What Etruscan Sounded Like - and how we know

A rich civilization that once spread across Italy founded ancient cities and may have left us words like "persona" and "Rome" and even the alphabet. The Romans? No, no, not her. I am referring to an ancient people whose language has almost been lost to us. Almost, but not quite. Let me take you to Egypt in the mid-19th century. A European traveler is touring the city and is now buying a souvenir. Wandering the streets he finds the perfect bargain: a sarcophagus, with the mummy still wrapped inside. He drags it back to Vienna and installs it as a creepy masterpiece in his house.

After his death it is donated to a museum where something strange is found. The mummy's bandages are full of letters. And not just a few letters. Quite a book. A mysterious book. He was not Egyptian at all. The ink reads inscriptions from Italy made by an ancient civilization like the Romans called Etrusci or Tusci. Today we still call their homeland Tuscany (Truscani). And now here was this mummy wrapped in the longest Etruscan text ever seen. It was expensive, but this linen book had a problem. A problem it shared with thousands of other Etruscan inscriptions: the language was unlike any other language.

Mysterious... but deciphered. These letters go from right to left, but turn them around and you will see that they are actually our letters. See, common history says that the ABC spread from the Phoenicians to Greece and Italy, where Rome inherited them. However, we are missing a piece: it was the Etruscans who spread the alphabet in Italy. It seems that the Greek alphabet they inherited had too many sounds for them. The Etruscans did well with voiceless p, t, k, but they didn't need voiced b, d, g. In one inscription they even wrote the word "Greece" as "Creice." This is why the Romans, when they borrowed the alphabet, originally pronounced C as k and g.

If we look at the Greek alphabet, it should only make the "g" sound. In my video about Latin letters, that's why we met an annoying Roman who added a tail to that C to form our letter G. But the Etruscans did use sounds that are harder to distinguish. Prepare your ears: p, t, k versus ph, th, kh aspirated. Like phersu, mask, a word that lives on in the heart of the English vocabulary. Ancient reports tell us that they were also missing the vowel "o." Or, linguistically speaking, we would say that they do not distinguish between o and u.

If we believe the claim that the name Rome comes from the Etruscans, an interesting example is the word Ruma. So in this book letters were missing but letters had also been added. Like this curious figure-eight symbol, previously written as /v/ plus /h/. The Romans cut out the H and left us the F. So this is a /f/. The Etruscans also had many letters for s sounds, but they only used two at a time, suggesting that they distinguished s from sh. But

what

do these letters mean? The answers are found in an ancient dictionary written by the last person to speak Etruscan, Emperor Claudius!

Whose work has been lost. No dictionaries. Without grammars. And many discoveries, frustratingly, never led to an Etruscan Rosetta Stone. The experts resorted to "guessing": extracting words from the text and guessing. Is this Indo-European by any chance? No, clearly Semitic! Wait, it's like Basque! No, no, Hungarian! Fed up with this vicious circle, Etruscologists have taken a new path. Don't extract words from artifacts; let them in. Then, like a keyless code, try combinations. Look at each inscription in its context. Combine different meanings in different contexts until you find meanings that unlock each text. It was brute force, but little by little this "combinatorial technique" gave results.

We got a glimpse of a real language with real grammar. It had singular and plural nouns: "clan", "clenar", "ais", "aiser". There were case endings, such as the nominative -e in Creice. pronouns like my, mini. And verbal forms: "tur" had a past tense "turuce". We have discovered a language that sounds dynamic and changing. The vowels became simpler over time. The hero Ajax was once Aivas but later became Eivas or Evas. The word for the gods, the greatest Etruscan concern, was aiser and later claimant. They used central consonants where we would expect vowels: lautn. Or perhaps weak vowels, like Atlnta.

These mangled Etruscan words suggest that the language underwent a major change. After centuries of writing, inscriptions began to omit vowels after the first consonant. The Etruscan name was once Rasenna, but became Rasna, and in one inscription a Latin word is divided into preśnts. It is an important clue that Etruscan words began with a strong stress on the first syllable: not /ra'senna/ but /'rasenna/. Comparison of translations and pronunciations yielded even more results. Take the almost bilingual ones, these Etruscan artifacts inscribed with a doppelgänger in Latin or Greek. My favorites are the 'talking objects', aristocratic gifts that speak for themselves: mini muluvanice Laris Velχanas.

It's very idiosyncratic, but it's plausible when we discover that the objects also speak like this in Latin, Greek, and Venetic. We even find hints of a context for the language itself, a language so different from its neighbors. A fascinating stone from the Greek island of Lemnos is a soldier surrounded by letters and words that really look Etruscan. Is this a lost sister language? A dialect? Perhaps the Etruscans were not so alone. Did it belong to a broader family of Tyrrhenian languages? The language of that linen book remains a mystery. We do not

know

how this text arrived in Egypt, but thanks to all this work we can say that it is a kind of ritual calendar.

And sometimes we can follow entire lines of text: "celi huθiś zaθrumiś flerχva neθunsl śucri θezric ". It's almost as if you close your eyes and can be transported back to the days when you spoke fluent Etruscan, but ask how you can say a simple yes or no and we're lost again. Stay and subscribe to learn the language.