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Etruscan (/ ɪ ˈ t r ʌ s k ən / ih-TRUSK-ən) was the language of the Etruscan civilization in the ancient region of Etruria, in Etruria Padana and Etruria Campana in what is now Italy. Etruscan influenced Latin but was eventually completely superseded by it.
- Tyrsenian, Etruscan
- Italian Peninsula
- Ancient Etruria
- Etruscan alphabet
- Overview
- Records and scholarship
- The Etruscan alphabet
Etruscan language, language isolate spoken by close neighbours of the ancient Romans. The Romans called the Etruscans Etrusci or Tusci; in Greek they were called Tyrsenoi or Tyrrhenoi; in Umbrian and Italic language their name can be found in the adjective turskum. The Etruscans’ name for themselves was rasna or raśna.
The Etruscans lived in Italy in the region of modern Tuscany, in an area bounded by the Arno River on the north, the Tiber River on the southeast, and the Tyrrhenian Sea on the west. At one time they controlled most of an area extending south from Milan through Marzabotto and Sarsina to the Adriatic Sea north of Ancona, and to the southwest their rule extended as far as Capua, Naples, and Pompeii. For the history of the Etruscans and Etruria, see ancient Italic people.
The Etruscan language is known mainly from epigraphic records originating in the Tuscan area and dating from the 7th century bc to the first years of the Christian Era. There are some 10,000 of these inscriptions, mainly brief and repetitious epitaphs or dedicatory formulas, as well as votive or owner’s inscriptions on paintings in tombs and accompanying engraved figures on small artifacts such as metal mirrors. There are, however, some remarkable exceptions to the general brevity of the inscriptions, and there are important differences in their origins. The longest single text, of 281 lines (about 1,300 words), now in the National Museum at Zagreb, is written on a roll of linen that had been cut into strips and used in Egypt as a wrapping for a mummy; a clay tablet found at Capua contains some 250 words; a stone slab from Perugia has two adjacent sides elegantly engraved with an inscription of 46 lines (some 125 words); a bronze model of a liver found at Piacenza, which probably represents the Etruscan microcosm in a form used for instruction in divination, has some 45 words; and a heavy rectangular block found on the island of Lemnos in the northern Aegean has an engraving of what is probably a warrior with one inscription of perhaps 18 words surrounding the head and another of 16 words in three lines on an adjacent side. In 1964 two inscriptions on gold tablets, one in Phoenician and the other in Etruscan, were unearthed at Pyrgi.
Despite many attempts at decipherment and some claims of success, the Etruscan records still defy translation. While the possibility always remains that an imaginative conjecture or a brilliant inference will suddenly provide the key to the mystery, this now seems remote. The etymological method of investigation, which ultimately depends upon the recognition of presumed cognates from related languages, seems to have failed because no clear and certain relationship between Etruscan and any other language has ever been established. The procedure sometimes called the combinatory method now appears to be the most efficacious if not indeed the only useful one. It requires, first, that note be made of anything unusual in the provenance of the object on which Etruscan writing is found (such as that the mummy wrapping came from Egypt and the Lemnos inscription from the Aegean) and likewise of anything unusual in the object itself (e.g., that it is a bronze replica of a liver or the representation of a god or mythological figure). Finally, each word and phrase and formula is compared with every recurrence of the same element or elements elsewhere, and all variations in the physical and the linguistic contexts are recorded. By this means it has been possible to assign some words to grammatical categories such as noun and verb, to identify some inflectional endings, and to assign meanings to a few words of very frequent occurrence.
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Languages & Alphabets
Etruscan is written in an alphabet probably derived from one of the Greek alphabets. It is of very great importance that Etruscan is written in a recognizable alphabet related to the Greek and Semitic because sound values can be assigned with some degree of precision to each symbol. Etruscan writing proceeded from right to left and in earliest times had no word division or punctuation. In about the 6th century bc a system of points, or dots, consisting of four, three, or two dots inscribed vertically, was introduced to mark word boundaries and, in some instances, apparently, to indicate syllables and possibly abbreviations.
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There were four vowels in Etruscan, i, e, a, and u or o, and symbols in the alphabet for p, t, c, m, n, l, r, z and for the equivalents of the Greek phi, theta, and chi, which in Etruscan as in classical Greek were the aspirated stops ph, th, ch (pronounced as p, t, k with an added brief puff of air). There were two sibilants, written s and ś, for which the precise pronunciation is uncertain; two front fricatives, f and v, articulated either with the two lips (bilabial) or with the lower lip approaching the upper front teeth (labiodental); and an h, which nearly always occurs at the beginning of words and is used to represent, inconsistently, the rough breathing of Greek (e.g., Greek Hēraklēs, Etruscan hercle or ercle). There were also a k and a q, of which the precise pronunciation is unknown. A marked tendency to make all vowels in a word similar or identical (qualitative vowel harmony) is characteristic: Greek Klutaimēstra, which if transliterated directly into Etruscan would be cluthemestha, actually occurs as cluthumustha and clutmsta.
- Murray Fowler
Etruscan was related to Raetic, a language once spoken in the Alps, and also to Lemnian, once spoken on the island of Lemnos. It was also possibly related to Camunic, a language once spoken in the northwest of Italy. Etruscan alphabet. The Etruscan alphabet developed from a Western variety of the Greek alphabet brought to Italy by Euboean Greeks.
El etrusco era un idioma hablado y escrito en la antigua región de Etruria (la actual Toscana) y en algunas partes de las actuales Lombardía, Véneto, y Emilia-Romaña (donde los etruscos fueron desplazados por los galos ), en Italia.
- Tirsénica, Etrusco-lemnia, Etrusco
- Lengua muerta
21 de feb. de 2017 · There are over 13,000 individual examples of Etruscan text, which cover the major period of the civilization from the 8th to 1st century BCE. Most are from Etruria itself, but there are additional sources from southern and northern Italy, Corsica, and North Africa.
- Mark Cartwright
21 de feb. de 2017 · El etrusco se hablaba en toda Etruria, es decir, el centro oeste de Italia, desde Roma en el sur hasta el valle del río Po en el norte, donde los etruscos fundaron colonias. Hay más de 13.000 ejemplos individuales de textos etruscos, que cubren el principal periodo de la civilización, desde el siglo VIII al I a.C.
June 2013. The Etruscan language is a unique, non-Indo-European outlier in the ancient Greco-Roman world. There are no known parent languages to Etruscan, nor are there any modern descendants, as Latin gradually replaced it, along with other Italic languages, as the Romans gradually took control of the Italian peninsula.
