28 Facts About Etruscan language

Etruscan language influenced Latin but was eventually completely superseded by it.

Consensus among linguists and Etruscologists is that Etruscan was a Pre–Indo-European, and a Paleo-European language and is closely related to the Raetic language that was spoken in the Alps, and to the Lemnian language, attested in a few inscriptions on Lemnos.

Grammatically, the Etruscan language is agglutinating, with nouns and verbs showing suffixed inflectional endings and gradation of vowels.

Etruscan language appears to have had a cross-linguistically common phonological system, with four phonemic vowels and an apparent contrast between aspirated and unaspirated stops.

The records of the language suggest that phonetic change took place over time, with the loss and then re-establishment of word-internal vowels, possibly due to the effect of Etruscan's word-initial stress.

Related searches

Etruscan language was written in an alphabet derived from the Greek alphabet; this alphabet was the source of the Latin alphabet.

The Etruscan language is believed to be the source of certain important cultural words of Western Europe such as military and person, which do not have obvious Indo-European roots.

In 30 BC, Livy noted that Etruscan language was once widely taught to Roman boys, but had since become replaced by the teaching of only Greek, while Varro noted that works of theatre had once been composed in Etruscan language.

Date of extinction for Etruscan language is held by scholarship to have been either in the late first century BC, or the early first century AD.

Freeman's analysis of inscriptional evidence would appear to imply that Etruscan language was still flourishing in the 2nd century BC, still alive in the first century BC, and surviving in at least one location in the beginning of the first century AD; however, the replacement of Etruscan language by Latin likely occurred earlier in southern regions closer to Rome.

In northern Etruria, Etruscan language inscriptions continue after they disappear in southern Etruria.

At Perugia, monolingual monumental inscriptions in Etruscan language are still seen in the first half of the 1st century BC, while the period of bilingual inscriptions appears to have stretched from the 3rd century to the late 1st century BC.

Centuries later and long after Etruscan is thought to have died out, Ammianus Marcellinus reports that Julian the Apostate, the last pagan Emperor, apparently had Etruscan soothsayers accompany him on his military campaigns with books on war, lightning and celestial events, but the language of these books is unknown.

One 19th-century writer argued in 1892 that Etruscan language deities retained an influence on early modern Tuscan folklore.

In 1998, Helmut Rix put forward the view that Etruscan is related to other members of what he called the "Tyrsenian language family".

Several scholars believe that the Lemnian Etruscan language could have arrived in the Aegean Sea during the Late Bronze Age, when Mycenaean rulers recruited groups of mercenaries from Sicily, Sardinia and various parts of the Italian peninsula.

The interest in Etruscan antiquities and the Etruscan language found its modern origin in a book by a Renaissance Dominican friar, Annio da Viterbo, a cabalist and orientalist now remembered mainly for literary forgeries.

In 1861, Robert Ellis proposed that Etruscan was related to Armenian, which isadays acknowledged as an Indo-European language.

In 2006, Frederik Woudhuizen went further on Herodotus' traces, suggesting that Etruscan language belongs to the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family, specifically to Luwian.

Etruscan language makes a number of comparisons of Etruscan to Luwian and asserts that Etruscan is modified Luwian.

The Etruscan language alphabet employs a Euboean variant of the Greek alphabet using the letter digamma and was in all probability transmitted through Pithecusae and Cumae, two Euboean settlements in southern Italy.

Etruscan language corpus is edited in the Corpus Inscriptionum Etruscarum and Thesaurus Linguae Etruscae .

Etruscan language-minted coins can be dated between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC.

Etruscan language coins have turned up in caches or individually in tombs and in excavations seemingly at random, and concentrated, of course, in Etruria.

Etruscan language coins were in gold, silver, and bronze, the gold and silver usually having been struck on one side only.

Related searches

Etruscan language might have had consonants ? and ??, as they might be represented in the writing by using two letters, like in the word .

Etruscan language substantives had five cases—nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and locative—and two numbers: singular and a plural.

Typical of SOV agglutinative languages, Etruscan had postpositions rather than prepositions, each governing a specific case.