The Etruscans are thought by some to be indigenous people of Italy, living there before the Indo-European migration and the arrival of the Latins, around 1000 BC. Herodotus (Histories I.94), however, describes the Tyrrhenians as immigrants from Lydia in western Anatolia, led west, fleeing famine, by their leader Tyrrhoeus, to settle in Umbria [1]; the Tyrrhenians of Herodotus are sometimes identified with the Etruscans, although there is no material cultural evidence to back this up. Literacy was fairly common, as can be seen by the g ...

See also:

Etruscan language, Etruscan language - History, Etruscan language - Classification, Etruscan language - Other less accepted theories, Etruscan language - Geographic distribution, Etruscan language - Related Languages, Etruscan language - Sounds, Etruscan language - Vowels, Etruscan language - Consonants, Etruscan language - Texts, Etruscan language - Vocabulary, Etruscan language - Writing system

Read more here: » Etruscan language: Encyclopedia II - Etruscan language - History

Helmut Rix, Etruskische Texte, works as a kind of incomplete thesaurus, a main key to studying the Etruscan language. First of all Rix and his collaborators present the only two unified (though fragmentary) texts available in Etruscan: the Liber Linteus used for mummy wrappings (now at Zagreb, Croatia) and the Tabula Capuana (the inscribed tablet from Capua). All the rest of the recovered inscriptions follow, grouped according to the localities in which they were found: Campania, Latium, Falerii and Ager Fa ...

See also:

Etruscan language, Etruscan language - History, Etruscan language - Classification, Etruscan language - Other less accepted theories, Etruscan language - Geographic distribution, Etruscan language - Related Languages, Etruscan language - Sounds, Etruscan language - Vowels, Etruscan language - Consonants, Etruscan language - Texts, Etruscan language - Vocabulary, Etruscan language - Writing system

Read more here: » Etruscan language: Encyclopedia II - Etruscan language - Texts

Due to its isolation, no significant certain translations from Etruscan into modern languages have been produced yet, however we can be fairly certain of how the language was pronounced as the Etruscan speakers wrote using a variant of the Greek alphabet. Latin borrowed a few dozen words from Etruscan, many of them related to culture, like elementum (letter), litterae (writing), cera (wax), arena, etc. ...

See also:

Etruscan language, Etruscan language - History, Etruscan language - Classification, Etruscan language - Other less accepted theories, Etruscan language - Geographic distribution, Etruscan language - Related Languages, Etruscan language - Sounds, Etruscan language - Vowels, Etruscan language - Consonants, Etruscan language - Texts, Etruscan language - Vocabulary, Etruscan language - Writing system

Read more here: » Etruscan language: Encyclopedia II - Etruscan language - Vocabulary

The reconstructed phonemes of Etruscan (IPA encoding): Etruscan language - Vowels. /a/ letter: A /e/ letter: E /i/ letter: I /u/ letter: V See also:

Etruscan language, Etruscan language - History, Etruscan language - Classification, Etruscan language - Other less accepted theories, Etruscan language - Geographic distribution, Etruscan language - Related Languages, Etruscan language - Sounds, Etruscan language - Vowels, Etruscan language - Consonants, Etruscan language - Texts, Etruscan language - Vocabulary, Etruscan language - Writing system

Read more here: » Etruscan language: Encyclopedia II - Etruscan language - Sounds

Etruscan was spoken in north-west and west-central Italy, in the region that even now bears their name: Tuscany, and in the Po valley to the north of Etruria. Etruscan language - Related Languages. One language certain to be very closely related to Etruscan is the language once spoken on the island of Lemnos before the Athenian invasion (6th century BC), aptly named Lemnian. A stone tablet called the Lemnos stele was found there written with a script related to Etruscan and is dated to approximately 600 BC ...

See also:

Etruscan language, Etruscan language - History, Etruscan language - Classification, Etruscan language - Other less accepted theories, Etruscan language - Geographic distribution, Etruscan language - Related Languages, Etruscan language - Sounds, Etruscan language - Vowels, Etruscan language - Consonants, Etruscan language - Texts, Etruscan language - Vocabulary, Etruscan language - Writing system

Read more here: » Etruscan language: Encyclopedia II - Etruscan language - Geographic distribution

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 b ...

See also:

Etruscan language, Etruscan language - History, Etruscan language - Classification, Etruscan language - Other less accepted theories, Etruscan language - Geographic distribution, Etruscan language - Related Languages, Etruscan language - Sounds, Etruscan language - Vowels, Etruscan language - Consonants, Etruscan language - Texts, Etruscan language - Vocabulary, Etruscan language - Writing system

Read more here: » Etruscan language: Encyclopedia II - Etruscan language - Classification

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" s ...

See also:

Etruscan language, Etruscan language - History, Etruscan language - Classification, Etruscan language - Other less accepted theories, Etruscan language - Geographic distribution, Etruscan language - Related Languages, Etruscan language - Sounds, Etruscan language - Vowels, Etruscan language - Consonants, Etruscan language - Texts, Etruscan language - Vocabulary, Etruscan language - Writing system

Read more here: » Etruscan language: Encyclopedia II - Etruscan language - Other less accepted theories