How to recognize crackpots
Massimo Pallotino once stated that Etruscology was the humoristic branch of linguistic. He was unfortunately quite right. Etruscan studies have attracted countless numbers of kooks and loons endlessly trying to "decipher" the old Tuscanian tongue. Most of the time their theories are utterly worthless. It is, however, not so easy for the layman to tell the exact value of a theory and to distinguish valuable, if sometimes overaudacious, proposals from sheer fantasy. Here a few guidelines
The alphabet
It is not uncommon to find, on the web or in bookstores, people claiming that they have deciphered the Etruscan script. For them, if scientists have not yet succeeded in reading Etruscan inscriptions (or so they say), it is because they misread them. Of course, once one adopts their system, the solution to the problem becomes "obvious".
All these claims are completely bogus and the demonstrations produced to support them do not prove anything but the total incompetence of their authors. There is no mystery in the Etruscan script. It is a Greek alphabet, ultimately of Phoenician origin. Of course, it is not the Athenian alphabet you have learnt at school, but a local variant in use in Eubea, and most important in the Greek colony of Pithekousai.
If you look at these two documents, they seem to be written in the same language, and indeed, they use
the same symbols. The problem is that the first one is in Etruscan (it is the first golden plate of Pyrgi),
while the second one is plain Greek (it is a votive offering to the Dioscures). So, still sure there is
something to decipher in the Etruscan script ?.
The supposed incompetence of “official” scientists
It is common among crackpots to castigate “official” etruscologists for not having been able to unravel the meaning of more than 250 Etruscan words in spite of having 12.000 texts at their disposal, among which at least one long bilingual document. And of course, they would come out with a cranky system of their own which will give the precise sense of thousands of Tuscanian words.
Well the truth is that deciphering a language is an hard - almost unfeasible job - especially with so few informations at hand. True, there is more than 12.000 known Etruscan texts but most of them are monotonous funeral inscriptions (the kind “so or so, son of so or so, which was magistrate had a few children and died at some date”), there is also dedicative writing (I was given / made for \) and a few boundary stones (Somebody gave some amount of land to somebody), and that's virtually all. Long texts, indispensable to understand the structure of the language are few, obscure and seemingly quite monotonous (they are mostly liturgical in nature). Now imagine what would be known of the English tongue if all searchers had at their disposal was epitaphs from a country graveyard, church ex-votos and damaged religious calendars. Do you really believe one could establish a list of English irregular verbs on such a scanty basis.
Moreover, we are dealing here with an UNKNOWN language which can have virtually any structure and when you look at the way modern languages work you realize that “any” really means “any”. Even the most basic grammatical concepts such as “subject”, “object” or “tense” could very well be meaningless in Etruscan, as they are in numerous modern tongues. Indeed, it is generally assumed that it is IMPOSSIBLE to decipher an unknown language without external references (what does not mean that it is impossible to decipher the Etruscan tongue, as there are external references, even if scanty and uncertain)
The ignorance of external references
Etruscan did not live in a isolated island. They were a major power of the ancient world and traded with both Greeks and Romans. Greek and Latin writers have extensively written about them (generally to say how immoral and decadent they were) and albeit they were no linguists, they gave us a few (very few) informations about their language. Thus, we are said that a lightning stroke a statue of the Emperor and that the inscription CAESAR written on it was partially erased, becoming AESAR Etruscan priests are said to have prophetized on that occasion that this event was a sign that the Emperor was soon to die since AESAR meant “Gods” in Etruscan. So we know that the word Ais(ar / er) (present in numerous inscriptions) means “god”. Of course this does not prevent a kook like Bilbija to interpret this word as “who asked”.
There is also a number of Etruscan names in Roman histories which we often find on the funerary inscriptions and an handful of translated Etruscan words in Latin or Greek books (notably month names). Etruscan also borrowed words from either Greek or Italic (Oscan and Latin), words which can be easily recognized. There is also a few bilingual texts.
These bilingual texts are mostly short, late, epitaph. They are generally short but can teach us few word such as “frontac” (latin : fulgurator) or “zicu” (scribe). The most important, however, is the First Golden Plate of Pyrgi for which we have a Phoenician translation. Crackpots will deal with that problem by denying that the Phoenician text is a translation of the Etruscan one, or by “redeciphering” Phoenician to make the content of the inscription more conform to their view.
But I hear you asking “if we have a bilingual text, why is Etruscan so badly known ?”. Well, the truth is that a bilingual text - especially if short - does not help us very much to understand the structure of an unknown language. We have a translation of the Etruscan text of the Golden Plate of Pyrgi, but this translation - which is relatively uncertain as Phoenician is not as well known as Latin - does not say us what means such or such Etruscan form, as Etruscan is very unlikely to have the same structure as Phoenician. Remember than 22 years were needed to decipher the Rosetta Stone while the Egyptian tongue the hieroglyphic part of it was written in was perfectly known. And if you don't believe me look at this text :
This is a translation of the Lord's Prayer in Ainu (an indigenous tongue of Northern Japan). Its meaning is perfectly clear but telling from this the way Ainu works is quite another matter (true, it is possible, but it won't be easy).
Cranky comparisons
Crackpots would generally try to compare Etruscan to such or such modern tongue. As they are most of the time very bad linguists and do not know anything about the comparative method they end up transforming even reasonable hypothesis (after all Etruscan could be remotely linked to Indo-European or Basque) into sheer delirium.
They would tell you that Etruscan is “strikingly” close to such or such tongue and produce interpretations where every Etruscan word is matched by a similar word in the language the compare it to. Of course to get this result, they will have to invent “abbreviations” and to ignore word separations, but that's not the major problem. The major problem is that no language can remain static for a long period and that Etruscan, being known since 800 B.C is at least 2800 years away from any modern tongue. In fact, the temporal distance between Etruscan and other tongues is probably far greater since the Vilanovian culture appears around -1200. That means that no speaker of any modern language can possibly read it freely. Now let's look back at the Lord' Prayer to see what it means 2800 years or 3200 years away.
This version is in English of 1389 (roughly 600 years away). It is still understandable but a few features would probably be problematic for a modern English speaker. No a bit farther, 1000 years away
I have lately heard that some crackpot has “translated” Etruscan inscriptions by using Basque and Iberian (that's what I call building castles in Spain) and has stated that it was 6000 years away from them. So, let's have a look upon a language 6000 years away from English : Assamese, spoken in India :
Easy to understand, isn't it. I am sure you can read it freely (yes, it is also the Lord's Prayer)