Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/34

14 great Italian stock, and that this branch, although much more closely related to Latin than to Greek, was very decidedly distinct from the Latin. In the pronoun, and frequently elsewhere, the Samnite and Umbrian used p where the Roman used q, as pis for quis; just as languages otherwise closely related are found to differ; for instance, p is peculiar to the Celtic in Brittany and Wales, k to the Gaelic and Erse. Among the vowel sounds the diphthongs in Latin, and the northern dialects in general, appear very much destroyed; on the other hand, in the southern Italian dialects they have suffered little; and connected with this is the fact that in composition the Roman weakens the. radical vowel, otherwise so strictly preserved,—a modification which does not take place in the kindred group of languages. The genitive of words in a is in this group as among the Greeks as, among the Romans, in the language when fully formed æ; that of words in us is in the Samnite eis, in the Umbrian es, among the Romans ei; the locative disappeared more and more from the language of the latter, while it continued in full use in the other Italian dialects; the dative plural in bus is retained only in Latin. The Umbro-Samnite infinitive in um is foreign to the Romans; while the Osco-Umbrian future formed from the root es, after the Greek fashion (her-est, like 🇬🇷), has almost, perhaps altogether, disappeared in Latin, and its place is supplied by the optative of the simple verb, or by analogous formations from fuo (ama-bo). In many of these instances, however—in the forms of the cases, for example—the differences only exist in the two languages when fully formed, while in their infancy they coincide. It thus appears that, while the Italian language holds an independent position by the side of the Greek, the Latin dialect within it bears a relation to the Umbro-Samnite somewhat similar to that between the Ionic and the Doric; and the differences of the Oscan and Umbrian, and kindred dialects, may be compared with the differences between the Dorism of Sicily and the Dorism of Sparta.

Each of these linguistic phenomena is the result and the attestation of an historical event. With perfect certainty they guide us to the conclusion that from the common cradle of peoples and languages there issued a stock which embraced in common the ancestors of the Greeks and the Italians; that from this, at a subsequent period, the Italians