New work sheds light on the Etruscans, who may have founded Rome • Hacker News Board

Re: New work sheds light on the Etruscans, who may have founded Rome

#11

Post by ramraj07 » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 6:56 AM UTC

notorandit wrote: post #5

That doesn't sound to me as any news. Etruscans settled a lot of colonies in the southern part of the peninsula, down to Pompeii (which was founded by Etruscans and taken over by Samnites) and Melfi. And they were ahead of all other local cultures by far, especially in the metallurgic technologies and writing. They were not a single kingdom but a group of city-kingdoms. So I can think of Rome more like a colony that…

A lot of times what's kinda obvious to experts can take a while to be proven definitively. Like the presence of exo planets for example.

Re: New work sheds light on the Etruscans, who may have founded Rome

#12

Post by sayonaraman » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 7:08 AM UTC

fsckboy wrote: post #7

Isn't it a bigger/more important mystery why proto-indo european language was so successful at supplanting the local languages it intermixed with? Rather than why the Etruscans kept speaking their own language. I'm really curious if there were positive "network effects" of increasingly large populations of neighbors speaking compatible languages (even if they formed a gradient as the Romance languages did from Rome t…

May be thousands of years before Genghis Khan the hords of steppe people conquered the territory of modern Italy in the same way mongols conquered most of Europe and Asia much later.

The fact Etruscans preserved their language could be either because they fought really well or may be had some diplomatic relations and mutual trade with the “migrants”, or both.

It’s funny we have the names of say Alexander the Great or Genghis but leaders of those long gone civilizations before them are completely unknown. May be they intermarried and the steppe people’ benevolent leader allowed some of the conquered tribes to keep their language, who knows.

Re: New work sheds light on the Etruscans, who may have founded Rome

#13

Post by 8bitsrule » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 7:26 AM UTC

Talk about important work in 'founding':

The Etruscans laid the first underground sewers in the city of Rome around 500 BC. These cavernous tunnels below the city's streets were built of finely carved stones, and the Romans were happy to utilize them when they took over the city.

[https://phys.org/news/2015-11-toilets-sewers-ancient-roman-s...]

Re: New work sheds light on the Etruscans, who may have founded Rome

#14

Post by riffraff » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 8:05 AM UTC

My favourite part of the Etruscan language legacy is the letter "C" ("K" sound).

It was originally a gamma ("G" sound), but the Etruscan language did not need it and they just used it as K.

Then the Romans adopted the Etruscan alphabet, but they _did_ have both K and G sounds and so had to invent a new letter, even tho the original greek alphabet (and all its predecessors) already had it to begin with :)

Re: New work sheds light on the Etruscans, who may have founded Rome

#15

Post by ithkuil » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 8:47 AM UTC

est31 wrote: post #9

fsckboy wrote: post #7

Isn't it a bigger/more important mystery why proto-indo european language was so successful at supplanting the local languages it intermixed with? Rather than why the Etruscans kept speaking their own language. I'm really curious if there were positive "network effects" of increasingly large populations of neighbors speaking compatible languages (even if they formed a gradient as the Romance languages did from Rome t…

The romance languages formed due to the legacy of the Roman empire, so their success is largely due to the Roman success. People say that the roman empire ended, and while indeed Rome lost its central role in many ways, the roman empire's legacy is still felt. Before the Romans though, there have been the greeks as well as the hittites, both speaking indo european languages. Romans pretty much copied a lot of greek c…

I think a similar argument can be made for the legacy of the indo europeans. You just have to go a bit further back, before greek and hittite and celt and iranian/aryan and vedic cultures where a distinct thing, there was one single culture speaking a single language: the proto indo european people and culture. They had a lot of success (horse drawn carts with wheels, bronze working). They slowly spread east and west and slowly diverged for several millenia until we reach the time frame you were talking about. Those descendent cultures didn't branch and stay isolated forever after; as you correctly point out, they did influence one another again and again in successive waves.

The original question in this thread was: why was PIE culture so successful that it supplanted almost all existing PRE-indo-eurpean languages. Vascon and Etruscan survived (and possibly others), the former evolving into modern Basque, and Etruscan slowly dying out (very likely by the end of first century AD there were no more etruscan speakers)

Re: New work sheds light on the Etruscans, who may have founded Rome

#16

Post by ithkuil » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 8:59 AM UTC

sayonaraman wrote: post #12

fsckboy wrote: post #7

Isn't it a bigger/more important mystery why proto-indo european language was so successful at supplanting the local languages it intermixed with? Rather than why the Etruscans kept speaking their own language. I'm really curious if there were positive "network effects" of increasingly large populations of neighbors speaking compatible languages (even if they formed a gradient as the Romance languages did from Rome t…

May be thousands of years before Genghis Khan the hords of steppe people conquered the territory of modern Italy in the same way mongols conquered most of Europe and Asia much later. The fact Etruscans preserved their language could be either because they fought really well or may be had some diplomatic relations and mutual trade with the “migrants”, or both. It’s funny we have the names of say Alexander the Great or…

History is a very interesting topic and there are a lot of great sources to study; books but also very good youtube channels nowadays. There are a lot of things that we don't know, but there is also a lot we do know; I'd recommend to anybody who is interested to read more about the actual history.

There are so many interesting details that can give more depth to the struggle of human existence; migration, ingenuity, cooperation, dominance, trade, war, culture, religion.

Reducing everything to a couple of famous names is an unfortunate oversimplification that glosses over much more interesting aspects I wholeheartedly recommend to research.

Re: New work sheds light on the Etruscans, who may have founded Rome

#17

Post by Bayart » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 9:01 AM UTC

fsckboy wrote: post #7

Isn't it a bigger/more important mystery why proto-indo european language was so successful at supplanting the local languages it intermixed with? Rather than why the Etruscans kept speaking their own language. I'm really curious if there were positive "network effects" of increasingly large populations of neighbors speaking compatible languages (even if they formed a gradient as the Romance languages did from Rome t…

It's usually explained away by technological superiority, namely the mastery of horse husbandry and cart-making. But social structures geared towards war and conquest might have played a role too.

Re: New work sheds light on the Etruscans, who may have founded Rome

#18

Post by disillusioned » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 9:31 AM UTC

Those darn Etruscans.

Re: New work sheds light on the Etruscans, who may have founded Rome

#19

Post by morpheos137 » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 9:39 AM UTC

est31 wrote: post #9

fsckboy wrote: post #7

Isn't it a bigger/more important mystery why proto-indo european language was so successful at supplanting the local languages it intermixed with? Rather than why the Etruscans kept speaking their own language. I'm really curious if there were positive "network effects" of increasingly large populations of neighbors speaking compatible languages (even if they formed a gradient as the Romance languages did from Rome t…

The romance languages formed due to the legacy of the Roman empire, so their success is largely due to the Roman success. People say that the roman empire ended, and while indeed Rome lost its central role in many ways, the roman empire's legacy is still felt. Before the Romans though, there have been the greeks as well as the hittites, both speaking indo european languages. Romans pretty much copied a lot of greek c…

This not true. Indo-European diffusion in Europe preceeded Roman influence by at least a half to a full milenium. For example in 500 BC the Celts, the Germans and the Scythians were all speaking indo european tongues while rome was a relatively small republic or kingdom in italy. The italic peoples surrouding the latins all spoke indo european languages except for the etruscans.

Re: New work sheds light on the Etruscans, who may have founded Rome

#20

Post by dr_dshiv » Tue, Sep 28, 2021, 9:50 AM UTC

ithkuil wrote: post #15

est31 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The romance languages formed due to the legacy of the Roman empire, so their success is largely due to the Roman success. People say that the roman empire ended, and while indeed Rome lost its central role in many ways, the roman empire's legacy is still felt. Before the Romans though, there have been the greeks as well as the hittites, both speaking indo european languages. Romans pretty much copied a lot of greek c…

I think a similar argument can be made for the legacy of the indo europeans. You just have to go a bit further back, before greek and hittite and celt and iranian/aryan and vedic cultures where a distinct thing, there was one single culture speaking a single language: the proto indo european people and culture. They had a lot of success (horse drawn carts with wheels, bronze working). They slowly spread east and west…

The steppe people evolved to raid and invade agricultural communities; and those communities evolved to grow larger to fend off the raids.

"pressure from the steppe selected for the unification and scaling-up of agricultural societies into larger groups to more effectively counteract these incursions. This in turn would select for greater size in pastoralist communities, and also other neighbouring agricultural groups who were now relatively smaller and at a competitive disadvantage with their neighbours. This effect would be amplified by the diffusion of such military technology from the steppe"

From this awesome modeling paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0516-2