllabic consonants, namely /l, r, m, n/ and palatal /lʲ, rʲ, nʲ/ as well as a labiovelar spirant /xʷ/ and some scholars such as Mauro Cristofani also view the aspirates as palatal rather than aspirated but these views are not shared by most Etruscanologists.

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 engraved on three gold leaves.

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.

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, few certain translations have been produced yet; however, we can be fairly certain of how the language was pronounced, as the Etruscan speakers wrote using an alphabet closely related to the Greek alphabet.

The value of some words attested in many short inscriptions are known with certainty because the correctness of their meaning can be so easily cross-verified:

Pronouns

Etruscan English
an he, she
in it
ipa who, which [relative pronoun]
mi I
mini me

Family terms

Etruscan English
apa father
ati mother
clen, clan son
sech daughter
ruva brother
nefts nephew

Calendar terms

Etruscan English
avil year
Celi the month of September
tinś day
tiur month, moon

Common verbs

Etruscan English
am- to be
cer- to make
tur- to give
zich- to write

The Etruscan numerals are known although debate lingers about which numeral means "four" and which "six" (huth or śa). Thanks to neighbouring Latin, a few dozen loanwords from Etruscan are purported to survive, 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 theorized 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 derived from West Semitic scripts.

See also

References

  • Bonfante, Giuliano (2002). The Etruscan Language: an Introduction. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. ISBN 0-7190-5540-7. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • Mario Alinei (2003). Etrusco: una forma arcaica di ungherese. Bologna: Le edizioni del Mulino.
  • Cristofani, Mauro (1984). Gli Etruschi: una nuova immagine. Firenze, Giunti Martello. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • Cristofani, Mauro (1979). The Etruscans: A New Investigation (Echoes of the ancient world). Orbis Pub. ISBN 0-85613-259-4.
  • Rix, Helmut (1991). Etruskische Texte. G. Narr. ISBN 3-8233-4240-1. 2 vols.
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