[Corpora-List] Etrusk corpora

[Christian Chiarcos]

> Dear Corpora colleagues, I wonder if you know some Etrusk corpora or  
> texts?

Some years ago, I have compiled a corpus of Etruscan from various internet  
resources in order to investigate Etruscan morphology and to compare it  
with Rhaetic. Due to copyright issues, it cannot be distributed. You can  
try to rebuild it, most of the original sites are down by now, but maybe  
they have just moved to different locations. The most important sources  
were:

- Wikipedia pages of the most prominent Etruscan inscriptions (you'll find  
it, most of the other stuff was linked from there, also try different  
language versions)
- Etruscan Texts Project (academic site, http://etp.classics.umass.edu,  
apparently offline by now, but still in google cache)
- Various inscriptions published on private Etruscan pages and homepages  
of Etruscanists (e.g., http://etruskisch.de)

Unfortunately, the Liber Linteus, formerly under  
http://users.tpg.com.au/etr/etrusk/pt/, which is the longest known  
Etruscan document (1,200 tokens) is no longer available over the internet.  
Most other parts of the corpus, however, can probably be restored with  
some efforts.

One has to be *very* careful when working with the texts as given there,  
as the transliterations need to be normalized with respect to non-standard  
letters (e.g., some authors don't distinguish S and s, and S is marked  
differently, e.g., as sh, s with a dot, etc.), and possibly with respect  
to tokenization and epigraphic marks (for uncertain readings, etc.) too.  
To perform this normalization in an appropriate way, I had to consult the  
literature on Etruscan orthography and epigraphy (references on the  
Etruscan language Wikipedia site). Also, one has to be careful about the  
age of inscriptions, as there are immense (phonological and/or  
orthographical) differences between the two major phases of Etruscan  
attested. The Late Etruscan vowel system is rigorously reduced, which  
gives it a completely different appearance than Old Etruscan.

Just as a remark: I'm not sure whether you can perform any quantitative  
analysis on this data, as all taken together made up no more than 3,000  
tokens (epigraphic signs etc. omitted). Further, most texts are very brief  
and/or heavily fragmented.

Best,
Christian

BTW: A developed civilization can very well disappear without leaving any  
texts behind (in a traditional sense of "text" at least), cf. the case of  
Teotihuacan from whose script only some proper names, calender signs and  
toponymic icons survived ;)

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