The Etruscan World (Routledge Worlds)

• Luciano Agostiniani –

Etruscan the basic syllable structure is the open syllable, or at most closed by / m n r l
/. As for the accent, it had to be predominantly melodic and non-dynamic, as evidenced
by the fact that this syllabic structure was maintained for a very long period, from the
seventh to fi fth centuries bc. In the fi rst half of the fi fth century bc, Neo-Etruscan
developed a strong accent on the fi rst syllable of the word. This eventually led to the loss
of unstressed vowels, especially those that followed the accented syllable, thus reducing
the number of syllables of the word and the appearance of more or less complex closed
syllables. For example, the Archaic trisyllabic turuce (“dedicated”) corresponds to the Late
Etruscan bisyllabic turce; to avile, a male personal name, corresponds avle; to ramuθa, a
female personal name, corresponds ramθa; to venel, a male personal name, corresponds
vel (from *venl); to clutumusta, a local version of the name of Clytemnestra, corresponds
clutmsta. The loss of vowels was preceded by a phase of weakening, resulting in oscillating
written results: see the series aχile – aχele – aχale (then aχle), a personal name, or avile –
avele – avale (then avle), another personal name.

Morphosyntax

On the morphosyntax of Etruscan our information is far less comprehensive. It has
been established that it is an agglutinating language (but see below), in which each
grammatical category is expressed by a morphemic segment placed after the lexical
base^22 (a radical, followed or not by derivative suffi xes).^23 The sequence of the constituent
elements of the words is as expected: “radical (+ derivative morphology) + number +
case.” The noun has an uninfl ected form, the absolute case, and then a series of marked
cases. Taking the word for “son” as an example, and comparing the structural homology
with Turkish, another agglutinative language, in contrast with the Latin (a fusional
language), we have:

clan clen-ar clen-si clen-ar(a)-si

oǧul oǧul-lar oǧul-a oǧul-lar-a

fi li-us fi li-i fi li-ō fi li-is

“child” “children” “to the child” “to the children”

Apart from the absolute case, the cases marked for Etruscan are the genitive, ablative,
locative and pertinentive. Formally, the pertinentive^24 is close to the genitive: see for
example the declension of proper names such as Larθ (gen. Larθ-ia Larθ-ial, pert. Larθ-
ial-e), Venel (gen. Venel-us, pert. Venel-us-i), Marce (gen. Marce-s, pert. Marce-s-i). But the
genitive case, in spite of what has been said in the past, is functionally distinct: the
genitive expresses belonging, the pertinentive^25 the destination. Turuce, “he dedicated,”
is constructed with the genitive, muluvanice, “he donated” with pertinentive, and so on.
Even the ablative^26 is formally close to the genitive, as shown, again, in the declension of
proper names such as Larθ (gen. Larθ-al, abl. Larθ-al-s), Tute (gen. Tute-s, abl. Tute-i-s),
Vel (gen. Vel-u-s, abl. Vel-u-i-s), Tarna (gen. Tarna-s, abl. Tarn-e-s from *Tarna-i-s). The
case is well attested, especially in Late Etruscan, in its function either as prototypical
expression of origin: