is? 
^Discarding the. final sibilant as being only the ordinal si<m, we 
have nine inscriptions in which the decade ends in l-ch-l. ° This, 
therefore, must be a decadal suffix corresponding to -ty in English! 
in (jcrman, -gintct in Latin, or -Kovra in Greek. 
Here then at least, is something absolutely certain and definite, 
tree from all doubts and ambiguities, which may be used as the 
starting-point m determining the family of languages to which the 
Mruscan speech belonged. 
Now it is utterly out of the question that the Etruscans can have 
been a colony of Negroes, or Hottentots, or South-Sea Islanders, or 
Mexicans, or Peruvians, or Red Indians. The portraits in their 
tombs, to say nothing of geographical considerations, are enough to 
dispose ot any such hypothesis. 
Putting aside the languages of such impossible races, the lan- 
guages ot Europe and Asia divide themselves into three orand 
divisions: — ° 
I. 1 he Aryan or Indo-European languages, — such as Sanskrit, 
Persian, Greek, Latin, German, Russian, or Welsh. 
II. The Semitic languages, — such as Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, 
and Assyrian. 
III. The Turanian languages, comprising the various Finnic, 
Turkic, Mongolic, Dravidic, and Malayic dialects. 
Thus the problem reduces itself to this simple question, — In 
which of the three great families of speech — Aryan, Semitic, or 
Turanian, are there any decades resembling this Etruscan decade ? 
Are there any languages in which l-ch-l , or any equivalent root, is 
used as a decadal suffix ? 
To this very definite question there is a very definite answer. 
The Aryan and the Semitic languages are at once put out of court. 
The claims of Hebrew, Arabic, Phoenician, Coptic, Celtic, Oscan, 
Umbrian, Latin, Greek, Gothic, and Sclavonic, all of which have 
been urged by learned men, in learned books, disappear before this 
simple test. In none of them do the decades end in 1-k-l. 
The Turanian languages are left. If they do not satisfy our 
test, the Etruscan language must, as some have thought, stand 
apart, solitary and kinless among all the known languages of the 
earth ; — a single shattered peak as it were, emerging out of the 
deluge which has overwhelmed the whole linguistic world to which 
it formerly belonged. 
Fortunately, however, our test is satisfied by the North Tura- 
nian, Altaic, or Finno-Turkic family of speech, a class which 
includes the languages of the Lapps, Finns, Magyars, Turks, 
Tatars, Mongols, and Samoyedes. 
