The Italic languages are a subfamily of the Indo-European language family
originally spoken by Italic peoples. They include the Romance languages
derived from Latin, a number of extinct languages of the Italian Peninsula,
including Umbrian, Oscan, Faliscan, South Picene, and Latin itself. At
present, Latin and its daughter Romance languages are the only surviving
languages of the Italic language family. In the past various definitions of
"Italic" have prevailed. This article uses the classification presented by the
Linguist List: Italic includes the Latin subgroup as well as the ancient Italic
languages. Venetic, as revealed by its inscriptions, shared some similarities
with the Italic languages and is sometimes classified as Italic. However,
since it also shares similarities with other Western Indo-European branches,
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. 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." 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.
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 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 alphabets themselves show minor
influence from the Etruscan and somewhat more from the Ancient Greek alphabet.
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: ...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 he describes as "as good a guess as anyone's."
Branches The Italic family has two known
branches: Latino-Faliscan, including:
Faliscan, which was spoken in the area around Falerii Veteres north of the city
of Rome and possibly Sardinia 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 Osco-Umbrian or Sabellian including:
Oscan, which was spoken in the south-central region of the Italian
Peninsula Umbrian, 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 Apennines
Some other languages belong to the Italic branch, but are too little known
to be further classified: Aequian, spoken by the Aequi just east of Rome,
and Vestinian, spoken by the Vestini in northeast Italy. It is unknown whether
the language spoken by the Sicels in Sicily was Italic or not.
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. It has also been proposed that the
Lusitanian language belonged to the Italic family.
Characteristics of Italic languages From the point of view of PIE the Italic
languages are fairly conservative. In phonology, the Italic languages are
centum languages, merging the palatals with the velars, thus Lat cenum with a
k-, but keeping this combines group separate from the labio-velars. In
morphology the Italic languages preserve six cases in the noun and adjective with
traces of a seventh, but the dual of both the noun and 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. See also
Italo-Celtic Language families and languages
Vestinian Celtic languages
References Bibliography
Bakkum, Gabrël C.L.M., 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, Tongues of Italy,
Prehistory and History, Cambridge: Harvard University Press
Rix, Helmut, "Ausgliederung und Aufgliederung der italischen Sprachen",
in Bammesburger, Alfred; Vennemann, Theo, Languages in Prehistoric Europe,
Indogermanische Bibliothek 3, Heidelberg: Winter, pp. 147–172, ISBN
3-8253-1449-9 Silvestri, Domenico, "The Italic
Languages", in Ramat, Anna Giacalone; Ramat, Paolo, The Indo-European
languages, Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 322–344 .
Watkins, Calvert, "Proto-Indo-European: Comparison and Reconstruction", in
Ramat, Anna Giacalone; Ramat, Paolo, The Indo-European languages, Taylor &
Francis Group, pp. 25–73 . External links
TM Texts Italic A list of all Italic texts in Trismegistos.
Michael de Vaan Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages
p.826, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries Series, Brill Academic
Publishers, "Tree for Italic". Linguist List,
Eastern Michigan University. 2010. Retrieved 4 April 2010.
"A Glossary of Indo-European Linguistic Terms". Institut für deutsche Sprache
und Linguistik. 2009. Retrieved 16 September 2009.