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From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Re: Etruscan
Message-ID: <petrichDw659u.KJp@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <4uugil$9u0@news.inforamp.net>
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 07:39:30 GMT
Lines: 30
Sender: petrich@netcom18.netcom.com

In article <4uugil$9u0@news.inforamp.net>,
Peter k Chong  <peterk@inforamp.net> wrote:
>Dear fellow curious people,
>
>I have read that Etruscan is probably related to the ancient Lydian 
>tongues of Asia Minor. 

	That's probably from Herodotus claiming that the Etruscans had 
come from Asia Minor. The Northeast Caucasian hypothesis of Diakonov and 
Starostin would fit very well with that.

... Other authors have 
>postulated that Etruscan might be an offshoot of Sumerian or a related 
>Turanian language like Magyar, Turkish or Khalkha Mongolian.


... However 
>there is something noteworthy in this theory. I was once shown samples of 
>the numbers 1-10 written in three scripts: Ancient Hungarian, Etruscan 
>and Roman. The similarity among all of them was quite striking. 

	Writing system != language!!! The Arabic numerals are used to
write numbers in *many* different languages -- *without* affecting their
pronunciation in *any* of them, with the exception of words for "zero", 
which tend to be borrowed.
-- 
Loren Petrich				Happiness is a fast Macintosh
petrich@netcom.com			And a fast train
My home page: http://www.webcom.com/petrich/home.html
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