ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Etruscan alphabet

Okay kiddo, imagine that you wanted to write something down but instead of using the letters you know like A, B, C, you had to use different letters that not many people know! That's kind of what happened with the Etruscan alphabet.

A long, long time ago in Italy, there was a group of people called the Etruscans. They had their own way of writing which used special symbols or letters that didn't look like our letters today. Instead of 26 letters, they only had 20.

The Etruscan alphabet was made up of symbols that looked like different shapes - some were straight lines, some were squiggly, and some were curved. They used these symbols to represent different sounds. For example, one symbol looked like a smiley face with a line through it (☺︎) and it stood for the sound "a."

When people wanted to write something down in Etruscan, they would use these symbols to spell out words. It was kind of like a secret code that only they could understand!

Over time, the Etruscan alphabet changed and was eventually replaced by the Roman alphabet that we still use today. But even though the Etruscan language is no longer spoken, we can still learn about it by studying the symbols they used to write!
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