ABSTRACT
Latin is the chief representative of the Italic group of Indo-European languages. The most important of the others were Oscan, which was spoken over most of southern Italy in the last four centuries BC and is attested in substantial inscriptions from Avella and Banzi, and Umbrian, which was spoken further north and survives almost exclusively in a series of liturgical inscriptions from Gubbio dating from 350 to 50 BC. A large number of the Oscan and Umbrian texts are in native alphabets, ultimately derived like those of Latin and Etruscan from the Greek alphabet. Some are in the Latin alphabet, and collation of the two graphic systems provides valuable insights into the phonology of the two languages. In this chapter words attested in the native alphabets appear in capitals, those in the Latin alphabet in lower case. Neither Oscan nor Umbrian is as closely related to Latin as Faliscan, a language
attested in a small number of inscriptions from near Cività Castellana. Of the non-Italic languages spoken in Italy after 500 BC Venetic in the far north-east was closely related to Italic; Etruscan, which is attested, again epigraphically, over a large area of central and northern Italy, was totally unrelated. Although Oscan was still in use at Pompeii until AD 79, Latin had long since become the written language of all Italy. Some dialects of Latin were partly shaped by the native languages, but it is doubtful whether the latter survived long into the Christian era. In this chapter Oscan and Umbrian phenomena will be treated only in relation to Latin as providing evidence for the Italic complex within which Latin must historically be placed. For Latin phonology the most valuable source is the spellings, both standard and
deviant, and the diachronic changes in spelling that are discernible in the numerous inscriptions recorded from about 500 BC onwards and the manuscripts of contemporary texts written on papyrus and subsequently on other soft materials. The manuscripts of literary texts from antiquity, usually written centuries after their composition, provide fuller testimony for morphology, syntax and lexicon. Among these texts are treatises on the language itself and on rhetoric. These are especially important as revealing the criteria, derived mostly from Greek theory, by which the norms of classical usage were formulated and applied in the period 150 BC-AD 150.
