Etruscan language: Encyclopedia II - Etruscan language - Classification

Etruscan language - Classification

The majormost consensus is that Etruscan is related only to other members of what is called the Tyrrhenian language family which in itself is isolate, that is, unrelated to other language groups as far as we can tell. There is no doubt that Rhaetic and Lemnian are among this family. In his Natural History (1st century AD), Pliny wrote about Alpine peoples: "The Rhaetians and the Vindelicans border with these [Noricans], all distributed in numerous cities. The Gauls maintain that the Raetians descend from the Etruscans, pushed back under the leadership of Raetus." Based on this and linguistic data it's clear that Etruscan ought to be related to Raetic. However, beyond these known facts, there is ample debate and hearsay that follows.

Debate continues on concerning the relationship of Eteocypriot, Eteocretan and Minoan to this family. The Amathus bilingual written in Eteocretan shows important structural similarities bearing what appears to be a genitive in -O-SE (Etruscan <-as> and Lemnian <-š>) as well as a 3ps animate pronoun A-NA (Etruscan <an> 'he, she'). The meager text however makes it difficult to prove a kinship for certain. Eteocretan likewise shows grammatical similarities and vocabulary terms but again the number of texts are meager. Since Minoan texts are also few and far between, any grammatical similarities with Etruscan are always tentative. However it has been noted by some online that the oft-repeated Minoan U-NA-KA-NA-SI and U-NA-RU-KA-NA-SI may bear resemblence to what would be written in Etruscan as *unχva cenase "bearing libations" which is surprisingly reasonable considering that the objects on which this is consistently written are in fact libation tables. (The value of <un> as 'libation' is proven by its repeated usage in the Liber Linteus.) Time will tell whether these connections bear fruit.

Some modern scholars have claimed that Etruscan as part of a larger Tyrrhenian family is distantly related to Indo-European, citing similarities in grammatical endings and vocabulary. By extension, because Indo-European is a classified as a Nostratic language by some, it is therefore presumed if related that Etruscan and its family are also Nostratic. Nothing yet can be ascertained considering the paucity of texts in general other than those of Etruscan. For now, many remain conservative and consider Tyrrhenian to be isolate. A connection with IE is merely one of the strongest possibilities so far but not proven by a long-shot.

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