ABSTRACT

Etruscan1 is a dead language, the knowledge of which – in contrast to other dead languages like Latin or Greek – has been completely lost, and therefore it is accessible for us only through the surviving evidence: the written documents and the so-called “Etruscan glosses.” The latter contribution to our knowledge of the language is minimal. We are dealing, as is known, with about sixty words – the greater part of them reported by the Lexicon of Hesychius and by the Liber Glossarum, and the rest by authors such as Varro, Verrius Flaccus, Dioscorides, Strabo and others – that the ancients have passed down to us as Etruscan, providing a Greek or Latin translation. Their number, in itself modest, decreases further when one considers that some of them, such as κάπρα or δέα reported by Hesychius, are obviously not Etruscan words but rather Latin-Italic. Moreover, the words often appear in Graecized or Latinized form (as exemplified by the case of αι̉σ-οĩ, “gods,” also in Hesychius, with an inflectional ending -οĩ, which is a Greek nominative plural): this makes them very unreliable evidence for the sounds or forms of Etruscan.