Copper, Bronze, or Iron Age weaponry?), or even on what their route would have been (over the sea from the Balkans? down the Adriatic or the Tyrrhenian coasts?). We can only say where in the Italian peninsula the Italic languages ended up, and what sort of languages they were.
As to where in Italy they settled, it is clear that there were two major groups or subfamilies: Latin-Faliscan-Venetic settled the north, whereas Oscan and the rest, usually known as the Sabellian languages, occupied most of the south of Italy. The main exception to this pattern is Umbrian, a dialect which is more similar to Oscan than northern Italic; so its position in north-central Italy suggests that the Umbrians migrated later from the south up into the Apennines. It is also significant that the very similar Latin and Faliscan—a dialect best known for its drinker’s motto FOIED VINO PIPAFO CRA CAREFO “Today I shall drink wine; tomorrow I shall go without.”2—were separated from their cousin Venetic by a large, and totally unrelated, Etruscan-speaking population. The geography suggests that the Etruscans moved in from the west, splitting the two wings of northern Italic apart.
The Italic languages were not mutually intelligible, at least not across their full range. An idea of how different they could be may be gained from looking at some very short texts in the two best known and farthest flung (Venetic and Oscan) with a word-for-word translation into Latin. (For comprehensibility, none of the languages is shown in its actual alphabet.)
First a Venetic inscription on a bronze nail, found at Este:
mego zontasto sainatei reitiai egeotora aimoi ke louzerobos [Venetic]
me dōnāvit sanātricī reitiae egetora aemō līberīsque [Latin]
i.e., word for word in English:
“me gave to-healer to-Reitia Egetora for Aemus and children”
or more clearly:
“Egetora gave me to Reitia the healer for Aemus and his children.”
And then a clause of a Roman magistrate’s arbitration (183 BC) between Nola and Avellino, written on a boundary stone:
avt púst feihúís pús fisnam amfret, eíseí tereí nep abellanús nep nuvlanús pídum tríbarakattins [Oscan]*
autem pōst murōs quī fānum ambiunt, in eā terrā neque avellānī neque nōlānī quicquam aedificāverint [Latin]
i.e., word for word in English:
“but behind walls which temple they-surround, on that land neither Avellani nor Nolani anything they-shall-have-built”
or more clearly:
“but behind the walls which surround the temple, on that land neither the Avellani nor the Nolani may build anything.”
Nevertheless, there are striking similarities among them, and features, from the most specific to the most general, that set Italic languages apart from the other Indo-European languages.
First of all, a distinctive sound in Italic is the consonant f. It is extremely common, cropping up mostly in words where the Indo-European parent language had once had either bh or dh. In Latin, the sound is mostly restricted to the beginning of words, but in Oscan and Umbrian it often occurs too in the middle: Latin fūmus, facit, forēs, fingit; Oscan feihús, mefiú; Umbrian rufru—meaning ‘smoke, does, doors, makes’; ‘walls, middle’; ‘red’.*
With respect to meanings, the verb form ‘I am’ is sum or esom, with a vowel (o or u) in the middle and none at the end; there is no sign of such a vowel in Greek eimí, Sanskrit asmi, Gothic im, Hittite ešmi. There are also some distinctive nuances of words in the Italic vocabulary (asterisks show that forms are historical reconstructions): the common Indo-European root *deikmeans ‘say’ here (Latin dīcere, Oscan deíkum), not ‘show’ as it does in the other languages (Greek deíknumi, Sanskrit diśati, English token); also, the root *dhē- means ‘do’ or ‘make’ (Latin facere, Oscan fakiiad, Umbrian façia, Venetic vhagsto ‘made’) and not ‘put’ as it does in the other languages (Greek -thēke, Sanskrit -dhā-).
The pattern of verb forms is simplified and regularized from Indo-European in a distinctive way. As every schoolboy once knew, Latin had four different classes of verbs, each with slightly different endings, known as conjugations. The different sets of endings corresponded to the vowel that closes the stem and preceded the endings (as amā- ‘love’, monē- ‘warn’, regĭ- ‘rule’, audī-‘hear’). This vowel then largely determined the precise forms of all the verb’s endings, 106 choices in all.† Something similar is seen in Oscan and Venetic verbs. This is complex by comparison with English, but is in fact rather simpler than the fuller, differently organized systems seen in such distantly related languages as Greek, Sanskrit, or Gothic, where one can find more persons (dual as well as singular and plural), an extra tense (aorist), voice (middle), and moods (optative, benedictive).
The nouns, on the other hand, followed five patterns (declensions), choosing a set of endings on the basis of their stem vowel (-a, -o, none, or -i, -u, -e): the endings marked whether a noun was singular or plural (here too, in Italic languages, dual was not an option), and which case it was in, i.e., what its function was in the sentence; the cases were nominative (for subject), accusative (for object), genitive (for a noun dependent on another noun), dative (for a recipient), ablative (for a source), locative (for a place), and vocative (for an addressee), though the last two had become marginal in Latin. Hence analogously to a Latin noun like hortus ‘garden’, which had a pattern of endings
Sing. N. hortus, Ac. hortum, G. hortī, D. hortō, Ab. hortō, L. (hortō), V. horte Plur. N. hortī, Ac. hortōs, G. hortōrum, D., Ab., L. hortīs
we find in Oscan (remembering that ú was probably pronounced just like ō)
Sing. N. húrz, Ac. húrtúm, G.*húrteis, D. húrtúí, Ab. *húrtúd, L. *húrtei, V. ? Plur. N. *húrtús, Ac. *húrtúss, G. *húrtúm, D., Ab., L. *húrtúís.
On this kind of evidence, one can say that Latin and Oscan in the second century BC were about as similar as Spanish and Portuguese are today.
Consciousness of Latin as a language with its own identity began in the words of the poet Gnaeus Naevius, one of the very first in the Latin canon, writing from 235 to 204 BC. He wrote his own epitaph, showing either a concern that the language was in danger of decay, or an inordinate pride in his own literary worth!
Naevius is the earliest Latin poet whose works have survived. (He was actually a man of Campania and so probably grew up speaking Oscan.) But when these words were written, at the end of the third century BC, Rome already had three centuries of forthrightly independent existence behind her, and we know that Latin had been a written language for all of that time. Our earliest surviving
