Etruscan language: Encyclopedia II - Etruscan language - Other less accepted theories

Etruscan language - Other less accepted theories

The interest in Etruscan antiquities and the mysterious Etruscan language found its modern origin in a book by a Dominican monk, Annio da Viterbo, "il Pastura" (1432—1502), the cabalist and orientalist who guided Pinturicchio's allegorical frescoes for Pope Alexander VI's Vatican apartments. In 1498 Annio published his antiquarian miscellany titled Antiquitatum variarum (in 17 volumes) where he put together a fantastic theory in which both the Hebrew and Etruscan languages were said to originate from a single source, the "Aramaic" spoken by Noah and his descendants, founders of Etruscan Viterbo. Annio also started to excavate Etruscan tombs, unearthing sarcophagi and inscriptions, and made a bold try at deciphering the Etruscan language.

It is long ago been disproven that Etruscan can possibly be on its own a member of the Indo-European branch of Anatolian languages because of the discovery of the Lemnian language, which backs up Herodotus' ancient account of an eastern origin of the Etruscans and their language. Furthermore, Etruscan is very different from IE languages, having a 1ps nominative mi while Indo-European languages point to *h₁egô instead. It also lacks any pronominal endings, a thematic class of verbs in *-e-, ablaut between *e and *o in the verb stem, and other clear features that are specifically those of the IE family. While there is debate about Etruscan and the Tyrrhenian family being related to IE, the debate about Etruscan being an IE language is very much dead now.

The obscurity of Etruscan's roots continue to attract further investigation. A recent (2003) study by linguist Mario Alinei has proposed the idea that Etruscan may have been an archaic form of Hungarian. While this theory is considered controversial, and is not widely accepted in academic circles, nevertheless there are a number of similarities between Etruscan and Hungarian that provide the basis for Alinei's theory: similarities between certain words (magistrature names), agglutination, vowel harmony, construction of personal pronouns when used together with prepositions, etc. Alinei's theory is consistent with archaeological findings that established a connection between the Villanovan culture and the Urnfield culture that originated in the Carpathian basin (as concluded by archaeologist Hugh Hencken). However, critics accuse Alinei's work as being the product of mass comparison, a methodology that is not accepted by comparative linguists.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Other less accepted theories", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki