Etruscan language

Language spoken by the ancient people of Etruria in what is now Italy.

Its proposed relations with the Indo-European family have not been generally accepted, and Etruscan remains a linguistic isolate (i.e., unrelated to any other language). Known mainly from inscriptions that date from the 7th century BC to the 1st century AD, Etruscan was written in an alphabet probably derived from one of the Greek alphabets.

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Introduction

      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.

Records and scholarship

      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.

      The problem of Etruscan origins is insoluble until the language can be translated. While nothing at all is certain other than the existence of Etruscans in Italy, some Etruscan writing in Egypt, and an Etruscan inscription on Lemnos, the weight of all the evidence seems to favour a non-Italic but certainly Mediterranean place of origin of the Etruscan people. It is unlikely, therefore, that the Etruscan language is genetically related to any language or language family existing in an area remote from the Mediterranean. On the other hand, it does not follow that Etruscan must be related to a language or language fragment that can be found in the Mediterranean area.

The Etruscan alphabet

      Etruscan is written in an alphabet probably derived from one of the Greek alphabets (Greek alphabet). 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.

      There were four vowels (vowel) 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 (aspirate) stops ph, th, ch (pronounced as p, t, k with an added brief puff of air). There were two sibilants (sibilant), written s and ś, for which the precise pronunciation is uncertain; two front fricatives (fricative), 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.

      Both historical changes and dialectal differences can be observed. Diphthongs (diphthong) became single letters. Thus Greek Aiwas became Etruscan aivas, eivas, and evas, successively; au alternated with a; eu (like ai) became e (Greek Kleopatra is Etruscan clepatra; Greek Poludeukēs is, with Etruscan vowel harmony, Pultuce). Among consonants the most noticeable changes are c to ch to h (e.g., casri becomes chasri, caspr becomes haspr); similarly, p changes to ph to f to h and t to th to h. Throughout the history of Etruscan, a first syllable usually remains unchanged, whereas later syllables tend to weaken or lose vowels, at least in writing. Older Etruscan lavtun “family” becomes in later Etruscan lavtn; other examples are mutana changing to mutna, Greek Adonis written atunis and then atuns, Greek Alexandros appearing as elchsntre. The consonant cluster of elchsntre, while extreme, is not untypical of Etruscan spelling; words thus written have led some to suggest that a very economical spelling system may have been used that was far removed from the reality of pronunciation, requiring the introduction of lightly stressed vowels in actual utterance. (For a short history of the Etruscan alphabet, see alphabet: Etruscan alphabet (alphabet).)

Grammatical characteristics

      The minimal unit of meaning seems to have been a verbal root, such as zic or zich, meaning “write.” The suffixing of any vowel or certain consonants (c or its variant ch, t or its variant th, l, r, or n) produced a noun. The vowel u was used to form a gerund that, without further change, could be used as an agent noun; thus zicu meant “writing,” then, further, “scribe,” and then the equivalent of the Roman name Scribonius. From these verbal nouns, denominative verbs could be made; thus from zicu plus -ce, a past tense of perfective affix, was made zichuche “he wrote, he has written.”

      Because of the large number of names occurring in the inscriptions, the noun declension system can be understood reasonably well. Similar to the process of word building is the construction called genitivus genitivi, or “genitive of the genitive,” in which several possessive suffixes may be added to a word in succession. Thus, the simple genitive of larth, a proper name, is larthal “Larth's”; a second genitive suffix added gives larthalisa “of that which is Larth's.”

      There is apparently no grammatical gender in Etruscan. In late Etruscan an -i suffix marks some women's names; still later, apparently (or possibly in a different dialect area), -ia is similarly used. Although these suffixes appear to be the same as the final elements in some words designating exclusively female functions, such as puia “wife” (in one occurrence spelled pui, if it is the same word) and ati “mother” (in one occurrence atiu, if it is the same word), there is no evidence for any syntactic use of gender, and there is no formal marker that can be shown to have marked gender consistently.

      Case endings do not differ from singular to plural; in the singular they are suffixed directly to the word stem, and in the plural they are added to the stem, along with one of the plural markers ar, er, ur. There is no distinctive nominative (subject) case marker, the word stem or, in some cases, the root alone serving as the nominative. A final marker -s, however, does appear to have been added in some instances of a probable nominative case.

      The repetitive nature of most Etruscan inscriptions is such that very few distinctively different verb forms are available for analysis. Indeed, probably the only really certain verbal suffix is -ce. It must not be assumed, however, that the paucity of the verbal data from inscriptions reflects an impoverished verb system in the language; indeed, judging from the variety of verbal stems to which the recurring -ce is added, it is more likely that the Etruscan verb had a more complicated structure than the noun.

Vocabulary

      Since the language is undeciphered, meaning can be assigned with certainty to only a few Etruscan words that occur very frequently in the texts. Some kinship terms are sure—among these are ati, “mother,” clan “son,” śec “daughter,” puia “wife.” Less certain but probably correct are words designating members of the larger societal organization: lavtn “family,” zilc “official,” maru “official,” spur “city,” rasna or raśna “Etruscan, Etruria.” A pair of dice certainly have on them the names of the numbers from one through six. Although the order of these numbers has been and still is disputed, the arrangement most generally accepted is this: thu “one,” zal “two,” ci “three,” śa “four,” mach “five,” huth “six.”

      Among the continuing mysteries of Etruscan are the reasons why the Etruscans left no written records of their great civilization other than inscriptions and occasional texts and why the Romans, who knew the Etruscans intimately, transmitted little or nothing to posterity about either Etruscan literature or their language, which must certainly have been spoken, or at least preserved, by some families in Rome long after the period of Etruscan greatness had passed.

Murray Fowler

Additional Reading

The following sources provide accurate and reliable information on Etruscan: M. Pallottino, Etruscologia, 6th ed. (1968; Eng. trans., The Etruscans, 1955), the standard work; A.J. Pfiffig, Die etruskische Sprache (1969), an excellent and complete statement of what is known about the Etruscan language; and Murray Fowler and R.G. Wolfe, Materials for the Study of the Etruscan Language, 2 vol. (1965), which contains the inscriptions with indexes of several kinds for easy reference—there is no grammatical information included.Murray Fowler

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