Quote Originally Posted by Cyclops View Post
Yeah one of those situatons. Obviously they have a cultural link to the east and adopt a lot of Greek ideas so an Aegean origin (at least for some of the ruling class) is quite probable, but there's heaps of continuity in the material culutre as well, so i'm guessing a great proportion of Etruscans were locals. Maybe a similar situation to "Celts" in the British Isles? Or English/Lallans speakers in Scotland?
This is quite likely, yes. A bit like Turks and Turkish. They've been assimilated into the Anatolian populations, but the language of the conqueror remains. Such a scenario is most likely, I doubt the population of what is Etruria would have been small enough the be absorbed by the conqueror.

But the language! It seems related to Rhaetian, and prossibly came from western Anatolia, but it's still an agglutinative language (adding suffixes to a base word, like Hungarian), which no Indo-European or Semitic languages are (they're inflective*). It must be said that inflective languages seem to be agglutinative languages where the suffixes have fused with the base word.

*To varying degrees, ofcourse. Slavic languages are a prime example of inflective languages, with lost of declensions and conjugations. English, on the other hand, has very little left.