Get Etruscan An Archaic Form Of Hungarian - Continuitas

Knowledge of the Etruscan language was once considered "lost." It has not been spoken since the Roman empire, and for long before that it was spoken only by priests. Yet contrary to popular belief, we can—and do—read and understand Etruscan.

Despite many attempts at decipherment and some claims of success, the Etruscan records still defy translation.

The Etruscan language is a unique, non-Indo-European outlier in the ancient Greco-Roman world. There are no known parent languages to Etruscan, nor are there any modern descendants, as Latin gradually replaced it, along with other Italic languages, as the Romans gradually took control of the Italian peninsula.

Yet contrary to popular belief, we can—and do—read and understand Etruscan. Our knowledge is constrained only by the limited nature of the surviving inscriptions: we have tomb markers and votive dedications, cryptic calendars and incantations, but no diaries or literature.

The problem is that that very few Etruscan texts survived the Roman conquest and we don't have a “Rosetta stone” that can help us translate them, Posth notes. What we do know is that the Etruscans used an alphabet that derived from the Greek one, but spoke a language that was most likely not Indo-European.

The work determined that Etruscans had a genetic profile that was similar to Latin people who lived in neighboring Rome, and carried some ancestry from Eurasian steppe people of the Bronze Age. Indo-European languages are now spoken widely around the world, and steppe people probably helped usher in those languages.

The Etruscan language is a unique, non-Indo-European outlier in the ancient Greco-Roman world. There are no known parent languages to Etruscan, nor are there any modern descendants, as Latin gradually replaced it, along with other Italic languages, as the Romans gradually took control of the Italian peninsula.