Script

Transmission of the alphabet to and in Italy

In the 8^th century BC, the island of Pithekoussai (modern Ischia) off the coast of Campania was colonized by Greeks from Euboia. While it is not quite clear whether the settlement was a proper colony or just a trading post, it spawned the foundation of historically important Kyme around the middle of the 8^th century on mainland Italy. Pithekoussai itself seems to have lost importance at the turn of the century. The alphabet used by the colonists was that of the Euboian mother-cities Chalkis und Eretria - indeed, one of the oldest testimonies of early Greek writing is from Pithekoussai: the so-called Cup of Nestor, dated to the second half of the 8^th century? and thought to have been manufactured in Rhodes? The Etruscans would have been in contact with the Greek settlers from the beginning, and the acquisition of their script was not a long time coming: The oldest document of written Etruscan, a kotyle from Tarquinia, is dated to about 700 (Wallace 2008: 17). As the early Etruscan inscriptions and especially the oldest abecedarium on an ivory tablet from Marsiliana d’Albegna show, the Etruscans adopted the Greek alphabet, in its Eastern Greek "red" variety as used in Euboia, without any changes with regard to the different phonemic systems of the two languages. In fact, the writing is so similar to its Greek prototype that Jeffery (oder allgemein?) considers the early Etruscan inscriptions (welche genau?) together with those of the Greek colonies part of the Euboian corpus. Only by and by do the documented abecedaria reflect a process of adaptation to writing practice. The apparently obsolete signs for the mediae dropped out - all exept Gamma, which together with Kappa and Qoppa became part of a curious orthographic rule for writing allophones (see Wallace 2008: ?), and only later replaced both the other signs as the exclusive sign for the velar stop. Due to the lack of /o/ in Etruscan, Omikron falls away. In the 6^th century, an additional sign in the shape of an 8 is created for /f/, after a phase of writing the sound with a digraph <vh> oder <hv>, and added to the end of the sign row. As concerns the writing of sibilants, a certain confusion on the part of the Greeks (see Jeffery 1990: 25ff., Swiggers 1996: 266f.) seems to have been propagated to the Etruscans: The Etruscan language seems to have had - apart from a dental affricate written with Zeta - two sibilants /s/ and probably /ʃ/ which were written with Sigma and San – in the South Sigma for /s/, San for /ʃ/, the other way round in the North. In the Southern cities Caere und Veii, where a number of divergences from general Etruscan writing practice can be observed over the course of time, a Sigma with more than three strokes appears instead of San. Finally in Cortona, a monophthongised, possibly long /e/ was consistently written with the sign E turned against the direction of writing. As is customary in archaic Greek inscriptions, Etruscan inscriptions are generally sinistroverse, apart from a short phase around 600 in Caere and Veii. Unlike Greek practice, boustrophedon writing is rare. While word separation is consistently executed on Nestor's Cup, the archaic Etruscan texts often dispense with it, until it establishes itself in neo-Etruscan time (after 470) unter lateinischem Einfluss?.

Von besonderem Interesse für die Ausbreitung der etruskischen Schrift nach Norden ist die Entwicklung einer Schreibung mit Silbenpunktierung, die ab ca. 600 in Südetrurien, v.a. in der Stadt Veii bezeugt ist. Im dortigen Heiligtum scheint sich eine vielleicht pädagogisch motivierte Schreibschultradition herausgebildet zu haben, in der alle Elemente, die nicht Teil einer (C)CV-Silbe waren, durch Punktierung abgeteilt wurden. Dieses Phänomen tritt ab dem 5. Jahrhundert auch in den venetischen Schreibtraditionen von Este und … auf.

Alphabets of Transpadania and the Alps as distinguished in TIR

Greek

Etruscan

North Italic

The archaic Venetic alphabet

Alphabet of Este

Alphabet of Padua

Alphabet of Cadore

Alphabet of Magrè

Alphabet of Sanzeno

Alphabet of Steinberg

Alphabet of Lugano

Camunic

Latin