Etruscan has been partially deciphered. It’s written in a variant of the Euboean Greek alphabet, so there are no major problems in reading it. And we do have some idea of the grammar—there were four noun cases, for example—and many inscriptions can be read.

The problem is that most Etruscan texts that have survived are short. A very common type of text is the funerary inscription. Like this:

Read from right to left, the inscription reads larth : seiante : trepu : tutnal . That’s the name of the person commemorated: Larth Seiante Trepu, of the Tutina family. We can get a genitive case ending out of this (-al), and other inscriptions let us pick up some vocabulary—there’s another inscription that ends tutnal clan, which gives us the word for “son”, clan. Unfortunately, these inscriptions give us mostly personal names, with some hints as to the grammar, but not a huge vocabulary. The same is true for the offerings left in graves, which were often inscribed suthina, “for the tomb”. Here’s the back of a bronze mirror, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

It shows a mythological scene: pele, the naked guy on the left with his name along the upper border, has surprised thethis who’s standing in the center with her name to the left. Sitting to the right is calaina. What’s going on in a scene from Greek mythology; Pele (Peleus) has just walked in on Thethis (Thetis), who’s being helped to dress by Calaina (Galene). Peleus and Thetis, of course, are the parents of Achilles. Peleus is looking into Thetis’s mirror, and is thought to be shrinking back in horror because he can foresee the results of his marriage in the mirror: the Trojan War, and all the suffering and death that went with it. A lot of scenes on mirrors are scenes from Greek mythology and legend, with the deities and heroes given Etruscan spellings (such as hercle for Herakles) or Etruscan names (such as uni for Hera or tinia for Zeus). (Source: Etruscan mirrors and the grave, which has many more examples. The original mirror may be seen here: Bronze mirror | Etruscan | Late Classical | The Met )

Imagine that you were trying to learn English only from studying gravestones in a cemetery. You’d learn a lot about personal naming practices, some basic family terms like “son of” and “husband of”, and some ritualized expressions like “rest in peace” and “sacred to the memory of”. You could learn a fair amount about English—but still be quite unable to order a cheeseburger. That’s about what the Etruscan tomb and artifact inscriptions get us—they’re immensely valuable and informative, but we still don’t have quite enough to order a cheeseburger in 4th-century BC Tuscany, as it were.

There are of course other sources. The Romans sometimes quoted Etruscan words in writings that have survived (although the Emperor Claudius’s Etruscan dictionary has been lost). There are a few longer texts, including three gold plates, the Pyrgi Tablets, that are bilingual in Etruscan and Phoenician. But we still don’t have enough Etruscan that we can translate every surviving text. We don’t have the range of text types in Etruscan that we have for Egyptian or Akkadian, in which everything from bookkeeping records to poetry and songs have survived.

So Etruscan can sometimes be translated. But there’s a lot that is still unknown or unclear about the language.

I regret that I have little useful information to offer.

The Etruscan civilisation by about 800 B.C. was well established on the Italian peninsula in the area that is now Tuscany and Umbria, between the Arno and Tiber rivers in western Italy. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that the dialects of those regions contain elements or remnants of the language spoken by that ancient and mysterious people but, sadly, I'm not acquainted with those particular dialects.

The names of their city states are however remembered. Tarquinii is today Tarquinia, Caere is Cerveteri and Volsinii is Bolsena. Their gods Tinii, Uni and Menerva correspond in function to the Roman gods Jupiter, Juno and Minerva.

The Etruscans introduced chariot racing and combat between gladiators, activities later adopted by the Romans, and their art included terra cotta and bronze statues of humans and animals. The Capitoline Wolf, the symbol of Rome, might indeed be attributable to Etruscans.

As I suggested, I have very little information to offer.

The sound values of their runes are known, so we can sound out Etruscan writing. The problem is it sounds like gibberish to everyone. The language seems to have been what’s called an isolate like Basque or Ainu. No known related language and no known descended languages to find cognates.

When transliterating writing we need to have hints about the phonetic values so we can sound out the writings. That part is done for Etruscan. One requirement of two satisfied.

When translating writings we need to know enough words to be able to start making sense of the writings. The most famous example is the Rosetta Stone taught that ancient Egyptian had a lot of words in common with modern Coptic. Sort of like ancient Greek has words in common with modern Greek. Because Etruscan was an isolated language, we have insufficient starting point for meanings. One requirement of two failed.

Etruscan runes look enough like Germanic runestaves that plenty of people can figure out how to sound out Etruscan writings.

Currently we don't know the Etruscan words for “Etruscan”, “language”, “thousand”, “ago”, “nobody” and “understand”. Since only “died”, “two” and “years” can be translated, the only translation available would be “[…] lupu zal […] avil […]” and that's just word for word without consideration for syntax.

E truscan is a dead language but what makes it worse is that it's a pretty poorly attested language as well. Poorly attested is a bit dramatic here - there's actually quite a lot of Etruscan texts and there's a devent amount of readable words in these texts. The largest problem is that we only have one rather short bilingual text in Etruscan. The way linguists translate Etruscan is extremely tedious - how would you translate Finnish without any dictionaries or prior knowledge about the language let alone the language family? There are some words and some sentences we can translate but Etruscan is still largely a mystery.

I’ve scanned the answers and found that my perspective is not represented yet.The Taiwanese whom I knew in the mid-1990s used “jiao” to mean leg (and possibly also foot if they didn’t distinguish the two), so Taiwanese girls who were concerned about their figures talked about having fat “jiao.”However, a decade later, my wife from Beijing made it clear to me that “jiao” means only “foot” in mainland China, and that “tui” has to be used to describe “leg” in China. I remember her saying that it makes no sense for Taiwanese girls to say that they have fat “jiao” in reference to their legs.Of course, there are differences between sets of vocabulary in Taiwan, parts of China, Singapore, and Chinese communities in North America.

Thanks for asking.

No, it isn’t. The reason why this term 认脚 was coined is that it’s used to be compared with an old style of shoes that Chinese people wore for thousands of years. This style of shoes is known as 正脚鞋 or 直脚鞋, which literally means upright shoes or straight shoes, respectively. When wearing a pair of this style of shoes, people don’t need to differentiate which shoe is worn by the left foot and which shoe is worn by the right shoe.

Here are two pictures showing two pairs of shoes excavated from two tombs buried during the time of Tang Dynasty. These two tombs are in Astana Cemetery, or 阿斯塔纳古墓 in Chinese, which is in Turpan, or 吐鲁番 in Chinese, a city in Xinjiang.

After the introduction of shoes which could not be worn interchangeably between left foot and right foot, Chinese people have adopted this new style of shoes. And it becomes the predominant footwear style that Chinese people put on. So, when our folks mention shoes, they usually refer to shoes which could be only fit for one or another foot. Therefore, it’s not necessary to repeat that these shoes belong to this 认脚 style.

By the way, according to an authoritative reference book for the modern Chinese language, 现代汉语词典, which literally means Dictionary of Modern Chinese, 认脚 means 鞋左右两只不能换着穿. So, it refers to a situation when a pair of shoes could not be worn interchangeably. So, strictly speaking, this term could not be applied to socks. Here is a picture showing the screenshot of the explanation of this term on this dictionary.

I prefer to treat 認脚 as a less common collocation of 認 rather than a fixed compound (認 or 認識 rènshi / renn.shyh “to recognize”).

Examples

1 認 卡 不 認 人 rèn kǎ bù rèn rén /renn kaa buh renn ren “the system only identifies clients / users etc by card” is a common use, especially when it comes to the stored value cards used in MRT systems throughout Taiwan: (the turnstile) only identifies the card (as being authentic), no personal recognition is involved, so if you lose your card, you’re out of luck (= we can’t help you): 遺失自認倒霉.

Similar logic applies to shopping at Costco: they will admit you if you have a store card … BUT at the cash register they DO check IDs, so you may be left with a whole cartload of goods that you cannot pay for.

2 認手支付

This post discusses Apple’s use of a hand (palm) recognition technology to use instead of facial recognition, which is seen as intrusive. Pay by waving your hand: the system will identify you by the unique pattern of veins in your hand: 認手支付 rèn shǒu zhīfù / renn shoou jyfuh

3 認手章 rèn shǒu zhāng / renn shoou jang “recognition via temporary tattoo on the back of one’s hand”.

Here “tattoo” refers to a washable rubber stamp that identifies people who have paid for admission. They can thus freely leave to use the toilet etc and reenter without flashing any ID or paper ticket (easily misplace).

4 認手環不認票券 rèn shǒu zhāng rèn shǒuhuán, bù rèn piàoquàn / renn shoouhwan, buh renn piawchiuann “(paid attendees) are identified by their bracelet, not by their ticket.

Given the above examples, 認脚 should probably be treated as a collocation of 認 “recognize”: “[literally] These shoes recognize (in a figurative sense) left and right feet”. I would imagine that 認脚 would only appear on a wrapper, label, or catalog. This would explain why there are very few Google entries.

A more colloquial rendition could be: “Left and right feet are not interchangeable”. Then again, isn’t this usually the case for most footwear (except slippers, flipflops and the like)? One doubtful case might be rainboots, which MIGHT be foot agnostic.

I imagine* that “It’s in lots of dictionaries” only applies to Chinese-English dictionaries, which are often compiled by copying the entries in previous dictionaries, rather than being compiled from scratch by lexicographers relying on corpus entries. With only a bit of context, native speakers would not have trouble figuring out what 認脚 means, so there is no entry in 現代漢語詞典**

Addendum 1:

*It turns out I was mistaken about dictionary entries.

**Although 認腳 does indeed appear in bilingual dictionaries, it also has its own entry in the 現代漢語詞典 (I somehow missed it the first time I looked), where it is noted as 方言 “dialectal usage”.

Because it's not spoken today and it's not from the Indo European family of languages. Neither is Basque, but we still have plenty of people today who speak Basque. The recent DNA testing seems to indicate that the Etruscans came from the steppes of Asian regions.

Etruscan can be read, according to the Penn Museum website. This question is interesting but not an area that I have expertise in, since we studied Egyptian, Greek, and Roman paradigms in art history, and nothing about the Etruscans since they were a mystery. Further archeology has been done in the past half century that may shed light.