Etruscan

Etruscan is either cosnidered a language isolate, together with two closely related languages (Rhaetic and Lemnian) or loosely related to Anatolian Indoeuropean languages such as Hittite. The relationships with Indoeuropean languages are many: numerals such as semph (seven) and numph (nine), words such as lautun (people = populus, Leute, liudi), and in particular many morphological items such as the genitive in –s, the locative in –thi. Nonetheless, they are outbumberd by strong discordances: for instance the words mach (five) and clan (son). In phylogeny, an animal that shares characteristics of different groups is typical of transitional types. For instance, Hippopothamus is very different from Cetaceans, even fossil Cetaceans, and yet has been shown that Artiodactyls, to whom Hippopotamus belongs and Cetaceans are in fact two grades of the same order Cetarctiodactylans, and Hippopothamus is exactly the “missing link” between the two (the morphology is of cow, but it lives in water).

In my opinion – and this is nothing new, it is for instance more or less the same opinion of Francisco Vilar in his “the Inodeuropeans and the origin fo Europe” – Indo-European is a fairly recent  and rather homogeneous branch in a larger family that comprises Anatolian languages and a number of preindoeuropean languages, among which possibly the Tartessian, the Pelasgian, possibly the language of hydronims of Northern Europe studied by Krahe, and appunto the Etruscan. These branches were diverging, with different morphologies and lexicon, and yet had a common origin in the so called Nostratic. Possibly also Anatolian languages such as Hittite and Luwian , that diverge in so many grammatical and lexical ways from the reconstructed Protoindoeuropean, represent one separete branch of this original radiation. The situation, in other words, is analogue to Semitic languages, one of the traditional linguistic families, that has been shown to belong to a larger Afro-Asiatic familiy that comprises also Berber, Somali etc. The hypothesis of an agricultural and matriarchal pre Indoeuropean Europe worshipping a Great Mother – as suggested by Marija Gimbutas - that was replaced by steppe people speaking Indoeuropean languages would be thus the history of the replacement of older and newer branches in the same large linguistic family.

Basque, that has often been related to the languages of Old Europe (pelasgian, etruscan, etc.), seems instead completely isolated – it is in any way unrelated to Etruscan.