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Jan 10, 2024 · January 10, 2024. The Adriatic Veneti were an Indo-European people who inhabited northeastern Italy along the 1st millennium BC. Their language is evidenced in approximately 300 short inscriptions dating from the 6th to 1st centuries BC. Although it shares some similarities with Latin, it also has some affinities with other Indo-European languages.
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Venetic language, a language spoken in northeastern Italy before the Christian era. Known to modern scholars from some 200 short inscriptions dating from the 5th through the 1st century bc, it is written either in Latin characters or in a native alphabet derived from Etruscan, the Etruscans having established settlements in the Po Valley in the ...
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- Origins of the Italic languages
- Phonology
- Morphology
The language represented by inscriptions from the territory of the Veneti—between the Po River, the Carnic Alps, and Istria—is called Venetic. The majority of discoveries come from sanctuaries at Este and Làgole di Calalzo. The Venetic inscriptions (of which there are about 300, ranging from the 5th to the 1st century bce) consist almost entirely o...
The Italic languages must have been brought from the original area of the Indo-European languages, perhaps in eastern parts of central Europe, when their speakers crossed the Alps. This is attested to by a stratum of very old place-names of non-Indo-European origin—e.g., Tarracina (modern Terracina), Capua—that covers not only the Apennine Peninsul...
Many of the phonetic processes that make the attested Italic languages differ from the reconstructed Indo-European language seem to have occurred relatively late in time. The only one that can confidently be placed outside of Italy—that is, before the immigration over the Alps—is the change to ss in combinations of d (dental occlusive, or dental stop) + t. This is a feature common to Celtic, Germanic, and the Italic languages. For example, Latin visus comes from the older, reconstructed form *wissos ‘seen’; this is cognate with High German gi-wiss ‘surely known’ and Old Irish ro-fess ‘is known,’ all of these forms deriving from an Indo-European term *wid-to-s, with d + t. (An asterisk [*] before a word means that it is not attested but reconstructed.)
The development of the Indo-European labiovelar stop kw is more complex. (A labiovelar stop is a sound pronounced with simultaneous articulation—movement—of the lips and the velum, the soft palate.) From this sound there has resulted a qu in Latin, p in Osco-Umbrian and South Picene, c in Irish, and p in Brythonic Celtic; e.g., Latin quis ‘who(ever)’ is cognate with Oscan pis and Umbrian pis (similarly South Picene pim ‘whom[ever]’ or ‘which[ever]’), these forms deriving from Indo-European *kwis; and Irish cia is related to Welsh pwy, ‘who,’ derived from Indo-European *kwei. Some scholars have tried to trace this development back to an Italo-Celtic unity, but the change of Brythonic kw to p is surely later than the dropping of the p in Common Celtic. It is sounder, therefore, to assume independent processes in the different languages.
In contrast to the phonology, which shows so many correlations among the Italic languages, there are few definite connections between these tongues in their grammars. A characteristic innovation is the extension of the ablative singular case from o-stems and pronouns, where it occurred originally, to other declension classes: Latin praidad ‘with th...
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Jun 16, 2015 · But they don't know exactly when and where the language truly began, or how it came to birth so many of our modern tongues. Under one hypothesis, the ancestral tongue is 6,000 years old.
