From: Mark Odegard
Message: 1553
Date: 2000-02-18
EtruscoLemnian is closer to Anatolian more than anything and contains both these suffixes. By viewing IndoEtruscan as originating from the Pontic-Caspian, EtruscoLemnian thereforemust have travelled (before the Anatolians did) to the Balkans in order for Etruscan to end up in Italy further west.
No.Herodotus, in The Histories, 1:94, states the Tyrrhennians (= Etrurians = Etruscans [= 'Tuscans']) originated in Lydia, in Asia Minor. This view tends to be seconded by modern writers, to a large extent because of the inscriptions found on Lemnos. It's easier to have Tyrrhenians migrating from an Asia Minor homeland to nearby Lemnos as well as much more distant Etruria in Italy than it is to explain how natives of Italy got to Lemnos. My reading suggests they would have migrated by sea during the time of the Sea Peoples, sometime after 1000 BCE.
The identification of the Pelasgian Language[s] as a part of the Tyrrhenian family of languages (Etruscan, Rhaetian, Lemnian) is, as I said in an earlier posting, a not unreasonable guess, but it's just a guess, based on the proximity of the attested Lemnian language on Lemnos and the testimony from antiquity about the presence of Pelasgians in the same place at the same time.
As for the Etruscan language itself, it remains undeciphered. We know some words (perhaps), but there is nothing that really really relates to any other known language, and until the unlikely day we find a Rosetta Stone, it will probably remain this way. Some respectable scholars have speculated about a relationship to IE, but this is just speculative (something to do with verbs, as I recall).
Mark.