I have long been intrigued by the notion of a language that has managed to keep its secrts s well, and wondered what the current state of scholarship on Etruscan is. Has it been fully "deciphered" and what is its place in the great language families. Are my romantic notions of a "mystery language" about to be shattered? And lastly, is there any shred of evidence to support a conjecture made in an SF novel I read once suggesting that Euskera and Etruscan belong to the same family?

Max-baby, according to http://www.geocities.com/etrusci/, all your illusions are lying in shards around your feet, but I can't say that translating Etruscan into Greek is going to make it any less of a mystery - gnothe se auton, and it's all Greek to me.

I think that it is pretty much accepted that a lot of Latin originally came from Etruscan roots. See http://latin.about.com/homework/latin/cs/etruscanlanguage1/index.htm for an awful lot more than I know.

I know what Euskera is - I have no idea of what its origins are.

FWIW

Thanks CapK - another childhood memory dashed! The idea of a link between Euskera and Etruscan intrigued me when I first read it. . This was probably because by then I had become friends with someone for whom Euskera is her mother tongue, although growing up as she did under Franco, her children are now more fluent in it than she.

That website mentioned above is stark raving mad, is my guess. Reading the Phaistos Disk using modern Greek values? Forget about it.

Etruscan isn't completely deciphered. There's still been no Rosetta Stone that allows parallel reading. Most of the existing texts can be read because they're formulaic: So-and-so son of so-and-so, died aged n, held the magistracy of X, etc.

The supposed association between Basque and Etruscan is invalid. It was made many decades ago when they were among the few ergative languages known. The theory was A is unlike B, B is unlike C, therefore A must be like C. There is no resemblance at all between Basque and Etruscan apart from some typology.

These days the experts consider that Etruscan might be related to Indo-European, though all the similarities might also be due to borrowing (direction not known) -- and I mean way before the immediate pre-classical Latin period. The term Indo-Etruscan is sometimes used. This is highly tentative; you can't say it's generally accepted. That is, Etruscan is sometimes considered one of the branches of the "Nostratic" phylum.

Basque is still an isolate, its only relative being the ancient Aquitainian, which was very possibly its direct ancestor. Even less accepted than the Nostratic theory is the Dene-Caucasian theory, held by a small minority of respectable linguists and a great deal more cranks: this says Basque can be connected with North Caucasian (Abkhaz, Chechen etc), with Burushaski (an isolate in the Himalayas), with Sino-Tibetan, and with Na-Dene (Athabaskan, Tlingit, Navaho etc). Possibly Sumerian too.

These two theories are genuine scholarly extrapolations from existing knowledge -- that miracle cure Phaistos Disk site ain't!

Mr. W, you never fail to leave me in awe.

Thanks for putting it all together.

On the subject of ancient languages, what is the status of Linear B, the Cretan ancestor of Greek? Last I heard, very little had been recovered -- just enough to shed some light on early pre-Homeric Greek and to establish that Crete was the cradle of Greek language, arts and science. Have you got a website for this?

Leaping millennia of language in single bound - you are da man!

Thank you so much for that reply. It was fascinating to read of the theories about the roigins of Etruscan and Basque. The possibiilty that Indo-European borrowed from Etruscan is intriguing. I know this is cheeky, but do you have examples of common English words derived from Etruscan, via Latin presumably?

do you have examples of common English words derived from Etruscan, via Latin presumably?

No, in a word. I can't think of any offhand nor do I know where to look. There would be a few, cultural terms taken into Latin.

The Pelican book The Etruscans is still valid, though it's decades old, as far as I'm aware. The chapter on language still applies. There was a long inscription on a bronze tablet deciphered last year, which added quite a few new words. All I can say is (a) do a Web search, and (b) DO NOT READ anything that says "amazing discoveries", or "startling new revelation", or says that Etruscan is connected wih Basque, Sumerian, Atlantis, Stonehenge, the Polynesians, or reptilian shape-changers. Seriously. Don't. There is NO KNOWN CONNEXION between Etruscan and any other language.

The kind of deep relation there might be between it and Indo-European is based on the personal pronouns being similar, and one or two other markers. The pronons won't be borrowings.

The numerals 'six' and 'seven' indicate cultural diffusion somehow: there are similarities in Indo-European, Basque, Semitic, Etruscan, and Turkic which are too close to be genetic, so must have dated from times when some of those cultures didn't have numerals that went that high, and borrowed them from another that did. Possibly Semitic into Indo-European, thence into the rest.

I recommend Chadwick's little book The Decipherment of Linear B. It's readily available, and he vividly describes his work with Ventris and how they justified their conclusions. I don't think there's been any big news in the field since their decipherment.

The Mycenaean texts largely confirmed pre-existing reconstructions of proto-Greek. There were some interesting points, which probably indicated that Mycenaean wasn't quite the direct ancestor of the later language. Also, because of the cumbersome and un-Greek nature of the writing system, a lot of detail can't be recovered. But basically, if a new text in Linear B were to be discovered, there would be little difficulty in reading it.

As to what it says about the culture of the area, I'm not the person for that.

All I can say is (a) do a Web search, and (b) DO NOT READ anything that says "amazing discoveries", or "startling new revelation", or says that Etruscan is connected wih Basque, Sumerian, Atlantis, Stonehenge, the Polynesians, or reptilian shape-changers. Seriously. Don't. There is NO KNOWN CONNEXION between Etruscan and any other language.


Thanks for the tip, Nicholas. If Etruscan is not connected with reptilian Polynesian Atlantis survivors, may I assume that Basque is? BTW, thanks for spelling connexion with an "x". I'm trying to revive the spelling to mock the supererogatory "ct" of Webster's mob.

The pronouns won't be borrowings

Is that a general rule of language then, NicholasW? If so, presumably the three personal pronouns in English that we took from the Vikings must be the exception that proves the rule…

http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=miscellany&Number=17632


CRYSTAL, D (1988) The English Language, Penguin