Latino-Faliscan languages

Latino-Faliscan
Latinian
Geographic
distribution		Originally Latium in Italy, then throughout the Roman Empire, especially in the western regions; now also throughout Latin America, Eastern Canada, and many countries in Africa
Linguistic classificationIndo-European
Proto-languageProto-Latino-Faliscan
Subdivisions
Language codes
Glottologlati1262
Latino-Faliscan languages and dialects in different shades of blue.

The Latino-Faliscan or Latinian languages form a group of the Italic languages within the Indo-European family. They were spoken by the Latino-Faliscan people of Italy who lived there from the early 1st millennium BCE.

Latin and Faliscan belong to the group, as well as two others often considered dialects of archaic Latin:[citation needed] Lanuvian and Praenestine.

As the power of Ancient Rome grew, Latin absorbed elements of the other languages and replaced Faliscan. The other variants went extinct as Latin became dominant. Latin in turn developed via Vulgar Latin into the Romance languages, now spoken by more than 800 million people, largely as a result of the influence of the Roman Empire initially, and in later times the Spanish, French and Portuguese Empires.

Linguistic description

Latin and Faliscan have several features in common with other Italic languages:

  • The late Indo-European diphthong /*eu/ evolved into ou.[1]
  • The late Indo-European /*ə/ from vocalic laryngeals evolved into a.[2]
  • The Indo-European syllabic liquids /*l̥, *r̥/ developed an epenthetic vowel o, giving Italic ol, or.[3]
  • The Indo-European syllabic nasals /*m̥, *n̥/ developed an epenthetic vowel e, giving Italic em, en.[4]
  • Word-initial aspirated stops from Indo-European were fricativised: /*bʰ, *dʰ, *gʰ, gʷʰ / > f, f, h, f.[5]
  • The sequence /*p...kʷ/ was assimilated into kʷ...kʷ (Proto-Indo-European *penkʷe 'five' > Latin quinque).[6]

Latin and Faliscan also have characteristics not shared by other branches of Italic. They retain the Indo-European labiovelars /*kʷ, *gʷ/ as qu-, gu- (later becoming velar and semivocal), whereas in Osco-Umbrian they become labial p, b. Latin and Faliscan use the ablative suffix -d, seen in med ("me", ablative), which is absent in Osco-Umbrian. In addition, Latin displays evolution of ou into ū, though this happens later than the Latino-Faliscan era, occurring around the 2nd century BCE (Latin lūna < Proto-Italic *louksnā < PIE *lówksneh₂ "moon").

Phonology

It is likely that the consonant inventory of Proto-Latino-Faliscan was basically identical to that of archaic Latin. Consonants not found in the Praeneste fibula are marked with an asterisk.

Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Labio-
velar 		Glottal
Plosive voiceless *p *t k *kʷ
voiced *b d *g *gʷ
Fricative f s *h
Sonorants *r, *l j *w
Nasal m n

The /kʷ/ sound still existed in archaic Latin when the Latin alphabet was developed, since it gives rise to the minimal pair quī /kʷiː/ ("who", nominative) > cuī /ku.iː/ ("to whom", dative). In other positions there is no distinction between diphthongs and hiatuses: for example, persuādere ("to persuade") is a diphthong but sua ("his"/"her") is a hiatus. For reasons of symmetry, it is quite possible that many sequences of gu in archaic Latin in fact represent a voiced labiovelar /gʷ/.[citation needed]

See also

References

  1. ^ Bakkum 2008, pp. 61–3.
  2. ^ Bakkum 2008, p. 58, 59.
  3. ^ Bakkum 2008, p. 64.
  4. ^ Bakkum 2008, p. 70.
  5. ^ Bakkum 2008, p. 65.
  6. ^ Bakkum 2008, p. 69.
  • Villar, Francisco [in Italian] (1997). Gli Indoeuropei e le origini dell'Europa [Indo-Europeans and the origins of Europe] (in Italian). Bologna, Il Mulino: Il mulino. ISBN 88-15-05708-0.
  • Vineis, Edoardo (1995). "X. Latin". In Giacolone Ramat, Anna; Ramat, Paolo (eds.). Las lenguas indoeuropeas [The Indo-European languages] (in Spanish). Madrid: Cátedra. pp. 349–421. ISBN 84-376-1348-5.
  • Bakkum, Gabriël C.L.M. (2008). The Latin Dialect of the Ager Faliscus : 150 Years of Scholarship. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ISBN 978-90-5629-562-2.

Further reading

Library resources about
Latino-Faliscan languages
  • Baldi, Philip. 2002. The foundations of Latin. Berlin: de Gruyter.
  • Clackson, James, and Geoffrey Horrocks. 2007. The Blackwell history of the Latin language. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
  • Giacomelli, Roberto. 1979. "Written and spoken language in latin-faliscan and greek-messapic." Journal of Indo-European Studies 7 no. 3–4: 149–75.
  • Mercado, Angelo. 2012. Italic Verse: A Study of the Poetic Remains of Old Latin, Faliscan, and Sabellic. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachen und Literaturen der Universität Innsbruck.
  • Palmer, Leonard R. 1961. The Latin language. London: Faber and Faber.
  • Joseph, Brian D., and Rex E. Wallace. 1991. "Is faliscan a local latin patois?" Diachronica: International Journal for Historical Linguistics/Revue Internationale Pour La Linguistique Historiqu 8, no. 2: 159–86.
  • Rigobianco, Luca. 2019. Faliscan. Language, Writing, Epigraphy. Aelaw Booklet 7. Zaragoza.
  • Rigobianco, Luca. 2020. «Falisco», Palaeohispanica 20: 299–333.