A close neighbor

[Mongoose42]

Has anyone ever heard of or studied the Etruscan Language?

[chad]

i thought etruscan was still undeciphered, like linear a, i don't know tho.

but i would like to know whether they've figured out whether etruscan is an off-shoot of a greek dialect (if the etruscans were a mycenean or even trojan colony) or a completely separate dialect--if the etruscans, like the greeks, adopted the greek alphabet as a convenient way to represent their own language. someone on this board will probably know

[annis]

Etruscan is considered sort of deciphered. The main problem is the lack of material - there's not much to work with, and what there is tends always to talk about the same things, much like Linear B's endless inventories.

It is not thought to be IE at all. Lack of material, as usual, encourages rather than inhibits wild theorizing, so the usual suspects (Sumerian, Basque, Atlantean) are regularly trotted out as likely relatives.

While it is usually stated that the Etruscans (and thus the Romans) got their alphabet from the Greeks, the exact nature and timing of the Greek/Etruscan writing relationship isn't clear. The cultures interacted early.

Mongoose, I once studied a bit of Etruscan, but it's not terribly interesting. "So and so made this for so and so" is only exciting the first or second time. This sort of dedication formula doesn't produce much in the way of grammar.

[chad]

hi will, that's quite interesting even tho etruscan isn't IE as u mentioned, are there any known cross-influences between it and latin? when the etruscans ruled the romans, i wonder what language they spoke: i wonder if there were cross-influences, in the same way that norman french seeped into english.

have they cracked linear a yet will? the book i read on the decipherment of linear b is really old. thanks, chad.

[Mongoose42]

According to the legends the Romans came out of another small civilization called Latinum (I believe). The similarities between Latin and Etruscan can be seen as the one being a primative form of another. All of the Italian civilizations probably spoke a similar language that was incorperated into Latin and developed as the Roman empire grew.

I have found websites where people use Etruscan as part of conversation and a grammer book can be purchased of Amazon, but most people either lose interest in it or never hear of it.

I like it for the simple linguistic challenge of translating a language that is largely unknown and untaught, although it would take a lot of time to master the known portions of the laguage.

[Eureka]

Anyone who's interested in ancient alphabets, and such, should look at this website:

http://www.ancientscripts.com/

enjoy.

[JuliaP]

Anyone who's interested in ancient alphabets, and such, should look at this website:

http://www.ancientscripts.com/

enjoy.

Oh boy!

[annis]

hi will, that's quite interesting even tho etruscan isn't IE as u mentioned, are there any known cross-influences between it and latin? when the etruscans ruled the romans, i wonder what language they spoke: i wonder if there were cross-influences, in the same way that norman french seeped into english.

Well, I'm sure Etruscan vocabulary appears in Latin. A lot of Roman religious ideas come to them from the Etruscans, and I gather that quite late, even into the Empire period, Etruscan priests and entrail-fondlers had a spooky reputation.

have they cracked linear a yet will?

Not that I'm aware of. It'll probably stay unknown until we find a Rosetta stone for Linear A. I'm not sure how likely that is. As I recall, many of the Linear A tablets appear to be inventory lists, too.

[chad]

hi will and mongoose, thanks very much for the replies. i don't know anything about the etruscans: only the 30 second snippets on ancient rome documentaries, like the documentary on the gladiator dvd, saying that the gladiator matches developed out of etruscan funerary entertainment.

so if you don't mind me asking more, is latin part-IE and part etruscan (which isn't IE)? are there e.g. ancient latin city names which have etruscan rather than latin-based names, like in greek, "athens" and "knossos" don't fit the normal word patterns but probably come from even more ancient peoples, as i read somewhere?

[annis]

so if you don't mind me asking more, is latin part-IE and part etruscan (which isn't IE)? are there e.g. ancient latin city names which have etruscan rather than latin-based names, like in greek, "athens" and "knossos" don't fit the normal word patterns but probably come from even more ancient peoples, as i read somewhere?

Simple answer: no.

Complex answer: membership in a language family is not primarily determined by vocabulary. If it were, English might qualify as a Romance language. This would also kick Greek out of the IE fold, since it imported something like 40% of it's vocabulary from Elsewhere. Words can always be imported. So can grammar, actually, but in general that is much more stable. Languages do not typically import conjugations or declensions from others (not never, though, I hasten to say).

So, in terms of grammar, Latin is utterly IE. Someone with Palmer's book will have to look up how much of Latin's vocabulary is traceable to Etruscan, but this will necessarily be speculative - we know so little certain about Etruscan.

Useful historical linguistics term (German, of course): Sprachbund. This defines an area of languages in close association, perhaps related, perhaps not. Languages in the same Sprachbund may exchange features among themselves. For example, I've heard that the uvular r of German is taking over northern Italy and parts of southeastern France. The use of reflexive pronouns to indicate intransitivity in several European languages (ich wasche mir..., je me lave) is a rather older example.

I wouldn't be surprised if Etruscan and Latin (and Oscan, Umbrian and the rest) made up a Sprachbund, and that a few changes Latin underwent came from Etruscan, or were shared with Etruscan. Since we know so little of Etruscan, it's hard to say just how much and what. But I'm not sure it's correct to say that this made Latin somehow less IE any more than it is to suggest northern Italians are turning German when they make their rs uvular.

Did that make sense?

[solitario]

The worst thing about the study of the Etruscans, (and their language) is all the propaganda. The Risorgimento completely exaggerated the impact of the Etruscans, and so many academics waste their time in attempts to decipher this language which has no modern applications.
No, I've never studied the language. But I do wish luck to all those who try.

[chad]

I wouldn't be surprised if Etruscan and Latin (and Oscan, Umbrian and the rest) made up a Sprachbund, and that a few changes Latin underwent came from Etruscan, or were shared with Etruscan. Since we know so little of Etruscan, it's hard to say just how much and what. But I'm not sure it's correct to say that this made Latin somehow less IE any more than it is to suggest northern Italians are turning German when they make their rs uvular.

Did that make sense?

hi will, yes it did and thanks again, i haven't studied linguistics or IE stuff so i value your comments and those of others on this. that stuff about Sprachbund is interesting, it might not be the same thing but it reminds me of what i overheard last year in (northern hemisphere) summer: my g/f and i spent a few weeks down in Nice, and once you got off the main beaches i noticed that the locals spoke french but used an italian accentuation of the 3rd-last/2nd-last syllable, instead of the normal french way of speaking (since nice is so close to italy): it didn't really sound like french or italian. it was bizarre.

[Michaelyus]

I was quite sure that Etruscan was an Indo-European language.

I've recently spotted a certain "glossary" on the web. What do you make of it?
http://etruscans1.tripod.com/Language/

You might also want to try this web page- it's quite informative.
http://www.mysteriousetruscans.com/language.

[Michaelyus]

It is not thought to be IE at all.

I was quite sure that Etruscan was an Indo-European language.

Eheu! I am mistaken:

In particular, Etruscan does not belong to the Indo-European family of languages...

Looks like Annis was right.

I apologise for any misleading information I gave.

[Jefferson Cicero]

It is true that Etruscan is not an IE language. When the ancestor of Latin and the other Italic languages first entered Italy, it was probably influenced by the older laguages of the peninsula. How much is not known. These older languages were probably distant relations to modern Basque, because the languages spoken in western Europe before the Indo-European expansions were probably all members of different branches of the same large language family. Even so, connexions between Basque and Etruscan are not well established as far as I know. Etruscan was probably the last language of that older language family to survive in Italy, perhaps the only one to make it into historical times.

So we would need to separate the influences of the prehistoric, pre-IE languages of Itlay on the ancestral language of the Italic family from later influences of Etruscan on Latin. We are now in a dark and murky territory.

I think that many place names in Italy are probably of pre-IE origin. I have no idea what the percentage would be.

I have wanted to compare examples of Basque and Etruscan for some time, but haven't found the time. There's really no point though, since real scholars have already done this with meagre results.