I was so inspired by Ruhlen's do-it-yourself tutorial approach to language comparison that I decided to try it myself and "fly solo." Since all we have of Etruscan is a 200-word vocabulary (400 max), I appointed myself an instant expert and tried to find out which of Ruhlen's language families Etruscan relates to the best.
I doubt there's a better way of finding out that in setting up this book's comparative tables, Ruhlen has done an enormous amount of work behind the scenes. I'll conceed this point to his critics. I encountered all sorts of nullities and "misses" and very few hits, whereas Ruhlen has filtered out most everything but the hits. Even so (surprise!) I found hints of a Dravidian association with Etruscan, unlikely as that seems, and having worked to get to this conclusion, I feel my own ego getting involved in defending it, so I can understand the wars of clashing egos that Ruhlen's book alludes to.
(I will conceed to everyone who cares that Etruscan does not have a Dravidian grammar. In fact it seems wonderfully Indo-European. But this is way beside the point.)
This is a book people are going to care about, because people care about work they've done themselves. Ruhlen is breeding up a multitude of enthusiastic "lumpers" and I include myself in that number.
