Edited by Richard Walker, Monday, 5 Nov 2018, 23:53
The Etruscans are mysterious. They flourished in what is now northern Italy for half a thousand years, always in close contact with the Romans. The name Rome was itself probably from Etruscan. But from the 4th century BCE Roman influence was overwhelming. Many Romans traced Etruscan descent, but the language was gradually lost as Latin took over and Etruria was assimilated.
In the 1st century CE the Emperor Claudius (as in, the brilliant Robert Graves novels and even more brilliant TV series I Claudius) is supposed to have compiled an Etruscan-Latin dictionary, and to have gone out into the Tuscan countryside and interviewed the last few native speakers of the language. Modern opinion generally agrees that this dictionary really existed, but it hasn’t survived. So the language is essentially lost.
But all modern English speakers know at least one Etruscan word. Person. It's from Etruscan phersu, mask. This was probably a mask someone wore in a religious or dramatic performance. In other words, the just like the modern word persona - an assumed character, or a facade. The word was borrowed into Latin as person.
The words person, person, personal, personality and so on, all derive from the same phersu, via Latin and later intermediate languages. And that’s remarkable, because a remnant word from the languages prevalent in Southern Europe before the more recent modern Indo-European language group arrived still survives and has the same basic meaning. A word caught in linguistic amber.
Let's Get Phersunal
The Etruscans are mysterious. They flourished in what is now northern Italy for half a thousand years, always in close contact with the Romans. The name Rome was itself probably from Etruscan. But from the 4th century BCE Roman influence was overwhelming. Many Romans traced Etruscan descent, but the language was gradually lost as Latin took over and Etruria was assimilated.
In the 1st century CE the Emperor Claudius (as in, the brilliant Robert Graves novels and even more brilliant TV series I Claudius) is supposed to have compiled an Etruscan-Latin dictionary, and to have gone out into the Tuscan countryside and interviewed the last few native speakers of the language. Modern opinion generally agrees that this dictionary really existed, but it hasn’t survived. So the language is essentially lost.
But all modern English speakers know at least one Etruscan word. Person. It's from Etruscan phersu, mask. This was probably a mask someone wore in a religious or dramatic performance. In other words, the just like the modern word persona - an assumed character, or a facade. The word was borrowed into Latin as person.
The words person, person, personal, personality and so on, all derive from the same phersu, via Latin and later intermediate languages. And that’s remarkable, because a remnant word from the languages prevalent in Southern Europe before the more recent modern Indo-European language group arrived still survives and has the same basic meaning. A word caught in linguistic amber.