Combinatory method

The combinatory method treats a corpus as its own dictionary. A word that always follows a personal name on a tomb and is followed by a number is probably "years" or "aged"; a word that appears only on vessels with a name in the genitive is probably "gift" or "belonging to". Each guess is checked against every other place the word occurs and against short bilinguals and glosses by ancient writers. It is the opposite of the etymological method, which matches words to look-alikes in a known language. For Etruscan the combinatory method, systematised by Massimo Pallottino and the Italian school in the twentieth century, has produced every meaning now accepted, including the numerals, kinship words and magistracies, while the etymological method has produced none that survived [@bonfante2002etruscan] [@wallace2008zikh]. Its weakness is speed and reach: it works best on repetitive formulae and does little for words that occur once.