Latino-Faliscan languages

Template:Short description Template:Template other 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 BC.

Latin and Faliscan belong to the group, as well as two others often considered dialects of archaic Latin: 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.

Lanuvian

Lanuvian was an archaic Latino-Faliscan language. It was spoken by Latins who lived close to Rome and could have been a dialect of Latin.

Praenestine

Praenestine or Praenestinian was an archaic form of Latino-Faliscan. It was spoken in eastern Old Latium in modern day Lazio, Italy.

Linguistic description

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

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

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 < 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
	voiced
Fricative
Sonorants
Nasal

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/.

See also

• Italic peoples

Further reading

• 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.

External links

• "Languages and Cultures of Ancient Italy. Historical Linguistics and Digital Models", Project fund by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (P.R.I.N. 2017)