Latin

Closely related to Oscan-Umbrian and the Sabellian dialects of central Italy, Latin is considered a member of that important branch of the IE language family traditionally termed ‘Italic’. This branch of Indo-European appears, in turn, to share a number of similarities exclusive to itself and Celtic, and together with the latter, Germanic, Greek, Hittite and Tocharian, forms what are called the centum dialects. It will not be inappropriate, we believe, to clarify, albeit briefly, this widely held view, commonly found in most current handbooks, which may at first seem puzzling. For instance, an immediate comparison between, say, a Latin text and a text written in another Italic dialect or language will clearly reveal two or more fundamentally different and mutually unintelligible languages. Undoubtedly, the degree of un­ intelligibility is far greater, for example, than that between Modem Italian and Spanish or Portuguese. In fact, if we look beyond the unmistakable superficial differences, there emerge ‘obvious’ similarities between Latin and OscoUmbrian, as identified by the historical-comparative method, including among others the following: (a) Phonetics: *2 > a, *ew > ou, */, *r > ol, or, *m, > em, en, *-s-> -z-, *-t/t-> -ss-, *-t > -d, the word-initial voiced aspirates *bh, *dÄ, *gh become voiceless fricatives, and the assimilation of words of the syllabic pattern *p . . . kw > kw . . . kw.