Grammatical characteristics

The minimal unit of meaning seems to have been a verbal root, such as zic or zich, meaning “write.” The suffixing of any vowel or certain consonants (c or its variant ch, t or its variant th, l, r, or n) produced a noun. The vowel u was used to form a gerund that, without further change, could be used as an agent noun; thus zicu meant “writing,” then, further, “scribe,” and then the equivalent of the Roman name Scribonius. From these verbal nouns, denominative verbs could be made; thus from zicu plus -ce, a past tense of perfective affix, was made zichuche “he wrote, he has written.”

Because of the large number of names occurring in the inscriptions, the noun declension system can be understood reasonably well. Similar to the process of word building is the construction called genitivus genitivi, or “genitive of the genitive,” in which several possessive suffixes may be added to a word in succession. Thus, the simple genitive of larth, a proper name, is larthal “Larth’s”; a second genitive suffix added gives larthalisa “of that which is Larth’s.”

There is apparently no grammatical gender in Etruscan. In late Etruscan an -i suffix marks some women’s names; still later, apparently (or possibly in a different dialect area), -ia is similarly used. Although these suffixes appear to be the same as the final elements in some words designating exclusively female functions, such as puia “wife” (in one occurrence spelled pui, if it is the same word) and ati “mother” (in one occurrence atiu, if it is the same word), there is no evidence for any syntactic use of gender, and there is no formal marker that can be shown to have marked gender consistently.

Case endings do not differ from singular to plural; in the singular they are suffixed directly to the word stem, and in the plural they are added to the stem, along with one of the plural markers ar, er, ur. There is no distinctive nominative (subject) case marker, the word stem or, in some cases, the root alone serving as the nominative. A final marker -s, however, does appear to have been added in some instances of a probable nominative case.

The repetitive nature of most Etruscan inscriptions is such that very few distinctively different verb forms are available for analysis. Indeed, probably the only really certain verbal suffix is -ce. It must not be assumed, however, that the paucity of the verbal data from inscriptions reflects an impoverished verb system in the language; indeed, judging from the variety of verbal stems to which the recurring -ce is added, it is more likely that the Etruscan verb had a more complicated structure than the noun.

Vocabulary

Since the language is undeciphered, meaning can be assigned with certainty to only a few Etruscan words that occur very frequently in the texts. Some kinship terms are sure—among these are ati, “mother,” clan “son,” śec “daughter,” puia “wife.” Less certain but probably correct are words designating members of the larger societal organization: lavtn “family,” zilc “official,” maru “official,” spur “city,” rasna or raśna “Etruscan, Etruria.” A pair of dice certainly have on them the names of the numbers from one through six. Although the order of these numbers has been and still is disputed, the arrangement most generally accepted is this: thu “one,” zal “two,” ci “three,” śa “four,” mach “five,” huth “six.”

Among the continuing mysteries of Etruscan are the reasons why the Etruscans left no written records of their great civilization other than inscriptions and occasional texts and why the Romans, who knew the Etruscans intimately, transmitted little or nothing to posterity about either Etruscan literature or their language, which must certainly have been spoken, or at least preserved, by some families in Rome long after the period of Etruscan greatness had passed.