I just watched a video about the pronunciation of Etruscan. It was well done, I think, although I’ve never heard Etruscan spoken aloud before so I can’t quite say.
I couldn’t help but be struck by the Etruscan word for god/gods - ais, aiser - and its resemblance to the Norse word for their gods - áss/Æsir. The pronunciation sounds roughly the same, to my untutored ears, anyway.
So, is it the same word? Is it, perhaps, an Indo-European thing? Or just a striking coincidence?
Here’s the video. It’s 8 minutes long and I enjoyed it. He has one about Aztec language that I’m going to watch next.
“Æsir is the plural of áss, óss “god” (genitive case āsir), which is attested in other Germanic languages, e.g., Old English ōs (gen. pl. ēsa) and Gothic (as reported by Jordanes, who wrote in the 6th century CE) anses “half-gods”. These all stem from Proto-Germanic *ansuz, which itself comes from Proto-Indo-European *h₂énsus (gen. h₂n̥sóus) “life force” (cf. Avestan aŋhū “lord; lifetime”, ahura “godhood”, Sanskrit ásu “life force”,[4] ásura “demons” (< *h₂n̥suró)). It is widely accepted that this word is further related to *h₂ens- “to engender” (cf. Hittite hass- “to procreate, give birth”, Tocharian B ās- “to produce”).[5]”
so Aesir goes way back to Indo-European. On the other hand, Etruscan isn’t an IE language, so the similarity might be coincidence.
Curious, how did they determine a pronounciation guide for Etruscan? Were there any clues using Latin or Greek & Etruscan in the same carvings & writings?
Chronos, we know of several hundred words. That I remember.
I have always wondered how all of the famous ancient Etruscan literature managed to disappear, so that only a few hundred words are known today. I realize it has been a few thousand years, but still. The Liber Linteus was recycled into a mummy wrapping.
The Etruscans took the Greek alphabet, modified it a bit, and used it for their own language. The Romans took the Etruscan alphabet, modified it a bit, and used it for Latin. There are what appears to be legible personal names on cemetery inscriptions in Etruscan. Put all these facts together and we have a good idea how Etruscan was pronounced… Just not what it meant.
I was going to say something along those lines, and I assume it is true as far as it goes. But consider Latin : certainly it is spelled reasonably phonetically, but I do not think the prosody would be completely obvious from only short fragments, nor things like which vowels were long and which consonants were elided.
Therefore, I wonder whether the methods used have really yielded a pretty good idea of what spoken Etruscan sounded like, or whether they are doing little more than sounding out unintelligible words based only on their spelling.
I realize that “watch this video” are the three most hateful words in the English language but “how do we know what Etruscan sounded like” is the actual topic. It’s a short video, btw, less than 8 minutes. It specifically discusses the Liber Linteus (although not by name).
We have more than fragmentary clips of Etruscan. Some of the inscriptions are quite long. There are quite a few inscriptions that include Phoenician, Latin or Greek translation.
We don’t have the equivalent of an Etruscan Rosetta stone because the problems are different. With the Rosetta stone, we understand the Egyptian language, both modern and antique variations. We needed something that would explain the Egyptian pictograms so that we could decipher which Egyptian word was being said.
With Etruscan, we understand the alphabet and how they were using it. We don’t understand the language. We can easily spell out the words but we need something that would explain what the words mean. The video explains that we are slowly brute forcing our way to a dictionary by taking several different samples and cycling through the different meanings of the words until they find a meaning that makes sense in each of the several example contexts, simultaneously.
To get back to my OP, though, the more I think about it, the more it does seem like it must be a coincidence. It makes sense that English, which has been strongly influenced by classical languages, might have inherited a stray Etruscan word like “person”, but it makes much less sense for old Norse.
OTOH, the Elder Futhark may have been based on the Etruscan alphabet. And the Elder Futhark became the Younger Futhark set of runes used by the Norse. Maybe some words were passed along with the alphabet, esp. if there were already similar words.
Another “clear as mud” connection is that some Norse god origin stories trace back to Asia Minor around the time of the early days of the Roman Empire. And Asia Minor is thought by some to be the origins of the family of languages that include Etruscan.
