Italic languages
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Italic | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution: |
Originally Italy, today mainly southern Europe, maximum extent world-wide intermittent |
| Genetic classification: |
Indo-European Italic |
| Subdivisions: |
Osco-Umbrian, formerly Sabellic
|
| ISO 639-5: | itc |
Approximate distribution of languages in Iron Age Italy during the sixth century BC. |
|
|
Indo-European topics |
|---|
| Indo-European languages (list) |
| Albanian · Armenian · Baltic Celtic · Germanic · Greek Indo-Iranian (Indo-Aryan, Iranian) Italic · Slavic extinct: Anatolian · Paleo-Balkans (Dacian, |
| Indo-European peoples |
| Albanians · Armenians Balts · Celts · Germanic peoples Greeks · Indo-Aryans Iranians · Latins · Slavs historical: Anatolians (Hittites, Luwians) |
| Proto-Indo-Europeans |
| Language · Society · Religion |
| Urheimat hypotheses |
| Kurgan hypothesis Anatolia · Armenia · India · PCT |
| Indo-European studies |
The Italic subfamily is a member of the Indo-European language family. It includes the Romance languages derived from Latin (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, etc.), and a number of extinct languages of the Italian Peninsula, including Umbrian, Oscan, Faliscan, and Latin itself.
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 ancient Venice), however, is regarded as unclassified Indo-European, despite its influence on the modern Italian of the region.
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. 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.
Contents |
[edit] Proto-Italic
In the comparative method of historical linguistics language families descended from proto-languages.
[edit] Phonetics
A partial list of regular phonetic changes from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Italic:
- Palatovelars merged with plain velars
- 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 → f
- dʱ → tʰ → θ
- ɡʱ → kʰ → x
- s → θ before r; unchanged elsewhere
- p → kʷ before kʷ in following syllable (e.g. Latin quinque 'five' from PIE *penkʷe); unchanged elsewhere
- Resonants and remaining stops (m n l r w b d ɡ p t k kʷ) unchanged
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.
[edit] Branches
The Italic family has two known branches and two 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
- 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:
- 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
The ancient Venetic language, as revealed by its inscriptions (including complete sentences), was also closely related to the Italic languages and is sometimes even 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.
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.
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.
[edit] References
- ^ See under External links below.
- ^ Silvestri 1998, pp. 322-323.
- ^ Watkins 1998, pp. 31-33
[edit] Bibliography
- 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.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- "Tree for Italic" (html). Linguist List, Eastern Michigan University. 2009. http://linguistlist.org/forms/langs/get-familyid.cfm?CFTREEITEMKEY=IEJ. Retrieved 16 September 2009.
- "A Glossary of Indo-European Linguistic Terms" (in English). Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik. 2009. http://korpling.german.hu-berlin.de/~amir/IE_Glossary.php. Retrieved 16 September 2009.
