Etruscan language

The Etruscan language (/ɨˈtrʌskən/) was the spoken and written language of the Etruscan civilization, in Italy, in the ancient region of Etruria (modern Tuscany plus western Umbria and northern Latium) and in parts of Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna (where the Etruscans were displaced by Gauls). Etruscan influenced Latin, but was eventually completely superseded by it. The Etruscans left around 13,000 inscriptions which have been found so far, only a handful of which are of significant length, some bilingual inscriptions with texts also in Latin, Greek or Phoenician, and a few dozen loanwords, such as the name Roma (from Etruscan Ruma), but Etruscan's influence was significant.Attested from 700 BC to AD 50, the language is not related to any living language, and has historically been referred to as an isolate, but consensus now holds that it is one of the Tyrsenian languages, along with the Raetic language of the Alps and the Lemnian language of the Aegean island of Lemnos. Lacking large corpora or extended texts, more distant relations of that family are unclear. A connection to the Anatolian languages, or at a further remove to Proto-Indo-European, has been suggested, while Russian scholars such as Sergei Starostin have suggested a link to the highly speculative Dené–Caucasian macrophylum. Neither of these two hypotheses has widespread support.Grammatically, the language is agglutinating, with nouns and verbs showing suffixed inflectional endings and ablaut in some cases. Nouns show four cases, singular and plural numbers, and masculine and feminine genders. Phonologically, Etruscan appears uncomplicated, with a four-vowel system and an apparent contrast between aspirated and unaspirated stops. The language shows phonetic change over time, with the loss and then re-establishment of word-internal vowels due to the effect of Etruscan's strong word-initial stress.Etruscan religion influenced that of the Romans and many of the few surviving Etruscan language artifacts are of votive or religious significance. Etruscan was written in an alphabet derived from the Greek alphabet; this alphabet was the source of the Latin alphabet. The Etruscan language is also believed to be the source of certain important cultural words of Western Europe such as 'military' and 'people', which do not have obvious Indo-European roots.