The alphabet and the language of the Etruscans: an alleged mystery
Contrary to what many still suppose, the documents of the Etruscan language are anything but 'undeciphered' or 'indecipherable': written with an alphabet of Greek derivation of the Euboic type ('red', i.e. Western, according to the division established by A. Kirchhoff of the writings of the Greeks), since the last century they have been read without any particular difficulty; but even previously, except for some doubts relating to individual signs, epigraphy had perhaps represented the most solid chapter in the entire panorama of Etruscology.
We therefore know that already in the late eighth century BC the Etruscans were certainly in possession of an alphabet, introduced in central Italy by Euboean colonists from the island of Ischia and comprising twenty-six letters, as can be deduced from an ivory tablet, with evidently scholastic use, found in Marsiliana d'Albegna (Grosseto).
But four letters are not actually used (the b, the d, the sound s and the o, which was initially confused with the u sound), while a special sign was introduced for the f sound from the 6th century BC. Writing normally proceeds from right to left; much more rarely, from left to right or with a boustrophedic pattern, i.e. alternating line by line. In less ancient epigraphs we can find dots separating words.
In reality the problem is another and it is a problem of linguistic interpretation, not of epigraphic deciphering: that of understanding the meaning of the texts, written in a language that does not seem related to any other of the ancient or modern proposals for comparison, and to elaborate, possibly, a grammatical, morphological and syntactic description of this language, which is the very condition of its effective knowledge. And, from this point of view, it must be admitted that, despite the grandiose effort of many generations of scholars, certain results remain few and sectorial; and this is not due to insufficient commitment or inadequacy of the methods adopted, but due to the very quality of the available documents.
In fact the Etruscan inscriptions, although numerous (about 10,000) come mostly from necropolises; they are therefore of a funerary nature and generally very short. Therefore, above all, if not only, they give us personal names and elementary personal data, even though most of them are quite easily (but sometimes approximately) translatable. The very few more complex Etruscan texts - a ritual written on a cloth roll then used to wrap a mummy, now in the Zagreb Museum; an inscribed tile, from Capua, in Berlin; the Cippus of Perugia - on the other hand raise serious difficulties in interpretation, also because for the moment no large bilingual documents of a literal translation nature are known (of the type of the Rosetta Stone).
Nonetheless, the patience of the investigators gradually leads to individual acquisitions which, despite the almost insurmountable limits imposed by the quantity and quality of the documents (to the epigraphic texts we must add the Etruscan words reported by ancient writers), can be organized into a fairly well-defined general design.
After the experience of the 'etymological' methods (which presupposed the kinship of Etruscan with other known languages) and 'combinatory' (aimed at analyzing the 'combination' of the constituent elements of the text only internally), in recent years they have found development of two new ways of approaching the linguistic problem: the so-called 'bilingualism', which integrates combinatorial analysis with the use of external interpretative sources (for example, comparison with Latin and Greek dedication formulas); and the 'structuralism' of Helmut Rix, who deems a description of the 'structure' of texts sufficient to clarify their meaning as well.
It is not the case here to speak extensively of Etruscan grammar, because it would introduce us into a terrain of difficult and complicated explanation. We prefer to give the reader the example of a declension of a noun now sufficiently ascertained (according to the patterns of better known languages, such as Greek and Latin and that of a fairly translatable funerary epigraph.
Here is the declension pattern of the noun methlum (meaning 'name'): methlumes ('of the name'); methlumth ('in the moment', with locative value); methlumeri ('to the name'). And here is the example of a funerary epigraph (it is the inscription engraved on a sarcophagus from Norchia and reported both in the Corpus Inscriptionum Italicarum by A. Fabretti, N. 2070, and in the new Corpus Inscriptionum Etruscarum, N. 5874):
Arnth Churcles [Arnth Churcle], Larthal [of Larth] clan [son] Ramthas Nevtnial [(and) of Ramtha Nevtni], zilc parcos [praetor] amce [fu] marunuch [belonging to the college of 'maroni'] spurana [urban] cepen [priest] tenu [exercised], avils [of years] machs [five] semphalchls [(and) seventy] lupu [died]
