How it works
The Etruscan alphabet to copy, letter by letter: 27 letters in order, each with its name, its Latin letter and its sound, then eight letters of other alphabets of ancient Italy and the four numerals.
Read the full guide
Letters Etruscan gave up
Four letters of the oldest alphabet, ๐ ๐ ๐ ๐, are in neither later alphabet, and no Etruscan sound is given for them. The later alphabet, used from the fourth century BC, also dropped ๐, ๐ and ๐, which left ๐ to write k. The letters that stayed are marked Neo-Etruscan here.
Names nobody wrote down
No Etruscan letter name survives. The names under the tiles are Unicode's, rebuilt by scholars: a stop takes a following e, as in be and te, and a sound that can be said on its own takes a leading e, as in el and em. By this account the Romans borrowed the names with the alphabet.
- The tiles face left to right, as Unicode encodes them. Most inscriptions run right to left, with every letter mirrored.
- From the sixth century BC words were often separated by one, two or three dots set one above another.
- A device with no font for this script shows empty boxes in place of the letters.
Questions and answers
How many letters are in the Etruscan alphabet?
26 on the oldest alphabet known, on the frame of a wax tablet of about 700 BC, and 20 in the later, neo-Etruscan one. This page has 27: the 26 and the 8-shaped ๐, which came into Etruscan around 600 to 550 BC.
What do the Etruscan letters sound like?
Mostly like the Latin letters they are written with. The exceptions: ๐ c is [k], ๐ v is [w] and ๐ z is [ts]. ๐, ๐ and ๐ are [tสฐ], [pสฐ] and [kสฐ], written ฮธ, ฯ and ฯ.
Where did the Etruscan alphabet come from?
From the Euboean Greek alphabet of the first Greek colonies in Italy, Pithekoussai and Cumae. The Latin alphabet derives from an Etruscan model in turn, and so do the alphabets of Oscan, Umbrian, Venetic and other languages of ancient Italy.
Is the Etruscan alphabet in Unicode?
Yes, in the Old Italic block, U+10300 to U+1032F, which it shares with the related alphabets of the Italian peninsula. The four numerals are there too: they are used in the same way as Roman numerals.