The Etruscan language was spoken and written by the Etruscan civilization Etruscan civilization is the modern English name given to a civilization of ancient Italy in an area corresponding roughly to Tuscany, whom the ancient Romans called Etrusci or Tusci. Their Roman name is the origin of the names of Tuscany, their heartland, and Etruria, their wider region in what is now present-day Italy Italy (pronounced /ˈɪtəli/ ; Italian: Italia [iˈtaːlja]), officially the Italian Republic (Italian: Repubblica italiana), is a country located partly on the European Continent and partly on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern, Alpine, in the ancient region of Etruria Etruria — usually referred to in Greek and Latin source texts as Tyrrhenia — was a region of Central Italy, located in an area that covered part of what now are Tuscany, Latium, Emilia-Romagna and Umbria. A particularly noteworthy work dealing with Etruscan locations is D. H. Lawrence's Sketches of Etruscan Places and other Italian essays (modern Tuscany Tuscany (Italian: Toscana, pronounced [tosˈkana]) is a region in Central Italy. It has an area of 22,990 square kilometres (8,880 sq mi) and a population of about 3.6 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence plus western Umbria Umbria is a region of modern central Italy. Central Italian is currently spoken there and northern Latium Latium is the region of central western Italy in which the city of Rome was founded and grew to be the capital city of the Roman Empire. Latium was originally a small triangle of fertile, volcanic soil on which resided the tribe of the Latins. It was located on the left bank of the Tiber river, northward to the Anio river (a left-bank tributary of) and in parts of Lombardy Lombardy (Italian: Lombardia Italian pronunciation: [lombarˈdia], Western Lombard: Lumbardìa, Eastern Lombard: Lombardia) is one of the 20 regions of Italy. The capital is Milan. One-sixth of Italy's population lives in Lombardy and about one fifth of Italy's GDP is produced in this region, making it the most populous and richest region in the, Veneto Veneto , is one of the 20 regions of Italy. Its population is about 4.8 million. Having been for a long period in history a land of mass emigration, Veneto is today one of the greatest immigrant-receiving regions in the country, with 454,453 foreigners (9.30% of the regional population) in 2008, the most recent of which are the Romanians and the, and Emilia-Romagna Emilia–Romagna is an administrative region of Northern Italy comprising the two historic regions of Emilia and Romagna. The capital is Bologna; it has an area of 20,124 km² and about 4.3 million inhabitants (where the Etruscans were displaced by Gauls Gaul is a historical name used in the context of Ancient Rome in references to the region of Western Europe approximating present day France, Luxembourg and Belgium, most of Switzerland, the western part of Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the left bank of the Rhine). Latin Latin or sometimes Roman is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Although often considered a dead language, in view of the fact that it has no native speakers, a small number of scholars can fluently speak it and it continues to be taught in schools and universities and has been, and currently is, used in the process of, however, superseded Etruscan completely, leaving only a few documents and a few loanwords By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept, whereby it is the meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort, while calque is a loanword from French in Latin e.g., persona from Etruscan φersu, and some place-names, such as Roma Rome (English pronunciation: /ˈroʊm/; Italian: Roma listen , pronounced [ˈroːma]; Latin: Rōma) is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated municipality (central area), with over 2.7 million residents in 1,285.3 km2 (496.3 sq mi). While the population of the urban area was estimated by Eurostat to have been 3.46.
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History of Etruscan literacy
Drawing of the inscriptions on the Piacenza Piacenza listen (Placentia in Latin, Piasëinsa in the local dialect of Emiliano-Romagnolo) is a city and comune in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Piacenza. Modern forms of the name descend from Latin Placentia.[note 1] The etymology is long-standing, tracing an origin from the Latin verb, placē liver, see haruspex In Roman and Etruscan religious practice, a haruspex was a man trained to practice a form of divination called haruspicy, hepatoscopy or hepatomancy. Haruspicy is the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals, especially the livers of sacrificed sheep and poultry. The rites were paralleled by other rites of divination such as the.Etruscan literacy was widespread over the Mediterranean The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean surrounded by the Mediterranean region and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Anatolia and Europe, on the south by North Africa, and on the east by the Levant. The sea is technically a part of the Atlantic Ocean, although it is usually identified as a completely shores, as can be seen by about 13,000 inscriptions Epigraphy is the study of inscriptions or epigraphs as writing; that is, the science of identifying the graphemes and of classifying their use as to cultural context and date, elucidating their meaning and assessing what conclusions can be deduced concerning the writing and the writers. Specifically excluded from epigraphy is the historical (dedications, epitaphs An epitaph is a short text honoring a deceased person, strictly speaking that is inscribed on their tombstone or plaque, but also used figuratively. Some are specified by the dead person beforehand, others chosen by those responsible for the burial. An epitaph may be in verse; poets have been known to compose their own epitaphs prior to their etc.), most fairly short, but some of some length.[1] They date from about 700 BC.[2]
The Etruscans had a rich literature, as noted by Latin authors. Unfortunately only one book (now unreadable) has survived. By AD 100 Year 100 was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar, Etruscan had been replaced by Latin.
Only a few educated Romans with antiquarian interests, such as Varro Marcus Terentius Varro , also known as Varro Reatinus to distinguish him from his younger contemporary Varro Atacinus, was a Roman scholar and writer, could read Etruscan. The last person known to have been able to read it was the Roman emperor Claudius Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus , born Tiberius Claudius Drusus, then Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus until his accession, was Roman Emperor from 41 to 54. A member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, he succeeded his nephew Caligula. The son of Drusus and Antonia Minor, he was born in Lugdunum in Gaul, and was the first emperor to be (10 BC – AD 54 Year 54 was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar), who — in the context of his work in twenty books about the Etruscans, Tyrrenikà (now lost) — compiled a dictionary (also lost) by interviewing the last few elderly rustics who still spoke the language. Urgulanilla, his first wife, was Etruscan.[3]
Livy Titus Livius , known as Livy in English, was a Roman historian who wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people, Ab Urbe Condita Libri, "Chapters from the Foundation of the City," covering the period from the earliest legends of Rome well before the traditional foundation in 753 BC through the reign of Augustus in Livy's own and Cicero Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists were both aware that highly specialized Etruscan religious rites were codified in several sets of books written in Etruscan under the generic Latin title Etrusca Disciplina. The Libri Haruspicini dealt with divination Divination is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of a standardized process or ritual. Diviners ascertain their interpretations of how a querent should proceed by reading signs, events, or omens, or through alleged contact with a supernatural agency. Divination can be seen as a systematic method with which to organize from the entrails of the sacrificed animal, the Libri Fulgurales expounded the art of divination by observing lightning. A third set, the Libri Rituales, would have provided us with the key to Etruscan civilization: its wider scope embraced Etruscan standards of social and political life as well as ritual practices. According to the 4th century Latin writer Servius Servius Maurus Honoratus was a late fourth-century grammarian, with the contemporary reputation of being the most learned man of his generation in Italy; he was the author of a set of commentaries on the works of Virgil. These works, In tria Virgilii Opera Expositio, comprised the first manuscript to be printed at Florence, by Bernardo Cennini, 147, a fourth set of Etruscan books existed, dealing with animal gods, but it is probably unlikely that any contemporary scholar could have read Etruscan at such a late date. The single surviving Etruscan book, Liber Linteus The Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis (Latin: Linen Book of Zagreb or Book of Agram) is the longest Etruscan text and the only extant linen book. It remains mostly untranslated because of the lack of knowledge about the Etruscan language, though the few words which can be understood indicate that the text is most likely a ritual calendar, being written on linen, survived only by being used as mummy wrappings.
Etruscan had some influence over Latin. A few dozen words were borrowed by the Romans and some of them can be found in modern languages.
Geographic distribution
Approximate distribution of languages in Iron Age Italy during the sixth century BC.Inscriptions have been found in north-west and west-central Italy, in the region that even now bears the name of the Etruscans Etruscan civilization is the modern English name given to a civilization of ancient Italy in an area corresponding roughly to Tuscany, whom the ancient Romans called Etrusci or Tusci. Their Roman name is the origin of the names of Tuscany, their heartland, and Etruria, their wider region, Tuscany Tuscany (Italian: Toscana, pronounced [tosˈkana]) is a region in Central Italy. It has an area of 22,990 square kilometres (8,880 sq mi) and a population of about 3.6 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence (from Latin tuscī "Etruscans"), as well as in today's Latium Latium is the region of central western Italy in which the city of Rome was founded and grew to be the capital city of the Roman Empire. Latium was originally a small triangle of fertile, volcanic soil on which resided the tribe of the Latins. It was located on the left bank of the Tiber river, northward to the Anio river (a left-bank tributary of north of Rome, in today's Umbria Umbria is a region of modern central Italy. Central Italian is currently spoken there west of the Tiber The Tiber (Latin Tiberis, Italian Tevere, Italian pronunciation: [ˈtevere]) is the third-longest river in Italy, rising in the Apennine mountains in Emilia-Romagna and flowing 406 kilometres (252 mi) through Umbria and Lazio to the Tyrrhenian Sea. It drains a basin estimated at 17,375 square kilometres (6,709 sq mi). The river has achieved, around Capua Capua is a city and comune in the province of Caserta, Campania, southern Italy, situated 25 km north of Naples, on the northeastern edge of the Campanian plain. Ancient Capua was situated where Santa Maria Capua Vetere is now. The modern town of Capua was founded after the ancient one had been destroyed by the Saracens in 841 AD in Campania Campania is a region in southern Italy. The region has a population of around 5.8 million people, making it the second-most-populous region of Italy; its total area of 13,595 km² makes it the most densely populated region in the country. Located on the Italian Peninsula, with the Tyrrhenian Sea to the west, the small Flegrean Islands and Capri and in the Po The Po is a river that flows either 652 km (405 mi) or 682 km (424 mi) – considering the length of the Maira, a right bank tributary – eastward across northern Italy, from a spring seeping from a stony hillside at Pian del Re, a flat place at the head of the Val Po under the northwest face of Monviso (in the Cottian Alps) through a delta valley to the north of Etruria. Presumably this range is a maximum Italian homeland where the language was at one time spoken.
Outside of Italy[4] inscriptions have been found in Africa, Corsica, Elba Elba is a Mediterranean island in Tuscany, Italy, 20 kilometres (12 mi) from the coastal town of Piombino. The largest island of the Tuscan Archipelago, Elba is also part of the National Park of the Tuscan Archipelago and the third largest island in Italy after Sicily and Sardinia. It is located between the Tyrrhenian Sea and Ligurian Sea, about 50, Gallia Narbonensis Gallia Narbonensis was a Roman province located in what is now Languedoc and Provence, in southern France. It was also known as Gallia Transalpina (Transalpine Gaul), which was originally a designation for that part of Gaul lying across the Alps from Italia and it contained a western region known as Septimania (see Septimania timeline). It became, Greece, the Balkans and the Black Sea. By far the greatest concentration is in Italy.
An inscription found on Lemnos Lemnos is an island in the northern part of the Aegean Sea. It is part of the Greek prefecture of Lesbos and has a considerable area, about 477 km². Lemnos is mostly flat (hence its more than 30 sand beaches), but the west, and especially the northwest part, is rough and mountainous (highest elevation: Mount Vigla, 470 m). The chief towns are in 1886, is in an alphabet practically identical to that of Etruscan.
Classification
The Etruscan language has been difficult to analyze, which is attributable to its being an isolate. The phonology Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system. When describing the formal area of study, the term typically describes linguistic analysis either beneath the is known through the alternation of Greek and Etruscan letters in some inscriptions (for example, the Iguvine Tables), and many individual words are known through loans into or from Greek and Latin, as well as explanations of Etruscan words by ancient authors. A few concepts of word formation have been formulated (see below). Knowledge of the language is incomplete.
The ancients were aware that Etruscan was an isolate. In the 1st century BC the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus Dionysius of Halicarnassus was a Greek historian and teacher of rhetoric, who flourished during the reign of Caesar Augustus stated that the Etruscan language was unlike any other.[5] Bonfante, a leading scholar in the field, says "... it resembles no other language in Europe or elsewhere ...."[1]
Tyrsenian family
Main article: Tyrsenian languagesThe majority consensus is that Etruscan is related only to other members of what is called the Tyrsenian language family which in itself is an isolate family A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. They are in effect language families consisting of a single language. Commonly cited examples include Basque,, that is, unrelated to other language groups by any known relationship. Since Rix (1998) it is widely accepted that Tyrsenian is composed of Rhaetic and Lemnian together with Etruscan.
Another possible Aegean language related with Etruscan is Minoan Linear A is one of two scripts used in ancient Crete before Mycenaean Greek Linear B. In Minoan times, before the Mycenaean Greek dominion, Linear A was the official script for the palaces and cults and Cretan Hieroglyphs were mainly used on seals. These three scripts were discovered and named by Arthur Evans. In 1952, Michael Ventris discovered. The idea of a relation between the language of the Aegean Linear scripts was taken into consideration as the main hypothesis by Michael Ventris Michael George Francis Ventris was an English architect and classical scholar who, along with John Chadwick, was responsible for the decipherment of Linear B before discovering that in fact the language behind the more modern Linear B Linear B is a syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, an early form of Greek. It predated the Greek alphabet by several centuries and seems to have died out with the fall of Mycenaean civilization. Most of the tablets inscribed in Linear B were found in Knossos, Cydonia, Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae. The succeeding period, known as script was Mycenean, a Greek dialect Ancient Greek, in classical antiquity before the development of the Koiné as the lingua franca of Hellenism, was divided into several dialects. Likewise, Modern Greek is divided into several dialects, most of them deriving from the Koiné. Facchetti, a researcher who has dealt with both languages (Etruscan and Minoan) has put forward again this hypothesis, comparing some of the Minoan words of known meaning with some similar Etruscan words [6]
Some modern scholars[7] assert that the Tyrsenian languages are distantly related to the Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and Southern Asia, and historically also predominant in Anatolia and Central Asia. With written attestations appearing since the Bronze Age, in the form of the Anatolian languages and Mycenaean family. More specifically Frederik Woudhuizen suggests a relation to the Anatolian The Anatolian languages are a group of extinct Indo-European languages, which were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language branch of the family. Woudhuizen revived a conjecture Etruscan civilization is the modern English name given to a civilization of ancient Italy in an area corresponding roughly to Tuscany, whom the ancient Romans called Etrusci or Tusci. Their Roman name is the origin of the names of Tuscany, their heartland, and Etruria, their wider region to the effect that the Tyrsenians came from Anatolia Anatolia is a geographic and historical term denoting the westernmost protrusion of Asia, comprising the majority of the Republic of Turkey. The region is bounded by the Black Sea to the north, Georgia to the northeast, Armenia to the east, Mesopotamia to the southeast, the Mediterranean Sea to the south and the Aegean Sea to the west. Anatolia, including Lydia Lydia was an Iron Age kingdom of western Asia Minor located generally east of ancient Ionia in the modern Turkish provinces of Manisa and inland İzmir. Its population spoke an Anatolian language known as Lydian, whence they were driven out by the Cimmerians in the early Iron Age, 750-675 BC, leaving some colonists on Lemnos. He makes a number of comparisons of Etruscan to Luwian and asserts that Etruscan is modified Luwian. He accounts for the non-Luwian features as a Mysian influence: "deviations from Luwian ... may plausibly be ascribed to the dialect of the indigenous population of Mysia."[8] According to Woudhuizen, the Etruscans were colonizing the Latins. The Etruscans brought the alphabet from Anatolia.
More recently Robert S.P. Beekes presented a similar case, but argued that the people later known as the Lydians and Etruscans had originally lived in north west Anatolia, with a coastline to the Sea of Marmara, whence they were driven by the Phrygians c. 1,200 BC, leaving a remnant known in antiquity as the Tyrsenoi. A segment of this people moved south-west to Lydia, becoming known as the Lydians, while others sailed away to take refuge in Italy, where they became known as Etruscans. The Etruscan language could therefore have been related to a non-Indo-European substratum of Lydian.[9]
Both of these accounts draw on the story by Herodotus (i, 94) of the Lydian origin of the Etruscans. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (book 1) rejected this account of the people he called the Tyrrhenians, partly on the authority of Xanthus, a Lydian historian, who had no knowledge of the story, and partly on what he judged to be the different languages, laws and religions of the two peoples.
Another proposal, currently pursued mainly by a few linguists from the former Soviet Union, suggests a relationship with Northeast Caucasian (or Nakh-Daghestanian) languages.[10] [11]
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The French Primitifs (Primitives) looked to the primitivism of archaic Greek and Etruscan art and the Italian Quattrocento (15th-century). ...
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Q. Latin? Ancient Greek? Etruscan? Sanskrit? I wish I knew Latin. That would help me understand Romance languages' words a lot better.
Asked by ? Yun ? - Sat Dec 15 06:11:18 2007 - - 7 Answers - 0 Comments
A. I speak latin. But I'm french so it's easier to learn cause many french words look like latin words.
Answered by praidailice - Sat Dec 15 06:15:25 2007
