Nick Kampouris writes about the path the alphabet took on its way to us:
As early as in the 8th century BC, Chalkideans sailed to Italy and established the first Greek colony on the peninsula, the city of Cumae (Κύμη). In what is now an ancient site near the town of Cuma (whose name was derived from ancient Cumae) lies the secret of the creation of the alphabet which is currently used by most of humankind. […]
The Greeks of Cumae spread their Greek culture throughout Italy and introduced the Euboean alphabet, the one their ancestors were using on Euboea, Greece, to the local people. The Etruscans, whose civilization came into direct contact and interrelation with the Greek settlers, were heavily influenced by Cumae and the rest of the nearby Greek settlements. Thus, from approximately 650 BC up until around 100 BC, the Etruscans adopted and used the Euboean alphabet introduced to Italy by the Cumaean Greeks, to create a written form for their own, Etruscan language. […]
The Etruscans, of course, added their own elements, shaping the Euboean alphabet in a way that would suit their own language, thus creating the precursor of the alphabet the Romans would eventually use. […] The Romans, along with their complete conquest of the Italian peninsula, adopted the Etruscan alphabet to use it as a written form of their own, Latin language, which soon became the lingua franca of Italy, eclipsing the Etruscan language and other dialects.
There are more details, as well as some great images and a fair amount of hot air (“The journey of any alphabet or language is far more complicated than we could ever even imagine…”), at the link. Thanks, Trevor!
Neither “Cuma” nor “Ischia”, mentioned as places in Italy, are shown on the map of Etruscan-era Italy, which is annoying.
There is also a lot of repetitive waffle like “The alphabet adopted by the Etruscans was almost identical to Euboean Greek, which in its turn, was very similar to the Greek alphabets used at that time in ancient Greece.” (Yes, we already got that.)
BUT, since I only had a vague idea of how the Greek alphabet turned into the Latin, it was eye-opening for me. Well, perhaps I’d just forgotten, but that’s where this kind of article has its own value. Instead of general statements like “The Romans got the Greek alphabet through the Etruscans”, it focuses on the route, the places, and the time scale. It would have been nice to see more examples of how the alphabet was adapted by the Etruscans and then the Romans (rather than constant repetition of the fact that they “adapted it to their own needs”). But it was interesting to find out (or be reminded) that the split between ‘п ‘ and ‘p’ was due to the Etruscans.
There’s a very neat animation of the evolution of the alphabet here:
https://imgur.com/TI8cX45
But it was interesting to find out (or be reminded) that the split between ‘п ‘ and ‘p’ was due to the Etruscans.
As I understand it, it’s basically that the original Greek letter had one long leg and one short leg (it appears in Unicode as ???? GREEK ACROPHONIC ATTIC FIVE, which is of course just the first letter of the Ancient Greek word for “five”), and the Etruscans started bending the short leg inwards (which resulted in something shaped a lot more like P, though without the join in the middle).
Sometime around the 2nd century BC, the Greek version got the other leg lengthened, for a symmetric П shape; and in the 1st century AD, the Latin version got its join in the middle, to make the modern P.
Any further development was reverted in modern times; both Greek and Latin letters (the capitals, at least) are now essentially the same as they were 1900 years ago (despite extensive later variations), aside from a few (particularly in Greek) that got reverted to even older forms.
There is also a lot of repetitive waffle
You say “waffle,” I say “hot air,” but we’re annoyed by the same thing!
BUT, since I only had a vague idea of how the Greek alphabet turned into the Latin, it was eye-opening for me.
Yes, that’s what I was hoping for. It’s got just enough detail to be enlightening if you can get past the waffle.
waffle; hot air It’s journalism.
Aka “paid by the word.”
…which is still absent in some serif fonts.
… and in the løkkeskrift handwriting I was taught at school.
Paid by the word doesn’t describe any of my freelancing, nor my wife’s salaried journalism. My pieces may have had a set rate for a set length, but if I tried padding with crap, the editor would have just sent it back for revision. I think it’s an unfair insult.
That tone is likely just what the editor wanted for an audience most of which rarely reads Lanuage Hat.
>shaping the Euboean alphabet in a way that would suit their own language
Interesting phrasing – it clearly refers to which letters they dropped and added, but at first glance the most obvious way they “shaped” their new alphabet was by flipping all the Euboean letters on the vertical axis. I wonder what led to that. And why, though the Romans flipped them all back, their alphabet is considered to descend from the Etruscan rather than the Euboean.
Ryan, Etruscan was normally written right-to-left.
Ah, that thought briefly crossed my mind to wonder about. Thanks.
Also, here’s a study of Picene genetics. Well it’s interesting for its own aspirations, what I found fascinating was an individual Etruscan sample with seemingly no steppe ancestry, from “an Etruscan necropolis (Monteriggioni/Colle di Val d’Elsa, 8th-6th centuries BCE).”
That seems shockingly late for an unadmixed individual. It raises an awful lot of questions, or rather, reopens them.
The authors describe this individual as an outlier “similarly to other Etruscan outliers previously reported” with a footnote to a 2021 study of Etruscan genetics between 800 BCE and 1000 AD. But that study’s outliers all had some steppe ancestry.
But would a Sardinian dying in 700 BCE Etruria have left this profile? They do go on to say something like that much later in the paper. Maybe I’m overreacting.
@Ryan, I noticed the Picene preprint when it appeared, but didn’t look into the details (just noted that, IE or not, the neighboring peoples were similar in genetic makeup, pretty much like Spaniards and Basques, and moved on).
Looking now: It’s not unreasonable to suggest that the individual EV15A from Etrurian cemetery was a Sardinian. The authors cite
Amicone S, Freund KP, Mancini P, D’Oriano R, Berthold C. New insights into Early Iron Age connections between Sardinia and Etruria: Archaeometric analyses of ceramics from Tavolara. J Archaeol Sci Rep. 2020;33:102452
which is available e.g. at
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10110244/
Thanks. Newfound but still rare signs of Etruscan sojourns in Sardinia, to match and contrast with ample archaeology showing that Sardinian elites were living in Etruria. I wonder whether that might explain the somewhat different profile of 3 of 4 Etruscan samples compared to the Picene samples in that study, very small group, with more variation and a lower average steppe percentage than the Picenes.
I’ve been waiting to comment until I’d read this 2020 paper.
Marcus, Posth, Ringbauer et al: Genetic history from the Middle Neolithic to present on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia:
The initial (or pre-Nuraghic settlement was a mix of 17% WHG and the rest EEF. Archaeology clearly suggests that the EEF settlement of Sardinia was part of the Mediterranean wave out of the Aegaean, but the high proportion of WHG complicates the picture (to me, anyway), There are too few early samples to discern between different settlement scenarios.
Sardinia completely avoided the genetic turnovers of Iberia and Britain, and there was very little genetic influx all through the Nuraghic period (Bronze Age) , at least from visibly different populations, This changes with the Iron Age. The Phoenicians leave a strong archaeological but fairly small genetic trace, but after (about) the Roman conquest “North Mediterranean” ancestry makes a large contribution to the later population. The sampling of possible source populations is (was?) not fine-grained enough to be precise on the origins.
I don’t know what this means for the possible Sardinian ancestry in Etruria. It seems that the Sardinian population shrinked after the arrival of the Phoenicians, so it’s hard to understand how they would have been able to sustain a presence in mainland Italy — at least one managed from the mother country.
Slavery? In Roman times, Sardinia was a source of slaves; after one uprising Sardinian slaves became so cheap that they became a byword for a cheap or worthless thing:
The mountain tribes were, however, still unsubdued; and in B.C. 181 the Ilienses and Balari broke out into a fresh insurrection, which assumed so formidable a character that the consul Tib. Sempronius Gracchus was expressly sent to Sardinia to carry on the war. He defeated the insurgents with heavy loss, and followed up his victory with such vigour that he put to the sword or took prisoners not less than 80,000 persons. (Liv. 40.19, 34, 41.6, 12, 17, 28.) The number of captives brought to Rome on this occasion was so great that it is said to have given rise to the proverb of “Sardi venales” for anything that was cheap and worthless. (Vict. Fir. Ill. 65.)