A wealthy civilization once spread across
Italy, founded ancient cities and may have left us words like "person" and "Rome" and
even the alphabet. The Romans? No, no, not them. I mean an earlier people whose language was
almost lost to us. Almost... but not quite. Let me take you back to Egypt in the mid 1800s. A European traveler has been touring the local
sights, and now he's shopping for a souvenir. Wandering the streets he chances upon the
perfect bargain: a sarcophagus, with the mummy still wrapped up inside. He hauls it back to Vienna and sets it up
as a creepy showpiece in his home. After his his death, it's donated to a museum
where something odd is found. The mummy's bandages are filled with letters. And not a few letters either. A whole book. A puzzling book. It wasn't Egyptian at all. The ink read like inscriptions from Italy
made by an ancient civilization the Romans called Etrusci or Tusci. Today we still call their homeland Tuscany. And now here was this mummy wrapped in the
longest Etruscan text ever seen. It was precious, but this Linen Book had a
problem. A problem it shared with thousands of other
Etruscan inscriptions: the language looked nothing like any other. Mysterious... but not undeciphered. These letters go from right to left, but flip
them and you'll see they are basically our letters. See, the popular story goes that the ABCs
spread from the Phoenicians, to Greece, to Italy where Rome inherited them. We're missing a piece though: it was the Etruscans
who spread the alphabet in Italy. It seems the Greek alphabet they inherited
had too many sounds for them. Etruscans were fine with voiceless p, t, k
but they didn't need the voiced b, d, g. In an inscription, they even wrote the word
Greek as "Creice". This is why the Romans, when they borrowed
the alphabet, originally pronounced C as both k and g. Looking at the Greek alphabet, it should've
only made the sound "g". In my video on Latin letter modding, this
is why we met a vexed Roman who added a tail to that C to create our letter G. But Etruscan did make use of sounds that might
be harder for you to distinguish. Get your ears ready: p, t, k versus aspirated
ph, th, kh. Like phersu, mask, a word that lives on right
in the heart of our English vocabulary. Ancient reports tell us that they were also
missing the vowel "o". Or, linguistically, we'd say that they didn't
distinguish o from u. If we believe the claim that Rome took its
very name from Etruscan, one interesting example is the word Ruma. So this book was missing letters, but it also
added letters. Like this curious 8-looking symbol, earlier
written /v/ plus /h/. The Romans cut out the H and left us with
F. So this is a /f/. Etruscans also had many letters for s-sounds
but only used two of them at a time, a hint that they distinguished s from sh. But what do these letters mean? The answers lie in an ancient dictionary written
by the last known speaker, Emperor Claudius! Whose work was lost. No dictionaries. No grammars. And find after find after find frustratingly
never uncovered an Etruscan Rosetta Stone. The experts turned to "guessology": pull words
out of the text and guess. Is this by chance Indo-European? No, clearly Semitic! Wait, it's like Basque! No, no, Hungarian! Fed up with this circular approach, Etruscologists
took a new path. Don't pull words out of artifacts; leave them in. Then, like a code without a key, try out combinations. Look at each inscription in its context. Combine different meanings in different contexts until you find meanings that unlock every text. It was brute force, but slowly this "Combinatory
technique" yielded results. We caught glimpses of a language with real
grammar. It had singular and plural nouns: "clan",
"clenar", "ais", "aiser". There were case endings, like nominative -e
on Creice. Pronouns like mi, mini. And verb tenses: "tur" had a past tense "turuce". We uncovered a language with dynamic and changing
sounds. Vowels were trending simpler over time. The hero Ajax was once Aivas but later became
Eivas or Evas. The word for the gods, the highest Etruscan
concern, was aiser and later eiser. They used nucleic consonants where we might
expect vowels: lautn. Or maybe faint vowels, like Atlnta. These smashed Etruscan words suggest the language
underwent a big shift. Centuries into its written history, inscriptions
start to drop vowels after the first syllable. The Etruscan name for themselves was once
Rasenna but became Rasna, and in one inscription a Latin word gets chopped down to preśnts. It's a major clue that Etruscan words started
with a heavy accent on their first syllable: not /ra'senna/ but /'rasenna/. Comparing translations and glosses yielded
even more results. Take quasi-bilinguals, these inscribed Etruscan
artifacts with a Latin or Greek doppelgänger. My favorite are "talking objects", aristocratic
gifts that speak for themselves: mini muluvanice Laris Velχanas. It's very quirky, but it's plausible when
we find out that objects also talk like this in Latin and Greek and Venetic. We were even finding hints of a context for
the language itself, a language so unlike its neighbors. A fascinating stone from the Greek island
of Lemnos features a soldier surrounded by letters and words that really resemble Etruscan. Is this a lost sister language? A dialect? Perhaps Etruscan wasn't so alone. Did it belong to a larger family of Tyrrhenian
languages? The language of that Linen Book is still mysterious. We don't know how this text got to Egypt,
but thanks to all this work we can tell it's a kind of ritual calendar. And sometimes we can follow whole threads
of text: "celi huθiś zaθrumiś flerχva neθunsl śucri θezric". It's almost like if you close your eyes I
can take you right back to the days of fluent Etruscan, but ask how to say a simple yes
or no and we're lost again. Stick around and subscribe for language.
Is there any other channels like this?
I’m fascinated by this topic and as student of history I would like to focus on this topic of Etruscan language
So seeing the etruscan term for god/gods was aes/aesir, I wonder is its resemblence to the Norse Aesir coincidental
or a sign of their common IE history?AFAIK other languages around the etruscans used the deus/theos words.But I'm not a linguist just a curious nerd.
Edit: definitely not a linguist lol.
I had a professor tell me that the closest language to the Latin was Modern Italian. I stayed quite but my class kept yelling that modern Italian was closer to Etruscan. I still don't know who was right. Would this be an inappropriate place to ask?
So I'm curious if anyone knows: what are the real differences between Toscano and Romanesco? Did they develop independently from Vulgar Latin or do they represent a continuum.
I'm still very curious about the absolute origins of Etruscan, seeing that it's not an IE language.