The Oscan alphabets
National (Oscan-Etruscan) alphabet
The Oscan “National” (or “Native”) alphabet is one of the three alphabetic systems used to codify the Oscan(-Samnite) language (see Prosdocimi 2000), together with the so-called Oscan-Greek and Oscan-Latin alphabets.
It was developed during the last half of the 5th century BC adapting an Etruscan model and, for this reason, it is also called Oscan-Etruscan alphabet (see Lejeune 1957: 88-105; 1970: 272).
Until the end of the 4th century the Oscan alphabet sub-differentiated the rendering of the mid-vowels, only using the and and letters. At the beginning of the 3rd century the alphabet was subject to a spelling reformation aimed to convey more accurately the phonology and two new letters were introduced: an i with diacritic (transl. <í>) representing /e/ (vs ~ /i/ and ~ /ε/) and an u with diacritic (transl. <ú>) representing /o/ ( ~ /u/).
The reformed alphabet consists of 21 letters:
Inscriptions are usually written with a right-to-left direction and use a dot to separate words.
Bibliography:
- Lazzeroni, Romano. 1985. «Varianti grafiche e varianti fonetiche nelle iscrizioni osche. Una questione di metodo». In Lingua e cultura degli Oschi, di Enrico Campanile, 47–53. Pisa: Giardini.
- Lejeune, Michel. 1957. «Notes de linguistique italique. XIII: Sur les adaptations de l’alphabet étrusques aux langues indo-européennes d’Italie». Revue des Études Latines 35: 88–105.
- ———. 1970. «Phonologie osque et graphie grecque». Revue des Études Anciennes 72: 271–316.
- ———. 1972. «Phonologie osque et graphie grecque II». Revue des Études Anciennes 74: 5–13.
- Marinetti, Anna, e Aldo Luigi Prosdocimi. 1988. «Lingua e scrittura dei popoli indigeni (Lucani, Bretti, Enotri)». In Magna Grecia: vita religiosa e cultura letteraria, filosofica e scientifica, di Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli, 29–54. Milano: Electa.
- Prosdocimi, Aldo Luigi. 2009. «Sulla scrittura nell’Italia antica». In Scrittura e scritture: le figure della lingua. Atti del convegno SIG (Viterbo, 28-30 ottobre 2004), 143–231. Roma: Il Calamo.
- Rocca, Giovanna. 2000. «Gli alfabeti d’Italia». In Alfabeti: preistoria e storia del linguaggio scritto, a cura di Mario Negri, 177–204. Demetra.
- Tagliapietra, Livia. 2020. «Mobility and Orthography: A Contextualisation of Variant Spellings in the Oscan Inscriptions in the Greek Alphabet». In Migration, Mobility and Language Contact in and around the Ancient Mediterranean, a cura di James Clackson, Katherine McDonald, Livia Tagliapietra, Nicholas Zair, e Patrick James, 122–55. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Tikkanen, Karin W. 2020. «Lost – and Found – in Transmission: The Creation of the Oscan Alphabet». In Migration, Mobility and Language Contact in and around the Ancient Mediterranean, a cura di James Clackson, Katherine McDonald, Livia Tagliapietra, Nicholas Zair, e Patrick James, 98–121. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Zair, Nicholas. 2013. «Individualism in “Osco-Greek” Orthography». In Scribes as Agents of Language Change, a cura di Esther-Miriam Wagner, Ben Outhwaite, e Bettina Beinhoff, 217–26. Studies in Language Change 10. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
- Zair, Nicholas. 2016. Oscan In The Greek Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Last update
10.04.2024