| The
major language of this subgroup, Latin, owes its dominance to the historical circumstance
that it was the language of Latium, the area around Rome. Two other closely related
Indo-European languages, Oscan and Umbrian , were long taken to be Italic as well
(that is, Latin and Osco-Umbrian all were thought to derive from proto-Italic).
There are sufficient differences, however, that some linguists no longer consider
Osco-Umbrian to be Italic. Another Indo-European language, Venetic , is seen by
some as Italic, but by others as Germanic, and yet others see it as an independent
Indo-European subgroup. A language of the southern peninsula attested to in inscriptions
from the sixth to the first centuries BCE, Messapic , is Indo-European but apparently
not Italic. Historical and archeological evidence suggest a connection with Illyria,
but since essentially no written Illyrian exists, the identification remains conjectural.
North of the Messapic area are inscriptions, some as early as the seventh century
BCE, in a language called Picene . The northern examples, if not Indo-European,
show extremely heavy borrowing; the southern examples resist translation, but
have been identified as Indo-European by some. Most who see Picene as Indo-European
associate it with Illyrian. With
the rise of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Italian peninsula and
across a significant portion of the Western World. Classical literary Latin continues
to eke out a tenuous oral and written existence today. Meanwhile, starting with
the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century BCE, various dialects
of Vulgar Latin, the Latin spoken by the masses, began to transform. These dialects
became the modern Romance languages (i.e., languages based in Romans).
Today, these include Italian, Romanian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Galician
, Catalan , and Provençal.
|
