Main linguistic groups in Iron-Age Italy and the surrounding areas. Some of those languages have left very little evidence, and their classification is quite uncertain. ThePunic language brought to Sardinia by thePunics coexisted with the indigenous and non-ItalicPaleo-Sardinian, orNuragic.
TheItalic languages form a branch of theIndo-European language family, whose earliest known members were spoken on theItalian Peninsula in the first millennium BC. The most important of the ancient Italic languages wasLatin, the official language ofancient Rome, which conquered the otherItalic peoples before thecommon era.[1] The other Italic languages becameextinct in the first centuries AD as their speakers were assimilated into the Roman Empire andshifted to some form of Latin. Between the third and eighth centuries AD,Vulgar Latin (perhaps influenced bysubstrata from the other Italic languages) diversified into theRomance languages, which are the only Italic languages natively spoken today, whileLiterary Latin also survived.[2]
Besides Latin, the known ancient Italic languages areFaliscan (the closest to Latin),Umbrian andOscan (or Osco-Umbrian), andSouth Picene. Other Indo-European languages once spoken in the peninsula whose inclusion in the Italic branch is disputed areVenetic andSiculian. These long-extinct languages are known only from inscriptions inarchaeological finds.[3][4]
In the first millennium BC, several (other) non-Italic languages were spoken in the peninsula, including members of other branches of Indo-European (such asCeltic andGreek) as well as at least one non-Indo-European one,Etruscan.
It is generally believed that those 1st millennium Italic languages descend from Indo-European languages brought by migrants to the peninsula sometime in the 2nd millennium BC throughBell Beaker andUrnfield culture groups north and east of theAlps.[5][6][7][6] However, the source of those migrations and the history of the languages in the peninsula are still a matter of debate among historians. In particular, it is debated whether the ancient Italic languages all descended from a singleProto-Italic language after its arrival in the region, or whether the migrants brought two or more Indo-European languages that were only distantly related.
With over 900 million native speakers,[8] the Romance languages make Italic the second-most-widely spoken branch of the Indo-European family, afterIndo-Iranian at 1.7 billion native speakers. However, in academia the ancient Italic languages form a separate field of study from the medieval and modern Romance languages. This article focuses on the ancient languages. For information on the academic study of the Romance languages, seeRomance studies.[9]
Most Italic languages (including Romance) are generally written inOld Italic scripts (or the descendantLatin alphabet and its adaptations), which descend from the alphabet used to write the non-Italic Etruscan language, which was derived from theGreek alphabet. The notable exceptions areJudaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is sometimes written in the Hebrew, Greek, or Cyrillic script, and some forms ofRomanian, which are written in the Cyrillic script.
Historical linguists have generally concluded that the ancient Indo-European languages of the Italian peninsula that were not identifiable as belonging to other branches of Indo-European, such as Greek, belonged to a single branch of the family, parallel for example toCeltic andGermanic. The founder of this theory isAntoine Meillet (1866–1936).[10]
This unitary theory has been criticized by, among others,Alois Walde,Vittore Pisani andGiacomo Devoto, who proposed that the Latino-Faliscan and Osco-Umbrian languages constituted two distinct branches of Indo-European. This view gained acceptance in the second half of the 20th century,[11] though proponents such as Rix later rejected the idea, and the unitary theory remains dominant in contemporary scholarship.[12]
The following classification, proposed byMichiel de Vaan (2008), is generally agreed on,[13] although some scholars have recently disputed the inclusion of Venetic in the Italic branch.[14]
Vulgar Latin (2nd c. BC–9th c. AD)[20] evolved intoProto-Romance (the reconstructed Late Vulgar Latin ancestor of Romance languages) between the 3rd and 8th c. AD[21][22]
Romance languages, non-mutually intelligible with Latin since at the least the 9th c. AD; the only Italic languages still spoken today[23][24]
Proto-Italic was probably originally spoken byItalic tribes north of theAlps. In particular, early contacts with Celtic and Germanic speakers are suggested by linguistic evidence.[6]
Bakkum defines Proto-Italic as a "chronological stage" without an independent development of its own, but extending over late Proto-Indo-European and the initial stages of Proto-Latin and Proto-Sabellic. Meiser's dates of 4000 BC to 1800 BC, well before Mycenaean Greek, are described by him as being "as good a guess as anyone's".[31] Schrijver argues for a Proto-Italo-Celtic stage, which he suggests was spoken in "approximately the first half or the middle of the 2nd millennium BC",[32] from which Celtic split off first, then Venetic, before the remainder, Italic, split into Latino-Faliscan and Sabellian.[33]
Italic peoples probably moved towards theItalian Peninsula during the second half of the 2nd millennium BC, gradually reaching the southern regions.[6][7] Although an equation between archeological and linguistic evidence cannot be established with certainty, the Proto-Italic language is generally associated with theTerramare (1700–1150 BC) andProto-Villanovan culture (1200–900 BC).[6]
At the start of the Iron Age, around 700 BC,Ionian Greek settlers fromEuboea established colonies along the coast of southern Italy.[34] They brought with them thealphabet, which they had learned from thePhoenicians; specifically, what we now callWestern Greek alphabet. The invention quickly spread through the whole peninsula, across language and political barriers. Local adaptations (mainly minor letter shape changes and the dropping or addition of a few letters) yielded severalOld Italic alphabets.
The inscriptions show that, by 700 BC, many languages were spoken in the region, including members of several branches of Indo-European and several non-Indo-European languages. The most important of the latter wasEtruscan, attested by evidence from more than 10,000 inscriptions and some short texts. No relation has been found between Etruscan and any other known language, and there is still no clue about its possible origin (except for inscriptions on the island ofLemnos in the easternMediterranean). Other possibly non-Indo-European languages present at the time were Rhaetian in theAlpine region,Ligurian around present-dayGenoa, and some unidentified languages inSardinia. Those languages have left some detectable imprint in Latin.
The largest language in southern Italy, exceptIonic Greek spoken in the Greek colonies, wasMessapian, known from some 260 inscriptions dating from the 6th and 5th centuries BC. There is a historical connection of Messapian with theIllyrian tribes, added to thearchaeological connection inceramics andmetals existing between both peoples, which motivated the hypothesis of linguistic connection. But the evidence of Illyrian inscriptions is reduced to personal names and places, which makes it difficult to support such a hypothesis.
It has also been proposed by some scholars, although not confirmed, that theLusitanian language may have belonged to the Italic family.[30][35]
In the history of Latin of ancient times, there are several periods:
From the archaic period, several inscriptions of the 6th to the 4th centuries BC, fragments of the oldest laws, fragments from the sacral anthem of theSalii, the anthem of theArval Brethren were preserved.
The period ofclassical ("golden") Latin dated until the death of Ovid in AD 17[36] (1st century BC, the development of vocabulary, the development of terminology, the elimination of old morphological doublets, the flowering ofliterature:Cicero,Caesar,Sallust,Virgil,Horace,Ovid) was particularly distinguished.
As theRoman Republic extended its political dominion over the whole of the Italian peninsula, Latin became dominant over the other Italic languages, which ceased to be spoken perhaps sometime in the 1st century AD. FromVulgar Latin, the Romance languages emerged.
The Latin language gradually spread beyond Rome, along with the growth of the power of this state, displacing, beginning in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, the languages of other Italic tribes, as well asIllyrian,Messapian andVenetic, etc. TheRomanisation of the Italian Peninsula was basically complete by the 1st century BC; except for thesouth of Italy andSicily, where the dominance ofGreek was preserved.The attribution ofLigurian is controversial.
The main debate concerning the origin of the Italic languages mirrors that on the origins of the Greek ones,[37] except that there is no record of any "early Italic" to play the role ofMycenaean Greek.
All that is known about the linguistic landscape of Italy is from inscriptions made after the introduction of the alphabet in the peninsula, around 700 BC onwards, and from Greek and Roman writers several centuries later. The oldest known samples come from Umbrian and Faliscan inscriptions from the 7th century BC. Theiralphabets were clearly derived from theEtruscan alphabet, which was derived from theWestern Greek alphabet not much earlier than that. There is no reliable information about the languages spoken before that time. Some conjectures can be made based ontoponyms, but they cannot be verified.
There is no guarantee that the intermediate phases between those old Italic languages and Indo-European will be found. The question of whether Italic originated outside Italy or developed by assimilation of Indo-European and other elements within Italy, approximately on or within its current range there, remains.[38]
An extreme view of some linguists and historians is that there never was a unique "Proto-Italic" whose diversification resulted in an "Italic branch" of Indo-European.Some linguists, like Silvestri[39] and Rix,[40] further argue that no common Proto-Italic can be reconstructed such that its phonological system may have developed into those of Latin and Osco-Umbrian through consistent phonetic changes and that its phonology and morphology can be consistently derived from those ofProto-Indo-European. However, Rix later changed his mind and became an outspoken supporter of Italic as a family.
Those linguists propose instead that the ancestors of the 1st millennium Indo-European languages of Italy were two or more different languages that separately descended from Indo-European in a more remote past and separately entered Europe, possibly by different routes or at different times. That view stems in part from the difficulty in identifying a common Italic homeland in prehistory,[41] or reconstructing an ancestral "Common Italic" or "Proto-Italic" language from which those languages could have descended. Some common features that seem to connect the languages may be just asprachbund phenomenon – a linguistic convergence due to contact over a long period,[42] as in the most widely accepted version of theItalo-Celtic hypothesis.[undue weight? –discuss]
General and specific characteristics of the pre-Roman Italic languages:
inphonetics:Oscan (in comparison withLatin andUmbrian) preserved all positions of old diphthongs ai, oi, ei, ou, in the absence ofrhotacism, the absence ofsibilants[clarification needed], in the development of kt > ht; a different interpretation of Indo-European kw and gw (Latin qu and v, Osco-Umbrian p and b); in the latter the preservation of s in front of nasal sonants and the reflection of Indo-European *dh and *bh as f; initial stress (in Latin, it was reconstructed in the historical period), which led tosyncopation and the reduction of vowels of unstressed syllables;
in thesyntax: many convergences; In Osco-Umbrian, impersonal constructions,parataxis, partitive genitive, temporal genitive and genitive relationships are more often used;
The most distinctive feature of the Italic languages is the development of the PIE voiced aspirated stops.[43] In initial position, *bʰ-, *dʰ- and *gʷʰ- merged to /f-/, while *gʰ- became /h-/, although Latin also has *gʰ- > /w-/ and /g-/ in special environments.[44]
In medial position, all voiced aspirated stops have a distinct reflex in Latin, with different outcome for -*gʰ- and *gʷʰ- if preceded by a nasal. In Osco-Umbrian, they generally have the same reflexes as in initial position, although Umbrian shows a special development if preceded by a nasal, just as in Latin. Most probably, the voiced aspirated stops went through an intermediate stage *-β-, *-ð-, *-ɣ- and *-ɣʷ- in Proto-Italic.[45]
The voiceless and plain voiced stops (*p, *t, *k, *kʷ; *b, *d, *g, *gʷ) remained unchanged in Latin, except for the minor shift of *gʷ > /w/. In Osco-Umbrian, the labiovelars *kʷ and *gʷ became the labial stops /p/ and /b/, e.g. Oscanpis 'who?' (cf. Latinquis) andbivus 'alive (nom.pl.)' (cf. Latinvivus).[49]
In grammar there are basically three innovations shared by the Osco-Umbrian and the Latino-Faliscan languages:
A suffix in theimperfectsubjunctive*-sē- (inOscan the 3rd person singular of the imperfect subjunctivefusíd andLatinforet, both derivatives of*fusēd).[50]
A suffix in theimperfectindicative*-fā- (Oscanfufans 'they were', in Latin this suffix became-bā- as inportabāmus 'we carried').[51]
A suffix to derivegerundive adjectives from verbs*-ndo- (Latinoperandam 'which will be built'; in Osco-Umbrian there is the additional reduction-nd- >-nn-, Oscanúpsannam 'which will be built', Umbrianpihaner 'which will be purified').[52]
In turn, these shared innovations are one of the main arguments in favour of an Italic group, questioned by other authors.[who?]
Among the Indo-European languages, the Italic languages share a higher percentage of lexicon with the Celtic and the Germanic ones, three of the four traditional "centum" branches of Indo-European (together with Greek).
The following table shows a lexical comparison of several Italic languages:
The asterisk indicates reconstructed forms based on indirect linguistic evidence and not forms directly attested in any inscription.
Map showing the approximate extent of thecentum (blue) andsatem (red)areals
From the point of view of Proto-Indo-European, the Italic languages are fairly conservative. In phonology, the Italic languages arecentum languages by merging the palatals with the velars (Latincentum has a /k/) but keeping the combined group separate from the labio-velars. In morphology, the Italic languages preserve six cases in the noun and the adjective (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, vocative) with traces of a seventh (locative), but the dual of both the noun and the verb has completely disappeared. From the position of both morphological innovations and uniquely shared lexical items, Italic shows the greatest similarities with Celtic and Germanic, with some of the shared lexical correspondences also being found in Baltic and Slavic.[53]
Similar toCeltic languages, the Italic languages are also divided into P- and Q-branches, depending on the reflex of Proto-Indo-European *kʷ. In the languages of the Osco-Umbrian branch, *kʷ gavep, whereas the languages of the Latino-Faliscan branch preserved it (Latinqu[kʷ]).[54]
^de Vaan 2008, p. 5: "Most scholars assume that Venetic was the first language to branch off Proto-Italic, which implies that the other Italic languages, which belong to the Sabellic branch and to the Latino-Faliscan branch, must have continued for a certain amount of time as a single language."
^Bossong 2017, p. 859: "Venetic, spoken in Venetia, was undoubtedly Indo-European. It is safe to assume that it formed an independent branch by itself, rather than a subgroup of Italic."
^Bossong 2017, p. 863: "Up to the middle of the 2nd century BCE (conquest of Carthage and Greece) the language was uniform; no differences between 'higher' and 'lower' styles can be detected." p. 867: "From a strictly linguistic point of view, theStrasbourg Oaths are just an instantaneous snapshot in the long evolution from Latin to French, but their fundamental importance lies in the fact that here a Romance text is explicitly opposed to a surrounding text formulated in Latin. Romance is clearly presented as something different from Latin."
^Herman 2000, p. 113: "That is, the transformation of the language, from structures we call Latin into structures we call Romance, lasted from the third or fourth century until the eighth."
^Fortson 2004, p. 258: "The earliest Romance language to be attested is French, a northern variety of which first appears in writing in the Strasbourg Oaths in or around the year 842 (...) it had diverged more strongly from Latin than the other varieties closer to Italy."
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