Social:Aequian language

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Short description: Extinct Italic language northeast of Rome
Aequian
Native toAequian country
RegionLatium, east-central Italy
EthnicityAequi
Eraattested 5th to 3rd century BC[1]
Indo-European
  • Italic
    • Osco-Umbrian?
      • Umbrian?
        • Aequian
Language codes
ISO 639-3xae
xae
Glottologaequ1239[2]
aequ1238  code retired[3]
Abraham Ortelius's map of ancient Latium, published in 1595


Corpus

Aequian is scantily documented by two inscriptions. Conway's publication of Italic inscriptions adds a gloss, several place names and several dozen personal names, but it does not distinguish which of these are certainly endonyms and which are Latin exonyms in use by the Latin-speaking population.[4] It is possible that they would have been the same in both cases, but such a hypothesis remains unproven.

The Inscription of Alba Fucens is a bronze plate inscribed with ALBSI PATRE.[5] Conway reconstructs the first word as *albe(n)si, a dative case. Baldi translates the text into Latin as Albano patri, two datives, and into English as "To the (god named) Alban Father."[6]

The second document is the Inscription of Cliternia (Capradosso) in Petrella Salto, an inscribed stone in a spring dissociated from context by nature (it rolled down a hill).[7] The text is:[4]

VIA INFERIOR | PRIVATAST | T VMBRENI C F |
PRECARIO | ITVR | PECVS PLOSTRV | NIQVIS AGAT

which is a notice stating that the road is private, passage by permission of Titus Umbrenus, son of Gaius, but beasts of burden are forbidden.

Notes

  1. Aequian at MultiTree on the Linguist List
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds (2017). "Aequian". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/aequ1239. 
  3. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds (2017). "code retired". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/aequ1238. 
  4. 4.0 4.1 Conway, Robert Seymour (1897). The Italic Dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 301–305. https://archive.org/details/italicdialects02conw. 
  5. Ernout 1916, pp. 43–44 gives the CIL number, as the inscription was originally taken to be early Latin: CIL I2 385, VI 3672, IX 4177.
  6. Baldi, Philip (2002). The Foundations of Latin. Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. p. 122. 
  7. CIL IX, 4171, according to Ernout 1916, p. 45.

Bibliography

Template:Italic languages