Italic languages

Italic
Geographic distribution:	Originally Italy, today mainly southern Europe, maximum extent world-wide intermittent
Linguistic classification:	Indo-European Italic
Subdivisions:	Latino-Faliscan Osco-Umbrian, formerly Sabellic Aequian Vestinian
ISO 639-5:	itc
Approximate distribution of languages in Iron Age Italy during the sixth century BC. (Note: most of these are not Italic languages.)

The Italic subfamily is a member of the Indo-European language family. It includes the Romance languages derived from Latin (Catalan, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, Occitan, etc.), and a number of extinct languages of the Italian Peninsula, including Umbrian, Oscan, Faliscan, and South Picene.

In the past various definitions of "Italic" have prevailed. This article uses the classification presented by the Linguist List:^[1] Italic includes the Latin subgroup (Latin and the Romance languages) as well as the ancient Italic languages (Faliscan, Osco-Umbrian and two unclassified Italic languages, Aequian and Vestinian). Venetic (the language of the ancient Veneti), as revealed by its inscriptions, was also closely related to the Italic languages and is sometimes classified as Italic. However, since it also shares similarities with other Western Indo-European branches (particularly Germanic), some linguists prefer to consider it an independent Indo-European language.

In the extreme view, Italic did not exist, but the different groups descended directly from Indo-European and converged because of geographic contiguity. This view stems in part from the difficulty in identifying a common Italic homeland in prehistory.^[2]

In the intermediate view, the Italic languages are one of the ten or eleven major subgroups of the Indo-European language family and might therefore have had an ancestor, common Italic or proto-Italic, from which its daughter languages descend. Moreover, there are similarities between major groups, although how these similarities are to be interpreted is one of the major debatable issues in the historical linguistics of Indo-European. The linguist Calvert Watkins went so far as to suggest, among ten major groups, a four-way division of East, West, North and South Indo-European. These he considered "dialectical divisions within Proto-Indo-European which go back to a period long before the speakers arrived in their historical areas of attestation."^[3] This is not to be considered a nodular grouping; in other words, there was not necessarily any common west Indo-European serving as a node from which the subgroups branched, but rather a hypothesized similarity between the dialects of Proto-Indo-European which developed into the recognized families. The West Indo-European dialects are Celtic, Italic and Tocharian. By the time of any written language, Tocharian was geographically remote from the other two.

  Origins

The main debate concerning the origin of the Italic languages is the same as that which preoccupied Greek studies for the last half of the 20th century. The Indo-Europeanists for Greek had hypothesized (see Dorian invasion, Proto-Greek language) that Greek originated outside Greece and was brought in by invaders. Analysis of the lexical items of Mycenaean Greek, an early form of Greek, raised the issue of whether Greek had been formed within Greece from Indo-European elements brought in by migrants or invaders, mixed with elements of indigenous languages. The issue was settled in favour of the origin of Greek being that of a language which had both developed from all of these elements and then also taken its recognisable form all within Greece.

A proto-Italic homeland outside Italy is just as elusive as the home of the hypothetical Greek-speaking invaders. No early form of Italic is available to match Mycenaean Greek. The Italic languages are first attested in writing from Umbrian and Faliscan inscriptions dating to the 7th century BC. The alphabets used are based on the Old Italic alphabet, which is itself based on the Greek alphabet. The Italic languages themselves show minor influence from the Etruscan and somewhat more from the Ancient Greek languages. The intermediate phases between Italic and Indo-European are still in deficit, with no guarantee that they ever 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. Silvestri says:^[4]

"...Common Italic ... is certainly not to be seen as a prehistoric language that can largely be reconstructed, but rather as a set of prehistoric and proto-historic processes of convergence."

Bakkum defines Proto-Italic as a "chronological stage" without an independent development of its own, but extending over late PIE and the initial stages of Proto-Latin and Proto-Sabellic. Meiser's dates of 4000 BC to 1800 BC (well before Mycenaean Greek) he describes as "as good a guess as anyone's."^[5]

  Branches

The Italic family has two known branches and two further unclassified languages:

• Latino-Faliscan, including:
  • Faliscan, which was spoken in the area around Falerii Veteres (modern Civita Castellana) north of the city of Rome and possibly Sardinia
  • Sicel, which was spoken in Sicily.
  • Latin, which was spoken in west-central Italy. The Roman conquests eventually spread it throughout the peninsula and beyond in the Roman Empire.
    • Romance languages, the descendants of Latin (see List of Romance languages)
• Osco-Umbrian or Sabellic including:
  • Oscan, which was spoken in the south-central region of the Italian Peninsula
  • Umbrian group, including:
    • Umbrian (not to be confused with the modern Umbrian dialect of Italian), which was spoken in the north-central region
    • Volscian
    • Marsian, the language of the Marsi
  • South Picene, in east-central Italy
  • Sabine in Lazio and the central Appennines
• Aequian, a language spoken by the tribe of the Aequi just east of Rome
• Vestinian, a language spoken by the tribe of the Vestini in northeast Italy

As Rome 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. From Vulgar Latin the Romance languages emerged.

  Proto-Italic language features

  The Italic branch of Indo-European Languages

In historical linguistics, language families are often considered to be descended from proto-languages. The comparative method is used for reconstructing a given proto-language from its descendants.

  Phonetics

A partial list of regular phonetic changes from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Italic follows. An arrow denotes that the sound after it descended from the sound before it. Enclosure within slashes indicates a phoneme. An asterisk denotes a following reconstructed (unattested) form. A number sign indicates a word boundary; at the beginning, that the sound following is word-initial.

  Plosives

• Palatovelars merged with plain velars, a change termed centumization.
  • kʲ → k
  • ɡʲʱ → ɡʱ
  • ɡʲ → ɡ
• Voiced labiovelars unround or lenite
  • ɡʱʷ → ɡʱ
  • ɡʷ → ɡ or w
• Voiced aspirates become first unvoiced, then fricativize
  • bʱ → pʰ → ɸ
  • dʱ → tʰ → θ
  • ɡʱ → kʰ → x
• p → kʷ before kʷ in following syllable (e.g. Latin quinque 'five' from PIE *penkʷe); unchanged elsewhere
• t → k when before l within a word;^[6] unchanged elsewhere
• Remaining plosives (b d ɡ k kʷ) are unchanged.

  Sibilants

• s → θ before r
• s → z between vowels^[6]
• unchanged elsewhere

  Resonants

• Vocalization of resonant, l → ol^[4]
• Vocalization of resonant, r → or
• Remaining Resonants (m n w) are unchanged

  Laryngeals

The laryngeals are a class of hypothetical PIE sounds that disappeared in late PIE leaving a zero vowel (h₁), an a (h₂) or an o (h₃). Their disappearance left some distinctive sound combinations in Proto-Italic. As there are a larger number of them, only a few representative are listed below. The # follows standard practice in denoting a word boundary; that is, # at the beginning denotes word-initial. The * denotes a reconstructed form.^[7]

• */#h₁e/ → */#e/
• */#h₂e/ → */#a/
• */#h₃e/ → */#o/

  Vowels

This section is empty. You can help by adding to it.

  Diphthongs

• eu → ou within a word^[4]

  Morphology

  Nouns

• Retention of masculine, feminine and neuter genders^[8]
• Retention of singular and plural; reduction of the dual to a few instances^[8]
• Retention of the nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, locative and vocative cases, but loss of the instrumental^[8]
• ā-declension endings (same order as in preceding item); singular: -ā, -ās, -āi, -ām, -ād, -āi, -a; plural: -ās, -āsōm, -āis, -āns, -āis, -ā, none, none^[9]

  Pronouns

This section is empty. You can help by adding to it.

  Post-proto phases

Further changes occurred during the evolution of the individual Italic languages, in Latin for example f, θ → b, d between vowels and θ → f at the beginning of a word.

  See also

• Italo-Celtic
• Language families and languages
• Vestinian

  References

  Bibliography

• Bakkum, Gabrël C.L.M. (2009), The Latin Dialect of the Ager Faliscus: 150 Years of Scholarship:Part I, Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, ISBN 978-90-5629-562-2 
• Pulgram, Ernst (1958), Tongues of Italy, Prehistory and History, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 
• Rix, Helmut (2003), "Ausgliederung und Aufgliederung der italischen Sprachen", in Bammesburger, Alfred; Vennemann, Theo (in German), Languages in Prehistoric Europe, Indogermanische Bibliothek 3, Heidelberg: Winter, pp. 147–172, ISBN 3-8253-1449-9 
• Silvestri, Domenico (1998), "The Italic Languages", in Ramat, Anna Giacalone; Ramat, Paolo, The Indo-European languages, Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 322–344 .
• Watkins, Calvert (1998), "Proto-Indo-European: Comparison and Reconstruction", in Ramat, Anna Giacalone; Ramat, Paolo, The Indo-European languages, Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 25–73 .

  External links

For a list of words relating to Italic languages, see the Italic languages category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Michael de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries Series, Brill Academic Publishers, 2008, 826pp. (part available freely online)
• "Tree for Italic". Linguist List, Eastern Michigan University. 2010. http://multitree.org/trees/Indo-European:%20Composite@664078. Retrieved 4 April 2010. 
• "A Glossary of Indo-European Linguistic Terms". Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik. 2009. http://korpling.german.hu-berlin.de/~amir/IE_Glossary.php. Retrieved 16 September 2009.