Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/662

Rh 038 E T R U R I A presents of painted vases, armour, and other objects. As a rule a special district or cemetery was set apart for the dead, but how far it was laid out so as to correspond with the quarters of each town cannot now be determined. For the construction of the dwelling-houses and Tuscan architecture generally see ARCHITECTURE, vol. ii.. p. 414. Laii- [LANGUAGE. By Etruscan is meant the language which &uage. was spoken by the Risena in Etruria more or less during the last thousand years B.C. until it succumbed to the Latin. It was the predominant language of Cam pania also from 800 to 400 B.C., at which time it yielded to the Oscan. Soon after this, owing to the incursions of the Gauls, it lost its hold on what was apparently its oldest home in Italy, the valley of the Po, but continued to exist in a debased form in the time of Livy (v. 33) among certain peoples of the Alps, in particular among the Ilhseti. To the ancients Etruscan sounded barbarous. Dionysius (i. 30) declared it to be related to no other language. Still there was a time when among the better class of Romans Etruscan was taught, just as afterwards was Greek (Livy, ix. 36). Its remains as preserved by writers are few and frequently misrepresented, including about 60 names of places, 28 rivers, several islands, hills, woods, and lakes. Of names of persons there are 7 prae- nomina, and 50 gentile names and cognomina together, a few names of deities, heroes, and mythical kings, 7 names of months, and about 30 glosses, mostly from Hesychius, Servius, and Festus, and in part very doubtful. Altogether there are a little over 200 words, and of those many are local names, and have obviously originated among peoples of the Ligurian, Umbrian, and Latin races conquered by the Etruscans. The Etruscan inscriptions discovered on anti quities up to the present time will be found in Fabretti s Corpus Inscription-urn Italicarum, with &quot; Glossarium Itali- cum,&quot; Turin, 1867; &quot; Primo Supplemento,&quot; 1872, &quot;Sec. Suppl.,&quot; 1874. The total number now reaches to about 5000, and increases yearly at the rate of 100 to 200. Unfortunately they include only 15 bi-linguals (Lat. and Etr.), and these are very short, containing almost nothing but names. Except the &quot; Cippus of Perugia&quot; found in 1822, which has 46 lines, Etruscan, inscriptions are all short, there being for instance only five which have more than 20 words. Four-fifths of them are sepulchral, with the mere indication of names or relationship. A few names of towns have been preserved on coins, as also the numerals from 1 to 6, on a pair of ivory dice. Altogether there are about 200 words which appear not to be names. Lepsius (Inscript. Umbr. et Oscce, Leipsic, 1841) was the first to determine definitely the character of the Etruscan alphabet. Its companion and northern variants were pointed out by Mommsen ( Unteritalische Dialelcte, Leipsic, 1840), and according to those authorities it was derived from a Graeco-Chalcidian prototype current on the west coast of Italy. In its common form it has the following 1 9 letters : fl.D, 3, a, c, e H, 0, ], v], m, H.-1, M, q, 3, t, V,, 8, h, 6, i, 1, m, n, p, s , r, s, t, u, & f - Of these c is a tenuis, = th, x = ch, s is soft, while the other letters have the usual force. Exceptionally &amp;gt;| = k occurs as an archaic form of c; (D =&amp;lt; = ph, mostly in foreign words, and A,, = m (Umbrian). The medhe u, g, d, and the vowel o, though they often occur in words handed down by writers as Etruscan, are never found in the inscriptions. (For other peculiarities see Fabretti, &quot; Osser- yazioni Paleografiche,&quot; Corp. Inscr. Ital. Pr. Suppl., p 145-252.) &amp;gt; The first who attempted to explain the Etruscan inscrip tions was Phil. Buonarroti (Explic. et Conject. ad Monum. Oper. Dempster., Flor. 1726). He was followed by Giov. Batt. Passeri (Paralipomena in Th. Dempster, Lucca, 1767), who sought to prove them to be in a*i Italic language, in fact, a dialect of the Latin. This opinion has maintained its ground with many, and only quite recently we find the great work of Corsseu (Die Sprache der Etmsker, Leipsic, 1874-5) devoted to the elaboration of a strictly scientific basis for it. On the other hand, Ottfried Miiller (Die Etruscer, Breslau, 1828) had observed certain distinctly foreign elements in the language, and had pointed them out clearly enough, without, however, venturing upon any conjecture as to their source. His views, though adopted by Niebuhr, Mommsen, and Aufrecht, have not satisfied others less skilled in these inquiries, who have endeavoured to trace the Etruscan to a Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Albanian, Basque, Semitic, and lastly a Turanian origin (Isaac Taylor, Etruscan Researches, London, 1874). These attempts have all failed, and M tiller s attitude of reserve appears to be decidedly the best under the circumstances. (See W. Deecke, Corssen und die Sprache der Etruscer, Stuttgart 1875; Etruscische Forschungen, 1875-6; and the new edition of O. Miiller s Die Etruscer, Stuttgart, 1877.) As a specimen of how the Etruscan language sounded may be given the inscription from a tomb at Perugia known as the Torre di San Manno. It is the third longest of existing inscriptions. The single words are separated from each other by two dots and the lines by a vertical stroke. The last part, which is in brackets, cannot be read with certainty : cehen : su^i : hin^iu : &ues : sians : etve : ^aure: lautnes cle: caresri : aules : lar^ial : precu^uras i : | lar^ialisvle : cestnal : clenaras i : eS- : fanu : lautn : precus : ipa : murzua: cerurum: ein heczri : tunur : clutiva : zelur [vs : cetiver : apasj. The simple vowels are a, c, i, u. Length is rarely indicated except in some doubtful cases by means of repeating the vowel. Modification of the vowels, such as occurs in various forms in the Indo-Germanic, Germanic, Semitic, and Turanian languages, is foreign to the Etruscan. It has no prefixes, and the accent appears to have been always on the first syllable, and in conse quence of this arose the habit of alliding vowels in the middle of words to such an extent as to bring about frequently very disagreeable combinations of consonants. An extreme case is that of El^sntre = AX.eav8po&amp;lt;s. Some times it may be due to a method of writing, though there is no evidence whatever of vowels being inherent in con sonants. The diphthongs are ai, au, ei, ia, ie, iu, ui, and aia, aie, eia, eie, uia, and again ae, ea, eu, ua, ue, which latter appear not to be original forms. The consonants are p, &amp;lt;j&amp;gt; (almost only in foreign words); c,, x; t, 6 ; I, r; m, n ; s (s }, z ; v,f, h. The aspiration of the tenues is very frequent, sometimes also of the media; in foreign words, in which cases / and h take the place of &amp;lt;f&amp;gt;, h of x- ^ i s doubtful whether/ and h interchange with ; h is sometimes allided. The hard / is common to the Etruscan and the Italian languages, as is also its interchange with h. Assibil- ation (e.g., in the name pethnei, which also occurs as petsnei, pesnei, peznei) is common. Nasal letters often fall out before mutes, and n when preceding a labial becomes m frequently, e.g., lanfa, lam&amp;lt;f&amp;gt;e ; s never changes to r, and the interchange of t and r is doubtful. With regard to the suffixes indicating masculine nouns, which have been wrongly used as an argument for the Italic character of the Etruscan, the most numerous series ends in a ; the next is that in e ; endings in i and u are comparatively rare, in ie and iu less so, while ia occurs only exceptionally. Con sonant endings are few. There is no suffix in p, (f&amp;gt;, z, v,f, h. The greater part of the feminine words, also chiefly names of persons, are derived from the masculine by the suffix ia ; not seldom nia, ta, Qa occur ; also the diminutives za and la. Besides these, however, are a number of feminine