Introduction

Already in 1874, the British priest Isaac Taylor brought up the idea of a genetic relationship between Etruscan and Hungarian (Taylor 1874). Since the very influential linguist August Friedrich Pott accepted this affiliation in the first number of his journal "Internationale Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft" (the very first journal of General Linguistics), it was internationally accepted (Pott 1877, p. 15ss.). In 1917, the German linguist Georg Sigwart showed the relationship between Etruscan and Sumerian (Sigwart 1917, esp. p. 148ss.), by which the relationship between Sumerian, Etruscan and Hungarian was established. The real breakthrough of Etruscan-Hungarian relationship was reached by the famous French orientalist Jules Martha (1853-1932, Professor at the Sorbonne in Paris) in his thorough and exhaustive 500 pp. volume "La langue étrusque" in 1913. Already two years earlier, the French orientalist Baron Carra de Vaux had shown the connections between Etruscan and Altaic Languages (1911). On the XIX. International Congress of Orientalists in Rome, in 1935, Félix von Pográny-Nagy gave a widespread lecture about his own new researches in the field of Etruscan, Hungarian and Sumerian (von Pográny-Nagy 1938), that was only an excerpt of a much bigger work (von Pográny-Nagy 1936-37), that was unfortunately never published. Several Sumerian-Etruscan- Hungarian etymologies came from the famous historian Viktor Padányi in various studies (e.g., Padány 1963, esp. p. 435ss., and 1964). In 1963, Géza Kúr presented a complete translation of the hitherto longest known Etruscan text, the Zagreb Mummy Script, based on the work by Martha (1913).

Shortly after, in 1969, Ambros Josef Pfiffig unfortunately asserted in his otherwise marvelous first Etruscan grammar that Etruscan is a linguistic isolate, but he also stated that it is agglutinative which is incompatible with the assumption that Etruscan is an Indo-European language. This viewpoint was followed by the influenceful Etruscologist Massimo Pallottino (1973) and thus brought the Hungarian- Etruscan studies to stagnate and opened the doors for all those who wanted to prove that Etruscan was Semitic - a view that goes back to the work of the Austrian classical philologist Karlmann Flor (1859-60) or Indo-European (most recently represented solely by Steinbauer 1999). But already Linus Brunner had shown that Etruscan is not Semitic (Brunner 1984, 1986), although he did not deny that it could be Indo-European, but only since according to him, Proto-Indo-European was also an agglutinative language (Brunner 1969, p. 11).

In 1983, György Zászlós-Zsóka resumed the Etruscan-Hungarian relationship in his work "Toszkánai harangok: Az etruszk nép Aszinte története". In 2003, the Italian linguist Mario Alinei's work "Etrusco: una forma arcaica di ungherese" appeared, the Hungarian translation two years after under the title "Ősi kapocs" (2005a). At the same time, and, as I want to point out, completely independently from Alinei, my articles "Etruscan-Hungarian word equations", "Rätisch und Etruskisch: zu einer Neubestimung ihres Verhältnisses" and my chapter "Etruscan and Hungarian" in my "Etymological Dictionary of Hungarian" had been written (all appreared only in 2007, cf. bibliography).

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