LITMIR.BIZ

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of the Indo-European speech, to which the name of Italic is given. Its nearest congener is the Hellenic, the next most distant being the Celtic. The Hellenic and Italic may thus be called sister languages, the Celtic standing in the position of cousin to both, though, on the whole, more akin to the Italic. [2]

      The Etruscan language is still a riddle to philologists, and until it is satisfactorily investigated the ethnological position of the people that spoke it must be a matter of dispute. The few words and forms which have been deciphered lend support to the otherwise more probable theory that they were an Indo-Germanic race only remotely allied to the Italians, in respect of whom they maintained to quite a late period many distinctive traits. [3] But though the Romans were long familiar with the literature and customs of Etruria, and adopted many Etruscan words into their language, neither of these causes influenced the literary development of the Romans in any appreciable degree. Italian philology and ethnology have been much complicated by reference to the Etruscan element. It is best to regard it, like the Iapygian, as altogether outside the pale of genuine Italic ethnography.

      The main points of correspondence between the Italic dialects as a whole, by which they are distinguished from the Greek, are as follow:—Firstly, they all retain the spirants S, J (pronounced Y), and V, e.g. sub, vespera, janitrices, beside upo, espera, einateres. Again, the Italian u is nearer the original sound than the Greek. The Greeks sounded u like ii, and expressed the Latin u for the most part by ou. On the other hand the Italians lost the aspirated letters th, ph, ch, which remain in Greek, and frequently omitted the simple aspirate. They lost also the dual both in nouns and verbs, and all but a few fragmentary forms of the middle verb. In inflexion they retain the sign of the ablative (d), and, at least in Latin, the dat. plur. in bus. They express the passive by the letter r, a weakened form of the reflexive, the principle of which is reproduced in more than one of the Romance languages.

      On the other hand, Latin differs from the other Italian dialects in numerous points. In pronouns and elsewhere Latin q becomes p in Umbrian and Oscan (pis = quis). Again, Oscan had two vowels more than Latin and was much more conservative of diphthongal sounds; it also used double consonants, which old Latin did not. The Oscan and Umbrian alphabets were taken from the Etruscan, the Latin from the Greek; hence the former lacked O Q X, and used [Symbol] or [Symbol] (san or soft z) for z (zeta = ds). They possessed the spirant F which they expressed by [Symbol] and used the symbol [Symbol] to denote V or W. They preserved the old genitive in as or ar (Lat. ai, ae) and the locative, both which were rarely found in Latin; also the Indo-European future in so (didest, herest) and the infin. in um (e.g. ezum = esse).

      The old Latin alphabet was taken from the Dorian alphabet of Cumae, a colony from Chaleis, and consisted of twenty-one letters, A B C D E F Z H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X, to which the original added three more, O or [Symbol] (th), [Symbol] (ph), and [Symbol] (ch). These were retained in Latin as numerals though not as letters, [Symbol] in the form of C=100, [Symbol] or M as 1000, and [Symbol] or L as 50.

      Of these letters Z fell out of use at an early period, its power being expressed by S (Saguntum = Zákunthos) or SS (massa = máza). Its rejection was followed by the introduction, of G. Plutarch ascribes this change to Sp. Carvilius about 231 B.C., but it is found on inscriptions nearly fifty years earlier. [4] In many words C was written for G down to a late period, e.g. CN. was the recognised abbreviation for Gnaeus.

      In Cicero's time Z was taken into use again as well as the Greek Y, and the Greek combinations TH, PH, CH, chiefly for purposes of transliteration. The Emperor Claudius introduced three fresh symbols, two of which appear more or less frequently on monuments of his time. They are [Symbol] or [Symbol], the inverted digamma, intended to represent the consonantal V: [Symbol], or anti-sigma, to represent the Greek psi, and [Symbol] to represent the Greek upsilon with the sound of the French u or German ü. The second is not found in inscriptions.

      Other innovations were the doubling of vowels to denote length, a device employed by the Oscans and introduced at Rome by the poet Accius, though Quintilian [5] implies that it was known before his time, and the doubling of consonants which was adopted from, the Greek by Ennius. In Greek, however, such doubling generally, though not always, has a philological justification. [6]

      The pronounciation of Latin has recently been the subject of much discussion. It seems clear that the vowels did not differ greatly, if at all, from the same as pronounced by the modern Italians. The distinction between E and I, however, was less clearly marked, at least in the popular speech. Inscriptions and manuscripts afford abundant instances of their confusion. Menerva leber magester are mentioned by Quintilian, [7] and the employment of ei for the i of the dat. pl. of nouns of the second declension and of nobis vobis, and of e and i indifferently for the acc. pl. of nouns of the third declension, attest the similarity of sound. That the spirant J was in all cases pronounced as Y there is scarcely room for doubt. The pronunciation of V is still undetermined, though there is a great preponderance of evidence in favour of the W sound having been the original one. After the first century A.D. this semi-vowel began to develop into the labiodental consonant v, the intermediate stage being a labial v, such as one may often hear in South Germany at the present day, and which to ordinary ears would seem undistinguishable from w.

      There is little to remark about the other letters, except that S, N, and M became very weak when final and were often entirely lost. S was rehabilitated in the literary dialect in the time of Cicero, who speaks of the omission to reckon it as subrusticum; but final M is always elided before a vowel. An illustration of the way in which final M and N were weakened may be found in the nasalised pronunciation of them in modern French (main, faim). The gutturals C and G have by some been supposed to have had from the first a soft sibilant sound before E and I; but from the silence of all the grammarians on the subject, from the transcriptions of C in Greek by kappa, not sigma or tau, and from the inscriptions and MSS. of the best ages not confusing CI with TI, we conclude that at any rate until 200 A.D. C and G were sounded hard before all vowels. The change operated quickly enough afterwards, and to a great extent through the influence of the Umbrian which had used d or ç before E and I for some time.

      In spelling much irregularity prevailed, as must always be the case where there is no sound etymological theory on which to base it. In the earliest inscriptions we find many inconsistencies. The case-signs m, d, are sometimes retained, sometimes lost. In the second Scipionic epitaph we have oino (unum) side by side with Luciom. In the Columna Rostrata (260 B.C.) we have c for g, single instead of double consonants, et for it in ornavet, and o for u in terminations, all marks of ancient spelling, contrasted with maximos, maxumos; navebos, navebous; praeda, and other inconsistent or modern forms. Perhaps a later restoration may account for these. In the decree of Aemilius, posedisent and possidere are found. In the Lex Agraria we have pequnia and pecunia, in S. C. de Bacchanalibus, senatuos and nominus (gen. sing.), consoluerunt and cosoleretur, &c., showing that even in legal documents orthography was not fixed. It is the same in the MSS. of ancient authors. The oldest MSS. of Plautus, Lucretius, and Virgil, are consistent in a considerable number of forms with themselves and with each other, but vary in a still larger number. In antiquity, as at present, there was a conflict between sound and etymology. A word was pronounced in one way; science suggested that it ought to be written in another. This accounts for such variations as inperium, imperium; atque, adque; exspecto, expecto; and the like (cases like haud, haut; saxum, saxsum; are different). The best writers could not decide between these conflicting forms. A still greater fluctuation existed in English spelling in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, [8] but it has since been overcome. Great writers sometimes introduced spellings of their own. Caesar wrote Pompeiii (gen. sing.) for Pompeii, after the Oscan manner. He also brought the superlative simus into use. Augustus, following in his steps, paid great attention to orthography. His inscriptions are a valuable source of evidence for ascertaining the correctest spelling of the time. During and after the time of Claudius affected archaisms

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