Your History Lesson for the Day: The Etruscan Language

I like to read. I also like facts. I also like to feel superior. Imagine how superior I felt reading all the facts in A.J. Jacobs' The Know-It-All : One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.

Answer: very superior!

It's a good book.

I stole it.

Anywho, there is an entry called "The Etruscan Language." Apparently the Etruscans (from Etruscanzania) came up with a way of writing where they interchanged the direction of their printing.

Actually, it's best if I show you. Here is an entry from an Etruscan Teenage Girl's Diary:

Oh Diary, Pepenene is such a nerd. He is constantly telling
boring is he, is know I All .boars 23 killed has he that me
me to death! Why can't Geuseppietoratano look at my face?

See! They wrap the sentence so the eye (or eyes, if you were lucky enough to be born with two) can easily jump to the next line without having to scan back to the right margin.

Scholars called the Etruscans "a brilliant civilization that reinvented the Latin alphabet and use of sentence structure."

I call them too lazy to scan across a page. That's why they're extinct! Yeah boy!

Next week's lesson: Neanderthal Trigonometery.

Note: This post originally published on the author's own blog, Die Actor Die.

Image Credit: Flickr user KaiChanVong