A History of Roman Literature | Page 7

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 = Z��kunthos_) or SS (_massa = m��za_). 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 _��_. 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