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Italic languages

The Italic languages form a branch of the Indo-European language family, whose earliest known members were spoken on the Italian Peninsula in the first millennium BC. The most important of the ancient languages was Latin, the official language of ancient Rome, which conquered the other Italic peoples before the common era.[1] The other Italic languages became extinct in the first centuries AD as their speakers were assimilated into the Roman Empire and shifted to some form of Latin. Between the third and eighth centuries AD, Vulgar Latin (perhaps influenced by substrata from the other Italic languages) diversified into the Romance languages, which are the only Italic languages natively spoken today, while Literary Latin also survived.[2]

Italic

Originally the Italic peoples

Originally the Italian Peninsula and parts of modern day Austria and Switzerland, today Southern Europe, Latin America, France, Romania, Moldova, Canada, and the official languages of half the countries of Africa.

Indo-European

Proto-Italic

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Besides Latin, the known ancient Italic languages are Faliscan (the closest to Latin), Umbrian and Oscan (or Osco-Umbrian), and South Picene. Other Indo-European languages once spoken in the peninsula whose inclusion in the Italic branch is disputed are Venetic and Siculian. These long-extinct languages are known only from inscriptions in archaeological 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 as Celtic and Greek) 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.[5][6][7] 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 single Proto-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 800 million native speakers, the Romance languages make Italic the second-most-widely spoken branch of the Indo-European family, after Indo-Iranian. 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 the others, see Romance studies, and for the subgroup of Italic languages currently spoken see Romance languages.[8]


Most Italic languages (including Romance) are generally written in Old Italic scripts (or the descendant Latin alphabet and its adaptations), which descend from the alphabet used to write the non-Italic Etruscan language, and ultimately from the Greek alphabet. The notable exceptions are Judaeo-Spanish (also known as Ladino), which is sometimes written in the Hebrew, Greek, or Cyrillic script, and some forms of Romanian, which are written in the Cyrillic script.

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 the , the anthem of the Arval Brethren were preserved.

Salii

In the pre-classical period (3rd and 2nd centuries BC), the (the comedies of Plautus and Terence, the agricultural treatise of Cato the Elder, fragments of works by a number of other authors) was based on the dialect of Rome.

literary Latin language

The period of dated until the death of Ovid in AD 17[35] (1st century BC, the development of vocabulary, the development of terminology, the elimination of old morphological doublets, the flowering of literature: Cicero, Caesar, Sallust, Virgil, Horace, Ovid) was particularly distinguished.

classical ("golden") Latin

During the period of dated until the death of emperor Marcus Aurelius in AD 180, seeing works by Juvenal, Tacitus, Suetonius and the Satyricon of Petronius,[35] during which time the phonetic, morphological and spelling norms were finally formed.

classical ("silver") Latin

in : Oscan (in comparison with Latin and Umbrian) preserved all positions of old diphthongs ai, oi, ei, ou, in the absence of rhotacism, the absence of sibilants, 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 to syncopation and the reduction of vowels of unstressed syllables;

phonetics

in the : many convergences; In Osco-Umbrian, impersonal constructions, parataxis, partitive genitive, temporal genitive and genitive relationships are more often used;

syntax

Italo-Celtic

Italic peoples

List of ancient peoples of Italy

Romance languages

Indo-European languages

Languages of Italy

A list of all Italic texts in Trismegistos.

TM Texts Italic

Brill Academic Publishers (archived 17 June 2013) – part available freely online

Michael de Vaan (2008) Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages p. 826, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries Series

. Linguist List, Eastern Michigan University. 2010. Retrieved 4 April 2010.

"Tree for Italic"

. Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik. 2009. Archived from the original on 4 December 2008. Retrieved 16 September 2009.

"A Glossary of Indo-European Linguistic Terms"

"", Project fund by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (P.R.I.N. 2017)

Languages and Cultures of Ancient Italy. Historical Linguistics and Digital Models