{"id":186,"date":"2011-02-02T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2011-02-02T08:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=186"},"modified":"2011-04-03T21:46:34","modified_gmt":"2011-04-04T04:46:34","slug":"etruscan-italy-700-bc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/02\/etruscan-italy-700-bc\/","title":{"rendered":"Etruscan &#8212; Italy, 700 BC"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_188\" style=\"width: 110px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/etruscanB1.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-188\" class=\"size-full wp-image-188\" title=\"etruscanB\" src=\"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/etruscanB1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\" height=\"199\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-188\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Etruscan &quot;b&quot;<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Somewhat unusually, the Etruscan <em>writing system<\/em> is completely understood, but the Etruscan <em>language<\/em> is not.\u00a0 With the early <a href=\"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/27\/cypriot-1500-bc-greece\/\">Cypriot<\/a> script, archeological linguists can guess that the symbols in early Cypriot writing system corresponded to the same pronunciation and orthography as they did when later used write a dialect of Greek (which <em>is<\/em> deciphered), but there is no assurance of that.\u00a0 With Etruscan, they are certain of the writing system.\u00a0 Not only do they have a small number of bilingual texts, but they understand very well both the alphabet it came from and an alphabet that came from it.<\/p>\n<p>The Etruscan alphabet came from the version of the Greek alphabet used on the western Greek island <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Euboea\">Euboea<\/a> and was shortly afterwards adapted by the Romans to become the Latin script.\u00a0 Note that the Euboean Greek alphabet did not have omega, but used a character for the &#8220;s&#8221; sound that looked more like an &#8220;s&#8221; than a sigma.\u00a0 They later started using a glyph that looks like a modern &#8220;8&#8221; for the &#8220;f&#8221; sound, but only after the Romans adopted their alphabet.<\/p>\n<p>The Etruscans got the alphabet from the Greeks early enough that the Greeks had not yet settled on which direction they would write.\u00a0 Etruscan, like <a href=\"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/29\/phoenician-1050-bc-lebanon\/\">Phoenecian<\/a>, was written right-to-left most of the time.\u00a0 Many Etruscan letters &#8220;look reversed&#8221; to Latin-script readers for that reason.\u00a0 Occasionally, Etruscans would write <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Boustrophedon\">boustrophedonically<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Part of why Etruscan hasn&#8217;t been deciphered is that it (again!) appears to be a language isolate, and there weren&#8217;t that many textual examples.\u00a0 Worse, many of the examples of Etruscan texts are on tombstones &#8212; not the most auspicious place to find bilingual texts or dictionaries.<\/p>\n<p>Links: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ancientscripts.com\/etruscan.html\">Ancient Scripts<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/writing\/etruscan.htm\">\ufeffOmniglot<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Etruscan_alphabet#Etruscan_alphabet\">Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Somewhat unusually, the Etruscan writing system is completely understood, but the Etruscan language is not.\u00a0 With the early Cypriot script, archeological linguists can guess that the symbols in early Cypriot writing system corresponded to the same pronunciation and orthography as &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/02\/etruscan-italy-700-bc\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,23,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alphabet","category-language-unknown","category-unknown"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}