Date of Completion
5-1-2024
Thesis Advisor(s)
Andrea Calabrese
Honors Major
Linguistics/Philosophy
Disciplines
Indo-European Linguistics and Philology
Abstract
A brief analysis of the known corpus of verbal forms in Oscan and Umbrian, going over the formation of each form, a speculative full conjugation for each language, and a short comparison to Latin. The Sabellic languages share some innovations from PIE in common with their much more famous cousin, but they also differ in the formation of a few important forms. Both branches have a system of thematic vowels across tenses and aspects, suggesting a purely ornamental function bleached of meaning dating back to Proto-Italic. The future tense is Sabellic is derived from the PIE aorist, rather than PIE subjunctive as in Latin. The perfective is similar in formation overall (suggesting that it has origins in Proto-Italic), but the suffixes used in Sabellic are notably distinct from those in Latin, and only share some overlap between them. The Sabellic past tense is also nearly entirely absent- while Oscan retains a few imperfect forms in a single inscription, Umbrian has none, and neither has a pluperfect, suggesting that the morphological past tense was in the process of being lost in the family and may have only survived dialectally.
Recommended Citation
deMello, Kaleb, "The Sabellic Verbal Systems" (2024). Honors Scholar Theses. 1015.
https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/srhonors_theses/1015