Expertlatin
Knowledge of the Etruscan language was once considered "lost." It has not been spoken since the Roman empire, and for long before that it was spoken only by priests. Yet contrary to popular belief, we can—and do—read and understand Etruscan.
Is Etruscan language deciphered?
Despite many attempts at decipherment and some claims of success, the Etruscan records still defy translation.
Why can't we translate Etruscan?
The problem is that that very few Etruscan texts survived the Roman conquest and we don't have a “Rosetta stone” that can help us translate them, Posth notes. What we do know is that the Etruscans used an alphabet that derived from the Greek one, but spoke a language that was most likely not Indo-European.
Is Etruscan still spoken?
The date of extinction for Etruscan is held by scholarship to have been either in the late first century BC, or the early first century AD.
