- chapter 22: The Etruscan language –
THE STRUCTURE OF THE LANGUAGEIn the absence of a continuity of transmission and of knowledge of the Etruscan language,
all that we know about it today – the sounds, forms, lexical meanings, syntactic structures
- results from a reconstruction process achieved through the interpretation of written
texts.^10 Among the approaches to the meaning of the texts we cannot reasonably count
what is traditionally known as the “etymological method”: i.e. the comparative procedure
which, assuming a genealogical bond of Etruscan with another known language, claims
to derive the meanings of the unknown Etruscan words from the words of the known
language that are similar in form. The method is correct in itself, but wrong in its
application to Etruscan, for the obvious reason that Etruscan is a language genealogically
isolated, and that any supposed kinship with this or that language – Hebrew, Basque,
Armenian, Finno-Ugric, Ural-Altaic languages, Caucasian languages, Berber languages,
Tuareg, Micro-Asiatic languages, Sanskrit, Latin and Italic languages, Greek – are quite
clearly totally illusory.
The case is different with what is traditionally defi ned as the “combinatory method,”
which originally was based exclusively – contrary to what is claimed by proponents
of the “etymological method” – on the identifi cation, comparison and classifi cation of
words and forms in the texts. Obviously, such a procedure is still indispensable and
preliminary to the analysis of a text in an unknown language, or to the reconstruction of
the characteristics of the language. But it must be said that such a type of analysis, which
works exclusively with the forms, would not by itself be able to provide information on
the overall meaning of a text, the meaning of words, or the value of forms of grammar.
To tap into this type of data, one must integrate the formal analysis of information in
different ways, by reviewing, for example, the contexts of the inscriptions, the type of the
object on which the inscription appears, the reference to proper names, etc.
The third of the traditionally recognized methods, the so-called “bilingual method”
(also “parallel texts method”) quite naturally integrates with the formal analysis, providing
clues to the meaning and structure of the texts. It is based on the idea that the well-
known cultural community existing between the different peoples of ancient Italy must
have resulted in, among other things, the use of similar text elements. Thus the structure
and meaning of a text in a known language, say Umbrian, will give us indications about
the meaning and structure of an Etruscan text. In fact, even our partial knowledge of
the contents of the rituals of the Liber linteus and the Capua Tablet rests largely on the
parallelism of the text with that of the other great ritual text of ancient Italy, the “Iguvine
Tables.” And we may recall, in confi rmation, the proofs of convergence that we have seen
before with the “speaking inscriptions,” the “prohibition of appropriation” or the form of
“beautiful object of/for a nice person.”
To the three methods traditionally recognized, one can add a fourth^11 that could be
called the “typological method.” This refers to aspects of the typology of languages,
especially – but not solely – the fact that some of the traits of a language are infl uenced
by the existence of other traits. For example, if a language puts the direct object before
the verb, it will also generally put the genitive before the head noun, and will generally
use postpositions rather than prepositions (see below, the description of Etruscan
morphosyntax). From a typological perspective it is possible to discover in Etruscan the
presence of certain traits, and also to verify the real presence of others proposed on the
basis of different methods, for example the combinatory method.