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Rhaetic or Raetic (), also known as Rhaetian, was a Tyrsenian language spoken in the ancient region of Rhaetia in the eastern Alps in pre-Roman and Roman times. It is documented by around 280 texts dated from the 5th through the 1st century BC, which were found through northern Italy, southern Germany, eastern Switzerland, Slovenia and western Austria, in two variants of the Old Italic scripts. Rhaetic is largely accepted as being closely related to Etruscan.:Etruscan origins lie in the distant past. Despite the claim by Herodotus, who wrote that Etruscans migrated to Italy from Lydia in the eastern Mediterranean, there is no material or linguistic evidence to support this. Etruscan material culture developed in an unbroken chain from Bronze Age antecedents. As for linguistic relationships, Lydian is an Indo-European language. Lemnian, which is attested by a few inscriptions discovered near Kamania on the island of Lemnos, was a dialect of Etruscan introduced to the island by commercial adventurers. Linguistic similarities connecting Etruscan with Raetic, a language spoken in the sub-Alpine regions of northeastern Italy, further militate against the idea of eastern origins.
The ancient Rhaetic language is not to be confused with the modern Romance languages of the same Alpine region, known as Rhaeto-Romance.
Rix's Tyrsenian family is supported by a number of linguists such as Stefan Schumacher, Carlo De Simone, Norbert Oettinger, Simona Marchesini, and Rex E. Wallace. Common features between Etruscan, Rhaetic, and Lemnian language have been observed in morphology, phonology, and syntax. On the other hand, few lexical correspondences are documented, at least partly due to the scanty number of Rhaetic and Lemnian texts and possibly to the early date at which the languages split. The Tyrsenian family (or Common Tyrrhenic) is often considered to be Paleo-European and to predate the arrival of Indo-European languages in southern Europe.: Italy was home to a number of languages in the Iron Age, some of them clearly Indo-European (Latin being the most obvious, although this was merely the language spoken in the Roman heartland, that is, Latium, and other languages such as Italic, Venetic or Ligurian were also present), while the centre-west and northwest were occupied by the people we call Etruscans, who spoke a language which was non-Indo-European and presumed to represent an ethnic and linguistic stratum which goes far back in time, perhaps even to the occupants of Italy prior to the spread of farming.
The language is documented in Northern Italy between the 5th and the 1st centuries BC by about 280 texts, in an area corresponding to the Fritzens-Sanzeno and Magrè cultures. It is clear that in the centuries leading up to Roman imperial times, the Rhaetians had at least come under Etruscan influence, as the Rhaetic inscriptions are written in what appears to be a northern variant of the Etruscan alphabet. The ancient Roman sources mention the Rhaetic people as being reputedly of Etruscan origin, so there may at least have been some ethnic Etruscans who had settled in the region by that time.
Magrè was more commonly used to write Rhaetic than Sanzeno. The vast majority of Sanzeno texts are from far northern Italy, and only from the 4th and 5th centuries BC. Magrè texts however have been found from northern Italy to southern Germany, and cover the entire known time Rhaetic was spoken.
The origins of Rhaetic's alphabets are ultimately unknown, but they seem to have been adopted through Venetic language. The punctuation and the direction certain letters face in Magrè, as well as Magrè's use in close vicinity to Venetic, suggest some sort of relationship between them. Sanzeno, however, retains many traditional Etruscan writing traditions. Both alphabets use a unique letter for the dental affricate however, something that Etruscan's zeta could have provided if Etruscan was the source of either of Rhaetic's alphabets. In Venetic however, zeta is rarely used, suggesting it as the more likely source of Rhaetic's alphabets. It is still unknown whether the two alphabets share a common origin or if they developed independently of each other, and to what degree if they did.
| + Rhaetic alphabets ! !alpha !epsilon !wau !zeta !heta !theta !iota !kappa !lambda !mu !nu !pi !san !rho !sigma !tau !/ts/ !upsilon !phi !chi |
For plural, the ending -r(a) is attested.
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