The
Italic subfamily is a member of the
Indo-EuropeanThe Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
language family. It includes the
Romance languagesThe Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
derived from
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
(
CatalanCatalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
,
ItalianItalian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, Lombard,
SpanishSpanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
,
PortuguesePortuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
,
FrenchFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
,
RomanianRomanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...
, etc.), and a number of
extinct languageAn extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers., or that is no longer in current use. Extinct languages are sometimes contrasted with dead languages, which are still known and used in special contexts in written form, but not as ordinary spoken languages for everyday communication...
s of the
Italian PeninsulaThe Italian Peninsula or Apennine Peninsula is one of the three large peninsulas of Southern Europe , spanning from the Po Valley in the north to the central Mediterranean Sea in the south. The peninsula's shape gives it the nickname Lo Stivale...
, including
UmbrianUmbrian is an extinct Italic language formerly spoken by the Umbri in the ancient Italian region of Umbria. Within the Italic languages it is closely related to the Oscan group and is therefore associated with it in the group of Osco-Umbrian languages...
,
OscanOscan is a term used to describe both an extinct language of southern Italy and the language group to which it belonged.The Oscan language was spoken by a number of tribes, including the Samnites, the Aurunci, the Sidicini, and the Ausones. The latter three tribes were often grouped under the name...
,
FaliscanThe Faliscan language, the extinct language of the ancient Falisci, forms, together with Latin, the group of Latino-Faliscan languages. It seems probable that the dialect lasted on, though being gradually permeated with Latin, until at least 150 BC.-Corpus:...
, and Latin.
In the past various definitions of "Italic" have prevailed. This article uses the classification presented by the
Linguist List: 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
VestiniVestini is the Roman exonym for an ancient Italic tribe that occupied the area of the modern Abruzzo included between the Gran Sasso and the northern bank of the Aterno river...
an). Venetic (the language of the ancient
VenetiThe Veneti were an ancient people who inhabited north-eastern Italy, in an area corresponding to the modern-day region of the Veneto....
), 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
GermanicThe Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
), 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
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 languageIn historical linguistics, a daughter language is a language descended from another language through a process of genetic descent.-Examples:*English is a daughter language of Proto-Germanic, which is a daughter language of Proto-Indo-European....
s 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 WatkinsCalvert Watkins is a professor Emeritus of linguistics and the classics at Harvard University and professor-in-residence at UCLA.His doctoral dissertation, Indo-European Origins of the Celtic Verb I...
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. The West Indo-European dialects are
CelticThe Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic"; a branch of the greater Indo-European language family...
, Italic and
TocharianTocharian or Tokharian is an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family. The name is taken from the people known to the Greeks as the Tocharians . These are sometimes identified with the Yuezhi and the Kushans. The term Tokharistan usually refers to 1st millennium Bactria, which the...
. 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 invasionThe Dorian invasion is a concept devised by historians of Ancient Greece to explain the replacement of pre-classical dialects and traditions in southern Greece by the ones that prevailed in Classical Greece...
,
Proto-Greek languageThe Proto-Greek language is the assumed last common ancestor of all known varieties of Greek, including Mycenaean, the classical Greek dialects , and ultimately Koine, Byzantine and modern Greek...
) 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 alphabetOld Italic refers to several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European languages and non-Indo-European languages...
, which is itself based on the
Greek alphabetThe Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
. The Italic languages themselves show minor influence from the
EtruscanThe Etruscan language was spoken and written by the Etruscan civilization, in what is present-day Italy, in the ancient region of Etruria and in parts of Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna...
and somewhat more from the
Ancient GreekAncient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean 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:
"...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
PIEA pie is a baked dish which is usually made of a pastry dough casing that covers or completely contains a filling of various sweet or savoury ingredients....
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."
Branches
The Italic family has two known branches and two further unclassified languages:
- Latino-Faliscan
The Latino-Faliscan languages are a group of languages that belong to the Italic language family of the Indo-European languages. They were spoken in Italy. Latin and Faliscan belong to this group....
, including:
- Faliscan
The Faliscan language, the extinct language of the ancient Falisci, forms, together with Latin, the group of Latino-Faliscan languages. It seems probable that the dialect lasted on, though being gradually permeated with Latin, until at least 150 BC.-Corpus:...
, which was spoken in the area around FaleriiFalerii was one of the twelve chief cities of Etruria, situated about 1.5 km west of the ancient Via Flaminia, around 50 kilometers north of Rome.- History :According to legend, it was of Argive origin...
Veteres (modern Civita CastellanaCivita Castellana is a town and comune in the province of Viterbo, 65 km north of Rome.Mount Soracte lies about 10 km to the south-east.-History:...
) north of the city of RomeRome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
and possibly SardiniaSardinia is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea . It is an autonomous region of Italy, and the nearest land masses are the French island of Corsica, the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, Tunisia and the Spanish Balearic Islands.The name Sardinia is from the pre-Roman noun *sard[],...
- Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, which was spoken in west-central Italy. The RomanAncient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
conquests eventually spread it throughout the peninsula and beyond in the Roman EmpireThe Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
.
- Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
, the descendants of Latin (see List of Romance languages)
- Osco-Umbrian
The Osco-Umbrian languages or Sabellic languages are a group of languages that belong to the Italic language family of the Indo-European languages. They were spoken in central and southern Italy before Latin replaced them as the power of the Romans expanded...
or Sabellic including:
- Oscan
Oscan is a term used to describe both an extinct language of southern Italy and the language group to which it belonged.The Oscan language was spoken by a number of tribes, including the Samnites, the Aurunci, the Sidicini, and the Ausones. The latter three tribes were often grouped under the name...
, which was spoken in the south-central region of the Italian PeninsulaThe Italian Peninsula or Apennine Peninsula is one of the three large peninsulas of Southern Europe , spanning from the Po Valley in the north to the central Mediterranean Sea in the south. The peninsula's shape gives it the nickname Lo Stivale...
- Umbrian group, including:
- Umbrian
Umbrian is an extinct Italic language formerly spoken by the Umbri in the ancient Italian region of Umbria. Within the Italic languages it is closely related to the Oscan group and is therefore associated with it in the group of Osco-Umbrian languages...
(not to be confused with the modern Umbrian dialect of Italian), which was spoken in the north-central region
- Volscian
Volscian was a Sabellic Italic language, which was spoken by the Volsci and closely related to Oscan and Umbrian.It is attested in an inscription found in Velitrae , dating probably from early in the 3rd century BC; it is cut upon a small bronze plate , which must have once been fixed to some...
- Marsian, the language of the Marsi
Marsi is the Latin exonym for a people of ancient Italy, whose chief centre was Marruvium, on the eastern shore of Lake Fucinus, drained for agricultural land in the late 19th century. The area in which they lived is now called Marsica. During the Roman Republic the people of the region spoke a...
- South Picene
South Picene is an extinct Italic language, belonging to the Sabellic subfamily. It is currently considered by SIL International to belong to the Umbrian Group although in the long history of its attempted classification it has been placed at a higher level, parallel to Oscan and Umbrian within...
, in east-central ItalyItaly , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
- Sabine
The Sabines were an Italic tribe that lived in the central Appennines of ancient Italy, also inhabiting Latium north of the Anio before the founding of Rome...
in Lazio and the central Appennines
- Aequian
Aequian is an extinct language presumed spoken by the people the Romans termed Aequi and Aequicoli living in the Alban hills of northeast Latium and the central Apennines east of them during the early and middle Roman Republic; that is, approximately from the 5th to the 3rd century BC, when they...
, a language spoken by the tribe of the Aequithumb|300px|Location of the Aequi in central Italy.The Aequi were an ancient people of northeast Latium and the central Appennines of Italy who appear in the early history of ancient Rome. After a long struggle for independence from Rome they were defeated and substantial Roman colonies were...
just east of Rome
- Vestinian
Vestinian is a scholarly term referring to an extinct Indo-European language documented only in two surviving inscriptions of the Roman Republic. It is presumed to have been anciently spoken by the tribe of the Vestini, who occupied the region within current Abruzzo from Gran Sasso to the Adriatic...
, a language spoken by the tribe of the VestiniVestini is the Roman exonym for an ancient Italic tribe that occupied the area of the modern Abruzzo included between the Gran Sasso and the northern bank of the Aterno river...
in northeast Italy
As
RomeThe Roman Republic was the period of the ancient Roman civilization where the government operated as a republic. It began with the overthrow of the Roman monarchy, traditionally dated around 508 BC, and its replacement by a government headed by two consuls, elected annually by the citizens and...
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 LatinVulgar Latin is any of the nonstandard forms of Latin from which the Romance languages developed. Because of its nonstandard nature, it had no official orthography. All written works used Classical Latin, with very few exceptions...
the
Romance languagesThe Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
emerged.
Proto-Italic language features
In
historical linguisticsHistorical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
,
language familiesA language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...
are often considered to be descended from
proto-languageA proto-language in the tree model of historical linguistics is the common ancestor of the languages that form a language family. Occasionally, the German term Ursprache is used instead.Often the proto-language is not known directly...
s. The
comparative methodIn linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal...
is used for reconstructing a given proto-language from its descendants.
Phonetics
A partial list of regular phonetic changes from
Proto-Indo-EuropeanThe Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
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.
Stops
- Palatovelars
Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....
merged with plain velars, a change termed centumizationThe centum-satem division is an isogloss of the Indo-European language family, related to the different evolution of the three dorsal consonant rows of the mainstream reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European:...
.
- Voiced
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts. Voicing can refer to the articulatory process in which the vocal cords vibrate...
labiovelars unround or leniteIn linguistics, lenition is a kind of sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening" . Lenition can happen both synchronically and diachronically...
- Voiced aspirate
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say pin ...
s become first unvoiced, then fricativize
- bʱ → pʰ → ɸ
- dʱ → tʰ → θ
- ɡʱ → kʰ → x → kʷ before kʷ in following syllable (e.g. Latin quinque 'five' from PIE *penkʷe); unchanged elsewhere
- t → k when before l within a word; unchanged elsewhere
- Remaining stop
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...
s (b d ɡ k kʷ) are unchanged.
Resonants
- Vocalization of resonant, l → ol
- Vocalization of resonant, r → or
- Remaining Resonant
In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant is a speech sound that is produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; fricatives and plosives are not sonorants. Vowels are sonorants, as are consonants like and . Other consonants, like or , restrict the airflow enough to cause turbulence, and...
s (m n w) are unchanged
Laryngeals
The
laryngealsThe laryngeal theory is a generally accepted theory of historical linguistics which proposes the existence of one, or a set of three , consonant sounds termed "laryngeals" that appear in most current reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European language...
are a class of hypothetical PIE sounds that disappeared in late PIE leaving a zero vowel (h
1), an a (h
2) or an o (h
3). 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.
- */#h1e/ → */#e/
- */#h2e/ → */#a/
- */#h3e/ → */#o/
Nouns
- Retention of masculine, feminine and neuter genders
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
- Retention of singular and plural; reduction of the
dual
Dual is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural. When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities identified by the noun or pronoun...
to a few instances
- Retention of the nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, locative and vocative cases
In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...
, but loss of the instrumental
- ā-declension
Latin is an inflected language, and as such has nouns, pronouns, and adjectives that must be declined in order to serve a grammatical function. A set of declined forms of the same word pattern is called a declension. There are five declensions, which are numbered and grouped by ending and...
endings (same order as in preceding item); singular: -ā, -ās, -āi, -ām, -ād, -a; plural: -ās, -āsōm, -āis, -āns, -āis, -ā, none, none
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
In historical linguistics, Italo-Celtic is a grouping of the Italic and Celtic branches of the Indo-European language family on the basis of features shared by these two branches and no others. These are usually considered to be innovations, which are likely to have developed after the breakup of...
- Language families and languages
- Vestinian
Vestinian is a scholarly term referring to an extinct Indo-European language documented only in two surviving inscriptions of the Roman Republic. It is presumed to have been anciently spoken by the tribe of the Vestini, who occupied the region within current Abruzzo from Gran Sasso to the Adriatic...
External links