The Osco-Umbrian , Sabellic or Sabellian languages are an extinct group of Italic languages , the Indo-European languages that were spoken in Central and Southern Italy by the Osco-Umbrians before being replaced by Latin , as the power of Ancient Rome expanded. Their written attestations developed from the middle of the 1st millennium BC to the early centuries of the 1st millennium AD. The languages are known almost exclusively from inscriptions, principally of Oscan and Umbrian , but there are also some Osco-Umbrian loanwords in Latin. Besides the two major branches of Oscan and Umbrian (and their dialects), South Picene may represent a third branch of Sabellic. The whole linguistic Sabellic area, however, might be considered a dialect continuum . Paucity of evidence from most of the "minor dialects" contributes to the difficulty of making these determinations.
31-649: Following an original theory by Antoine Meillet , the Osco-Umbrian languages were traditionally considered a branch of the Italic languages , a language family that grouped Latin and Faliscan together with several other related languages. This unitary scheme was criticized by, among others, Alois Walde , Vittore Pisani and Giacomo Devoto , who proposed a classification of the Italic languages into two distinct Indo-European branches. This view gained some acceptance in
62-778: A Native North American language, Navajo is sometimes described as fusional because of its complex and inseparable verb morphology. Some Amazonian languages such as Ayoreo have fusional morphology. The Fuegian language Selk'nam has fusional elements. For example, both evidentiality and gender agreement are coded with a single suffix on the verb: CERT:certainty (evidential):evidentiality Ya 1P k-tįmi REL -land x-įnn go- CERT . MASC nį-y PRES - MASC ya. 1P Ya k-tįmi x-įnn nį-y ya. 1P REL-land go-CERT.MASC PRES-MASC 1P 'I go to my land.' Some Nilo-Saharan languages such as Lugbara are also considered fusional. Fusional languages generally tend to lose their inflection over
93-663: A culture bearer (in a way that he claimed other Finno-Ugric languages were unable to become such). His views on Hungarian provoked a critical response from the Hungarian writer Dezső Kosztolányi . Meillet supported the use of an international auxiliary language . In his book La Ricerca della Lingua Perfetta nella Cultura Europea ('The Pursuit of the Perfect Language in the Culture of Europe'), Umberto Eco cites Meillet as saying: "Any kind of theoretical discussion
124-533: A word root is often placed into templates denoting its function in a sentence. Arabic is especially notable for this, with the common example being the root k-t-b being placed into multiple different patterns. Northeast Caucasian languages are weakly fusional. A limited degree of fusion is also found in many Uralic languages , like Hungarian , Estonian , Finnish , and the Sami languages , such as Skolt Sami , as they are primarily agglutinative . Unusual for
155-433: Is entirely composed of formulae handed down from poet to poet. An examination of any passage will quickly reveal that it is made up of lines and fragments of lines which are reproduced word for word in one or several other passages. Even those lines of which the parts happen not to recur in any other passage have the same formulaic character, and it is doubtless pure chance that they are not attested elsewhere. Meillet offered
186-438: Is that "anyone wishing to hear how Indo-Europeans spoke should come and listen to a Lithuanian peasant ." He worked closely with linguists Paul Pelliot and Robert Gauthiot . Today Meillet is remembered as the mentor of an entire generation of linguists and philologists who would become central to French linguistics in the twentieth century, such as Émile Benveniste , Georges Dumézil , and André Martinet . In 1921, with
217-581: Is useless, Esperanto is functioning". In addition, Meillet was a consultant with the International Auxiliary Language Association , which presented Interlingua in 1951. Fusional language Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language , distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use single inflectional morphemes to denote multiple grammatical , syntactic , or semantic features. For example,
248-569: The Romance languages and certain Germanic languages . Some languages shift over time from agglutinative to fusional. For example, most Uralic languages are predominantly agglutinative, but Estonian is markedly evolving in the direction of a fusional language. On the other hand, Finnish , its close relative, exhibits fewer fusional traits and thereby has stayed closer to the mainstream Uralic type. However, Sámi languages , while also part of
279-611: The Spanish verb comer ("to eat") has the first-person singular preterite tense form comí ("I ate"); the single suffix -í represents both the features of first-person singular agreement and preterite tense, instead of having a separate affix for each feature. Another illustration of fusionality is the Latin word bonus ("good"). The ending -us denotes masculine gender , nominative case , and singular number . Changing any one of these features requires replacing
310-581: The Italian peninsula after Latins and Falisci , but before Iapygians and Messapians . The two main branches of the Sabellic languages, spoken in the heart of the Italian peninsula, are Oscan in the south and Umbrian to the north of Oscan. Included among the Sabellic languages are: Volscian , Sabine , South Picene , Marsian , Paeligni , Hernican , Marrucinian and Pre-Samnite . Aequian and Vestinian have traditionally been ascribed to either
341-543: The Oscan group or the Umbrian group. However, they are all poorly attested, and such a division is not supported by evidence. It appears that they may have formed part of a dialect continuum , with Umbrian in the north, Oscan in the south and the 'Sabellic' languages in between (see next section) having features of both. However, there were also colonies that spoke Oscan, scattered throughout Southern Italy and Sicily . Oscan
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#1732766194618372-568: The Proto-Indo-European labiovelar series ("Q-Italic"), the Osco-Umbrian languages merged them with the labials ("P-Italic"): Latin quattuor , Oscan petora . Antoine Meillet Paul Jules Antoine Meillet ( French: [ɑ̃twan mɛjɛ] ; 11 November 1866 – 21 September 1936) was one of the most important French linguists of the early 20th century. He began his studies at the Sorbonne University , where he
403-852: The Umbrians were subdued by the Romans and the process of Romanisation led to its demise. Of all the Osco-Umbrian languages, it is the one that is the best known, mainly because of the Iguvine Tablets . These languages were spoken in Samnium and in Campania , partly in Apulia , Lucania and Bruttium , as well as by the Mamertines in the Sicilian colony of Messana ( Messina ). Sabellic
434-558: The Uralic family, have gained more fusionality than Finnish and Estonian since they involve consonant gradation but also vowel apophony . Inflections in fusional languages tend to fall in two patterns, based on which part of speech they modify: declensions for nouns and adjectives, and conjugations for verbs. One feature of many fusional languages is their systems of declensions in which nouns and adjectives have an affix attached to them that specifies grammatical case (their uses in
465-778: The Use of the Genitive-Accusative in Old Slavonic . In 1902 he took a chair in Armenian at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales and took under his wing Hrachia Adjarian , who would become the founder of modern Armenian dialectology . In 1905 Meillet was elected to the Collège de France , where he taught on the history and structure of Indo-European languages . One of his most-quoted statements
496-411: The centuries, some much more quickly than others. Proto-Indo-European was fusional, but some of its descendants have shifted to a more analytic structure such as Modern English , Danish and Afrikaans or to agglutinative such as Persian and Armenian . Other descendants remain fusional, including Sanskrit , Ancient Greek , Lithuanian , Latvian , Slavic languages , as well as Latin and
527-630: The clause), number and grammatical gender . Pronouns may also alter their forms entirely to encode that information. Within a fusional language, there are usually more than one declension; Latin and Greek have five, and the Slavic languages have anywhere between three and seven. German has multiple declensions based on the vowel or consonant ending the word, though they tend to be more unpredictable. However, many descendants of fusional languages tend to lose their case marking. In most Romance and Germanic languages , including Modern English (with
558-490: The further development and popularization of the concept by Jerzy Kuryłowicz and further development in the late 20th century, it would become a significant element of functionalist linguistics . At the Sorbonne, from 1924, Meillet supervised Milman Parry . In 1923, a year before Parry began his studies with Meillet, the latter wrote the following (which, in the first of his two French theses, Parry quotes): Homeric epic
589-505: The help of linguists Paul Boyer and André Mazon [ fr ] , he founded the Revue des études slaves . Today, Meillet is known for his contribution to historical linguistics . He is notable for having coined and formalized the concept of grammaticalisation (influential but still controversial today) to denote what he viewed as the process of innovation by which autonomous words ended up as "grammatical agents". Subsequent to
620-503: The help of phonograph recordings. From Parry's resulting research in Bosnia, the records of which are now housed at Harvard University , he and his student Albert Lord revolutionized Homeric scholarship . Meillet has been accused of meddling politics with his observation of languages. He had negative views on German and especially on Hungarian. Hungarian, he claimed, was too difficult a language full of loanwords and not capable of being
651-511: The notable exceptions of German, Icelandic and Faroese), encoding for case is merely vestigial because it no longer encompasses nouns and adjectives but only pronouns. Compare the Italian egli (masculine singular nominative ), gli (masculine singular dative , or indirect object), lo (masculine singular accusative ) and lui (also masculine singular accusative but emphatic and indirect case to be used with prepositions), corresponding to
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#1732766194618682-672: The opinion that oral-formulaic composition might be a distinctive feature of orally transmitted epics (which the Iliad was said to be). He suggested to Parry that he observe the mechanics of a living oral tradition to confirm whether that suggestion was valid; he also introduced Parry to the Slovenian scholar Matija Murko , who had written extensively about the heroic epic tradition in Serbo-Croatian and particularly in Bosnia with
713-493: The second half of the 20th century, although the exact processes of formation and penetration into Italy remains the object of research. Proponents such as Rix later rejected the idea, and the unitary theory (proposing the descent of all Italic languages from a unique common ancestor) remains dominant. In any case, it is plausible that the spread of all those languages took place through progressive inflows of Indo-European populations of eastern origin, with Osci and Umbri reaching
744-506: The single vestigial trio he, him, his in English. Conjugation is the alteration of the form of a verb to encode information about some or all of grammatical mood , voice , tense , aspect , person , grammatical gender and number . In a fusional language, two or more of those pieces of information may be conveyed in a single morpheme, typically a suffix. For example, in French ,
775-548: The singular, similar to those of Latin . Although the Osco-Umbrian languages are far more poorly attested than Latin, a corpus of a few thousand words' worth of inscriptions has allowed linguists to deduce some cladistic innovations and retentions. For example, while Proto-Indo-European aspirates appear as b , d and h/g between vowels in Latin ( medius < *medʰyos ), the aspirates all appear in Sabellic as f (Oscan mefiai < *medʰyos ). In addition, while Latin retained
806-496: The suffix -us with a different one. In the form bonum , the ending -um denotes masculine accusative singular, neuter accusative singular, or neuter nominative singular. Many Indo-European languages feature fusional morphology, including: Another notable group of fusional languages is the Semitic languages , including Hebrew , Arabic , and Amharic . These also often involve nonconcatenative morphology , in which
837-510: The verbal suffix depends on the mood, tense and aspect of the verb, as well as on the person and number (but not the gender) of its subject. That gives rise to typically 45 different single-word forms of the verb, each of which conveys some or all of the following: Changing any one of those pieces of information without changing the others requires the use of a different suffix, the key characteristic of fusionality. English has two examples of conjugational fusion. The verbal suffix -s indicates
868-539: Was included, even though it remains unclear whether it is related. The Osco-Umbrian languages or dialects of which testimony is preserved are: Little-documented variants collectively known as "Sabellic dialects" are ascribed without much evidence to the two main groups. Some authors doubt such traditional classification, placing, for example, Aequian and Vestinian in opposite branches, instead of grouping them together. The Osco-Umbrian languages were fusional inflected languages with about 5 different morphological cases in
899-606: Was influenced by Michel Bréal , the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure , and the members of the L'Année sociologique . In 1890 he was part of a research trip to the Caucasus , where he studied the Armenian language . After his return, de Saussure had gone back to Geneva , so Meillet continued the series of lectures on comparative linguistics that de Saussure had given. In 1897 Meillet completed his doctorate, Research on
930-478: Was originally the collective ethnonym of the Italic people who inhabited central and southern Italy at the time of Roman expansion . The name was later used by Theodor Mommsen in his Unteritalische Dialekte to describe the pre-Roman dialects of Central Italy that were neither Oscan nor Umbrian. The term is currently used for the Osco-Umbrian languages as a whole. The word "Sabellic" was once applied to all such minor languages, Osco-Umbrian or not. North Picene
961-468: Was the language of the Samnite tribes, powerful enemies of the Romans, who took years to subdue them (the Samnite wars took place from 370 BC to 290 BC). These languages are known from a few hundred inscriptions dating from between 400 BC and the 1st century AD. In Pompeii there are numerous Oscan inscriptions, such as dedications in public buildings and signs. Umbrian began a process of decline when