At 230 lines across twelve columns and roughly twelve hundred distinct word forms, the Liber Linteus is by a wide margin the longest connected Etruscan text ever recovered, dwarfing the brief funerary and dedicatory inscriptions that make up nearly all of the rest of the surviving Etruscan corpus. Etruscan itself is not related to any other known language family, has no surviving bilingual text long enough to serve as a full key, the way the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptian, and remains understood only partially, chiefly through internal comparison of recurring formulae, a handful of religious and calendrical loanwords borrowed into Latin, and short bilingual funerary texts.
What scholars can extract from the Liber Linteus rests on exactly this partial understanding: the text repeats groups of words at regular intervals in patterns that closely resemble a calendar, naming specific gods, among them recognizably Etruscan deities, alongside verbs plausibly meaning to offer or to sacrifice and words for specific months or festival days, leading most specialists to read the whole as a ritual calendar prescribing particular rites for particular deities on particular recurring dates, quite possibly tied to Etruscan haruspicy and the disciplina etrusca, the divinatory science the Romans themselves later borrowed from Etruscan priests. The great majority of the text, however, remains genuinely untranslated rather than merely awaiting a more patient reader, since Etruscan grammar and vocabulary outside a fairly narrow known set simply are not yet recovered well enough to support a full translation, a limitation that is a fact about the state of Etruscan studies rather than about this text in particular.