The Etruscan language is still a riddle to philologists, and until it is satisfactorily investigated the ethnological position of the people that spoke it must be a matter of dispute. The few words and forms which have been deciphered lend support to the otherwise more probable theory that they were an Indo-Germanic race only remotely allied to the Italians, in respect of whom they maintained to quite a late period many distinctive traits. [3] But though the Romans were long familiar with the literature and customs of Etruria, and adopted many Etruscan words into their language, neither of these causes influenced the literary development of the Romans in any appreciable degree. Italian philology and ethnology have been much complicated by reference to the Etruscan element. It is best to regard it, like the Iapygian, as altogether outside the pale of genuine Italic ethnography. The main points of correspondence between the Italic dialects as a whole, by which they are distinguished from the Greek, are as follow:--Firstly, they all retain the spirants S, J (pronounced Y), and V, _e.g. sub, vespera, janitrices_, beside _upo, espera, einateres_. Again, the Italian _u_ is nearer the original sound than the Greek. The Greeks sounded _u_ like _ii_, and expressed the Latin _u_ for the most part by _ou_. On the other hand the Italians lost the aspirated letters _th, ph, ch_, which remain in Greek, and frequently omitted the simple aspirate. They lost also the dual both in nouns and verbs, and all but a few fragmentary forms of the middle verb. In inflexion they retain the sign of the ablative (_d_), and, at least in Latin, the dat. plur. in _bus_. They express the passive by the letter _r_, a weakened form of the reflexive, the principle of which is reproduced in more than one of the Romance languages. On the other hand, Latin differs from the other Italian dialects in numerous points. In pronouns and elsewhere Latin _q_ becomes _p_ in Umbrian and Oscan _(pis = quis)._ Again, Oscan had two vowels more than Latin and was much more conservative of diphthongal sounds; it also used double consonants, which old Latin did not. The Oscan and Umbrian alphabets were taken from the Etruscan, the Latin from the Greek; hence the former lacked O Q X, and used [Symbol] or [Symbol] (_san_ or soft _z_) for _z_ (_zeta = ds_). They possessed the spirant F which they expressed by [Symbol] and used the symbol [Symbol] to denote V or W. They preserved the old genitive in _as_ or _ar_ (Lat. _ai, ae_) and the locative, both which were rarely found in Latin; also the Indo-European future in _so_ (_didest, herest_) and the infin. in _um_ (_e.g. ezum = esse_).