Vocabulary
Only a few hundred words of the Etruscan vocabulary are known with some certainty. The exact count depends on whether the different forms and the expressions are included. Below is a table of some of the words grouped by topic.
Some words with corresponding Latin or other Indo-European forms are likely loanwords to or from Etruscan. For example, neftś "nephew", is probably from Latin (Latin nepōs, nepōtis; this is a cognate of German Neffe, Old Norse nefi). A number of words and names for which Etruscan origin has been proposed survive in Latin.
At least one word has an apparent Semitic origin: talitha "girl" (Aramaic; could have been transmitted by Phoenicians).
The word pera "house" is a false cognate to the Coptic language per "house".
The Etruscan numerals are known although debate lingers about which numeral means "four" and which "six" (huθ or śa). Numerals are listed in their own article. Of them, and of the basic words in general, Bonfante (1990) says: "What these numerals show, beyond any shadow of a doubt, is the non-Indo-European nature of the Etruscan language. Basic words like numbers and names of relationships are often similar in the Indo-European languages, for they derive from the same root."
The Etruscan numbers are (Bonfante 2002:96):
- thu
- zal (esal)
- ci
- śa (6?)
- mach
- huth (4?)
- semph (?)
- cezp
- nurph (?)
- śar
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Read more about this topic: Etruscan Language
Famous quotes containing the word vocabulary:
“A new talker will often call her caregiver “mommy,” which makes parents worry that the child is confused about who is who. She isn’t. This is a case of limited vocabulary rather than mixed-up identities. When a child has only one word for the female person who takes care of her, calling both of them “mommy” is understandable.”
—Amy Laura Dombro (20th century)
“My vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone. Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle. I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“[T]here is no breaking out of the intentional vocabulary by explaining its members in other terms.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)