This contains just 70 legible letters and punctuation marks, less than your comment; so there's not really that much potential for understanding new words.

The largest Etruscan body of text we have is 1200 words, it somehow ended up as wrappings for a mummy in Egypt.

> The largest Etruscan body of text we have is 1200 words, it somehow ended up as wrappings for a mummy in Egypt.

Very cool, I'd never heard of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Linteus

Yes, I didn't get why Annalee Newitz (Ars Technica) wrote: "the stele contains 70 legible letters and punctuation marks" and on the other hand writes: "Scientists believe it will be full of words and concepts they've never encountered before" It makes it out to be some kind of revolutionary Rosetta's Stone, but with 70 characters this is even less then the Faistos Disk of that other enigmatic civilization, the Minoans. I think 'full of words' is a bit overstated - in the Italian reporting it's said that because of the different genre compared to the regular finds we have the scholars will probably encounter some new words (which would be around < 10) probably including the deity of the temple.

I guess it can be overstated.

I guess so!

Half a tweet.

It could be an extraordinarily expressive language, though. Think about what Japanese writers can do with 140 characters.

This made me want to Google 'Japanese entropy bits' and the first hit for me was this paper: http://www.phontron.com/paper/neubig13sam.pdf

"How Much is Said in a Tweet? A Multilingual, Information-theoretic Perspective"

I think what you want is presented in a figure on page 6.

So while Japanese tweeters could express more than English tweeters in the same character count, they generally don't choose to. That's pretty interesting.

Etruscan was written in a predecessor of the Latin alphabet we still use (albeit omitting most vowels), so no, it's not going to have a huge amount of information.

I believe he's referring specifically to writing in the Etruscan language.

I see, interesting that there's so much interest in Etruscan writing & history.

As someone who is only passing interested in history, I love the Etruscans for their wonderful bronzes.

Here's an example (praying to the art history gods this is an actual Etruscan example and not something else): http://www.royalathena.com/media/Etruscan/Bronze/HFN01.jpg

You can see in their work both the modern world that their culture would help form and the pre-historic tribal past of Europe.

Interesting, I'd have assumed jewelry[0] would have been most interesting, granulated works from 2500 years ago are somewhat impressive[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_jewelry [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_jewelry#/media/File:E...

Those are also cool, for some reason the bronzes have resonated with me since first seeing them.

It's the mysterious side of Roman culture. Also, the language itself is an isolate and of linguistic interest as language isolates are unusual in Europe.

Probably because their territories were conquered by the early Romans and little remained of their history after the Romans overtook those areas... And Romans are seen, along with the non-conquering Greeks, as _the_ pillars of Western Civilization.

It is more accurate to say that Roman culture is a blend of Latin, Etruscan, and (later) Hellenistic culture. The Romans may have finished them off, but not before appropriating massive amounts of culture: the household shrine, burial rites, and the fasces to name a few examples.

Not really, it's a precursor to many European cultures

If you are interested at all in Rome, you are interested in Etruscan.

Fun fact that might pique one's interest: the fasces, which is still widely used to symbolize strength through unity, is believed to be of Etruscan origin.