Oscan Reconstruction

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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by ęzo »

Sleinad Flar wrote:I'll respond to your comments later (I want to read Buck a little more before I respond), but for this:
Is your Wallace book available online? I might have to have a look at it. What about any other books with a good view of Proto-Italic? In the meantime I'll get around to writing up the second declension.
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by Sleinad Flar »

kanejam wrote:Thanks Sleinad! I've been very distracted but I promise to do verbs next! They'll be a bit trickyAlso thanks for the response on intervocalic h. I found quite a few examples of praenomina and gentiles with an h marking hiatus (or at least what appears to be hiatus) so who knows. I'll have a proper look when I have a minute but maybe h denotes /x/ everywhere except intervocalically, where a previous [*G] (which might be from Proto-Italic to follow the intevocalic voicing of /*f/ and /*s/) has been lost maybe?
Heh, 'a bit tricky' might be an understatement. There's bound to be some reconstruction going to happen.
I like your solution for <h>; it makes perfect sense.
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by kanejam »

Uzhdarchios wrote:Also available here, if you want to download without having to register anywhere.
De Vaan's etymological dictionary is here, if you want that as well.
Thanks very much! I will have a look through that to see if anything more can be gleaned without pure conjecture.

Anyway, onwards to verbs!


Verbs

Once again, Oscan morphology is very similar to Latin morphology. It is highly inflecting, marking three persons, two numbers, three moods, two voices, three tense and two aspects. Firstly, here are the personal endings:

1SG ... -u ... -m
2SG ... -s ... -s
3SG ... -t ... -d
3PL ... -nt ... -ns

The two sets of endings mark a distinction that was lost in all forms but the first singular in Latin. The endings on the right are the primary endings, used for the Present, Future and Future Perfect Indicative, and the second set of endings are the secondary endings, used in the Imperfect and Perfect Indicative, as well as the entirety of the Subjunctive.

You will notice that the 1PL and 2PL forms are missing, and that is because they are completely unattested in all the Sabellic inscriptions, apart from two I just found in Wallace, South Picene -ms and -tas. Will have to look into this. I would love some help with this, but I think that they would likely be as follows:
1PL ... -ms ... -ms
2PL ... -z ... -z

Where Latin has the thematic ending -unt (from *-ont), Oscan instead has the athematic ending *-ent generalised. This ending became either -et or -ínt, resulting in set 'they are', corresponding to Latin sunt.

Just as Oscan nouns fell into declensions, Oscan verbs are arranged in five conjugations, based on the thematic vowel. The first conjugation has an ā in the root, such as faamat 'he calls'. The second conjugation has an ē as in fatíum 'to speak'. The third conjugation of Latin corresponds to two conjugations: the i-conjuagtion as in fakiiad 'he should make' and the e-conjugation as in acum 'to move' (cognate to Latin agere). The last conjugation has an ī in the stem, and I can't find an example immediately.

This is probably enough for one go, but here is a reconstructed present indicative of faamat:

1SG - faamahu (that h is unattested but it would make sense)
2SG - faamas
3SG - faamat
1PL - faamams
2PL - faamaz
3PL - faamant
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by Sleinad Flar »

Oh man, the holes in the knowledge of the Sabellian verb system in general, and the Oscan one in particular, are worse than I thought...

I agree with your first and second plural ending -ms and -z (-ts). It makes sense in light of Latin -mus and -tis, and especially in light of South Picene -ms.

{Side-note: I'm unsure about SP videtas, which is equated with L videtis. The a-vocalism of the ending bugs me, unless there's an e > a rule in SP I'm not aware of. I'm starting to think it's t-perfect in disguise (<*wid-e-tt-as?), with 2sg ending....}

Also agreed on the primary 3pl ending, written as either -et (sometimes -ent) or -ínt.
The first conjugation has an ā in the root, such as faamat 'he calls'
You mean: the stem ends in ā (or a).

Faamahu without contraction and h indicating hiatus, makes sense.

So basically, well done!
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by kanejam »

Yeah the information is incredibly sparse, especially for non 3rd person forms. The third person form is either et or ínt, I'm not sure of the exact rules of n-loss but it's that is pretty well attested. I also thought SP videtas looked a bit odd.

Perfect

The perfect in Oscan is essentially the same as Latin. The most common method of making the perfect is through a suffix, such as -t-, -tt-, -f-, -k- and sometimes even -s-. Examples are prúfatted 'approved' from prúfat 'approves', aíkdafed 'rebuilt' from aíkdat 'rebuilds' or kellaked 'collected' from kellat 'collects'. Also used are reduplication and suppletion but these are likely to be unproductive. An example is fefakíd 'made' from fakít 'makes'.

I made up those present tense forms from the perfect as they aren't attested. I just read in Wallace about irregular presents that might be formed with suffixes or reduplication which sort of throws a spanner in the works in terms of reconstruction. I suppose we will just have to ignore them for now and maybe spice things up later on if need be.

There are a few patterns; the ā-stems prefer -t(t)- as the perfect suffix. Here is an example of the perfect of duunaúm 'donate':

1SG - duunatem
2SG - duunates
3SG - duunated
1PL - duunatems
2PL - duunatez
3PL - duunatens

More on tenses and the subjunctive next time!
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

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Tense

So far we've looked at the present tense (and present perfect) only. To form the future indicative, simply add an -(e)s- in between the root and the personal ending:

1SG - faamasu 'I will call'
2SG - faamases
3SG - faamast
1PL - faamasems
2PL - faamasez
3PL - faamaset

It is only attested in the third person, so I'm not completely certain on the other forms.

To form the future perfect, simply add -us- to the perfect stem:

1SG - duunatusu 'I will have donated'
2SG - duunatuses
3SG - duunatust
1PL - duunatusems
2PL - duunatusez
3PL - duunatuset


The imperfect is incredibly poorly attested and in fact I think only a single form fufans 'they were' exists. Buck doesn't think that this is evidence for anything as it is part of the irregular verb 'to be' and the reading isn't 100% certain. He even goes on to say that we can't prove Lscan did have an imperfect, and if it did, we can't tell anything about what it was like. Wallace goes the other way, and says that it's proof of a regular imperfect suffix -fā-, which is the same as Latin's imperfect suffix -bā-.

As we're trying to reconstruct Oscan, Buck isn't very helpful. After having read only Buck, I guess that maybe the imperfect was formed by changing the primary ending to a secondary. The trouble with that is that it's identical for three persons, which isn't ideal. So maybe going with Rex might be the best idea.

1SG ... faamafam ... duunafam
2SG ... faamafas ... duunafas
3SG ... faamafad ... duunafad
1PL ... faamafams ... duunafams
2PL ... faamafaz ... duunafaz
3PL ... faamafans ... duunafans

There is no evidence at all for a pluperfect (past perfect), and both Buck and Wallace leave the issue alone entirely, and so will we. Here's a recap of our system so far, remember these are all indicative and active:

.................. past ........... present ...... future
non-perfect ... duunafam ... duunahu .... duunasu
perfect ......... N/A .......... duunatem ... duunatusu
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

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Subjunctive

The subjunctive is a tense used for uncertain acts and in some dependent clauses such as sakrim fakiiad kasit 'it's necessary that he/she sacrifice a victim'.

To form the subjunctive, simply append -ā- to the end of the present stem to make the subjunctive stem, except for ā verbs which take -ī. So for example, pútíans 'may they be able' and deívaid 'let him/her swear'. That last word is three syllables and could probably be spelt with an h, although it is actually attested without one.

To make the imperfect subjunctive, simply attach -sē to the present stem: fusíd 'he/she should be'. For the perfect subjunctive, attach -ē to the perfect stem e.g. tríbarakattíns 'they should build'. So here is a sample subjunctive:

........ present ... imperfect ... perfect
1SG ... duunaim ... duunasím ... duunatím
2SG ... duunais ... duunasís ... duunatís
3SG ... duunaid ... duunasíd ... duunatíd
1PL ... duunaims ... duunasíms ... duunatíms
2PL ... duunaiz ... duunasíz ... duunatíz
3PL ... duunains ... duunasíns ... duunatíns
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

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Imperative

The evidence for the imperative is a bit wonky and Wallace and Buck don't really seem to match up. So for now we'll assume a single, regular ending for the imperative. Oscan has both a second and third person, but these are identical for both persons. There's no evidence of a future imperative as Latin has so we'll just ignore it.

The singular endings of the singular imperative are -tud for the active voice and -mur for the passive voice (or the active of deponent verbs), for example, liíkitud 'let it be permitted' and kensamur 'let it be assessed'.

The plural is a little trickier; Umbrian has the nice plurals tu : tuto and mu : mumo but this wouldn't work for Oscan. The one form that might correspond to a plural imperative is eítuns, which Buck likes because it could be formed by analogy as -ns being the plural of -d. I quite like this so I'll go with it. The trouble now is what the passive plural would be.

I realise I've jumped the gun a bit talking about the passive; I've been avoiding it because it's a bit of a pain in the neck and completely unattested outside of the third person. I promise to cover that next, along with the two irregular verbs and non-finite forms.
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by Sleinad Flar »

Re: Imperfect
Heh, I would've gone with Buck :D.

The reasoning for this is twofold:
1. As you said, the only possibly imperfect form is fufans and this looks like either a perfect or a pluperfect to me, esp. in the light of the perfect fufens. The latter could simply be a more regular variant of the former. In any case, this reeks of reduplication, not suffixation.
2. In Latin, the imperfect endings -bas, -ba:s etc. are strengthened by the future endings -bo:, -bis etc (compare also irregular impf erat, future erit). Sabellic has a different future formation in -s-, so there's nothing to back-up an imperfect in -fa-.

A counterargument would be the imperfect subjunctive in -sí-. It's rather strange that an imperfect subjunctive is better attested than an imperfect indicative. However, as Buck says (p. 218): 'All the occurances of the Imperfect Subjunctive are in clauses depending on an Historical Perfect...', just like the Latin sequence of tenses. It's not inconceivable that this sí-form was kept around precisely for these past-tensed constructions, while there was no reason to keep the fa-form around (if it ever developed in Sabellic), as the perfect indicative already functioned as a past tense (the perfect subjunctive has a whole different range of uses, none of them historical).

The whole imperfect mess is of course a very difficult question, and ultimately tied to the prehistory of the various suffixes. Because of the lack of evidence, I'm very hesistant to posit an imperfect indicative at all.

Re: Perfect
In the light of manafum, the 1sg perfect ending might have been -um.
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

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@Sleinad Flar, just finished this post when I saw yours. Thanks for the contribution! I am tired now so I will post what I have below and address your points in the morning.

Passive

Just about every active form in Oscan has a passive counterpart. There are even a few attested perfect passives which Latin lacks, although the more common way was to use a non-finite adjectival form (the past participle) along with an inflected form of the verb esúm 'to be'. In this case the past participle would agree in gender and case with the subject. The trouble with the passive is that it is only attested in the third person and has a different set of personal endings. I'll describe the third person endings and call for help for the other forms.

The singular passive form generally ends in -ter, apart from after an -e- or -í- at the end of the stem when it's just -r. The plural form is -nter except after an -e- when it's just -ter. Here are a few examples: vínkter 'he/she is convinced/convicted', karanter 'they eat' - which I think is one of those infamous deponent verbs I mentioned.

I think for most of the other forms, you simply replace the active personal endings with the passive endings: kúmparaskuster 'he/she will be consulted', sakahíter 'that he/she be sanctified', sakarafír 'that he/she have been consecrated' (saka- and sakara are different roots, the first coming from *sanka- and the second from *sakra-). There are a few problems and one attested case each of -tir and -tar for the third singular, which can't readily be explained. Will just need to work on this. (Wallace holds that sakarafír instead indicates a present infinitive, 'to be consecrated')


Non-finite forms

The present infinitive is formed with the suffix -úm such as tríbarakavúm 'to build', with the v being merely a glide. See just above for the passive infinitive, which Buck doesn't mention. I think more likely is that it was just formed by the past participle plus esúm as in the perfect passive infinitive. Neither author mentions a perfect active infinitive.

The supine is a verbal noun, usually in the accusative case, that expresses purpose, as in the Latin sentence Gladiatores adierunt pugnatum 'the gladiators came to fight'. It is formed similarly to the Latin supine, with the suffix -túm and behaves as a second declension noun. There are no attested supines in Oscan but an example is duunatúm 'to donate'.

The present participle is an adjectival similar to English verb forms in '-ing'. These had the suffix -nt- and follow the consonant stem pattern, similarly to Latin. So for example praísentid 'being present' as an ablative form of (probably) praísenz. (Maybe that should be praísef as in Umbrian, I'll have to read up on when that change happens happens).

The past participle is an adjectival similar to English verb forms in '-ed'. These had the suffix -to- and follow the o-stem pattern for masculine and neuter and the a-stem pattern for feminine. For example teremnaz, teremnatú 'widened' and skrifz, skriftú 'written'.

The perfect participle according to Wallace was formed with -us- on the basis of the one form sipus 'knowing'. I'll try to check this with Buck, especially because Wallace doesn't say what declension they might follow other than possibly an s-stem.

Lastly, gerundives were another verbal noun type thingy, corresponding roughly to the non-adjectival uses of the English '-ing' words. (Correct me if I'm wrong, my Latin gets fuzzy around non-finite forms) It is formed with -nno- and inflected as o- and a-stems, e.g. úpsanns, úpsannú 'build'.

Next up, we will look at the verb 'to be' and maybe even 'to go'.
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

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The reason I went with Wallace was a) because Buck doesn't say what an imperfect might look like and I want to reconstruct as complete a picture of Oscan as I can, not necessarily the most accurate; 2) I thought that because the cognate exists in Latin that it was just enough evidence. But yeah, you are right about fufans being a bit fishy.

I do want an imperfect because I imagine that, as in Latin, it would perform special roles of the past tense, even if it is eventually taken over by the perfect. The trouble with a lot of this reconstruction is I'm not sure quite how much will be eroded away anyway. The passive probably would be, and maybe the imperfect too.

With the perfect endings, I'll look a bit more into it. If the 1SG ending is -um, then maybe the other 1st and 2nd person endings are wrong, at least in the vowels. We are running into problems with such small data sets...

Also, any thoughts on how to resolve the awkward future tense forms?


ESÚM

The verb 'to be' is an important verb. It is irregular, suppletive, and slightly lacking in attestation, although not nearly as badly as the verb 'to go'.

The present of both the indicative and the subjunctive are built of a stem (e)s-, whence súm 'I am', est 'he/she is' and set 'they are'. The forms es for 2SG and súms for 1PL are likely, but I'm not sure about 2PL (esz seems like an illegal cluster; maybe a vowel would pop up as in ager from *agros).

There also exist the forms sim/b] and íst. The second is some weird alternate form or something, I don't know, but the second could be the subjunctive, which would be nice because then we could assume the same formation as in Latin. The subjunctive is otherwise unattested. Buck doesn't mention the form sim so he must have a different interpretation for it. He does however mention a lot of Umbrian subjunctives in sī-.

The other form with es- is the imperative in estud and presumably estuns. All other forms are formed with the stem fu-, so a future with fust, fuset. Like I said before, both authors agree on fufans being an imperfect plural, and so would give a singular form fufad. The imperfect subjunctive is regular with the form fusíd.

The perfect is attested in fufens which is just a nice little reduplicated stem. Buck gives fust for a future perfect form which I'm not sure about and will have to check Wallace. I would expect *fufust. The subjunctive perfect is weird again, with fuíd.

Here is the most complete picture of the verb that I can give:

PRES ... súm ... es ... est ... súms ... esez ... set
FUT ... fusu ... fuses ... fust ... fusems ... fusez ... fuset
IMP ... fufam ... fufas ... fufad ... fufams ... fufaz ... fufans
PERF ... fufem(fufum?) ... fufes ... fufed ... fufems ... fufez ... fufens
FUT PERF ... fusu ... fuses ... fust ... fusems ... fusez ... fuset
SUB ... siím ... siís ... siíd ... siíms ... siíz ... siíns
SUB IMP ... fusím ... fusís ... fusíd ... fusíms ... fusíz ... fusíns
SUB PERF ... fuím ... fuís ... fuíd ... fuíms ... fuíz ... fuíns

Infinitive ... esúm
Imperative ... estud ... estuns
Present participle ... senz (sef?)


Pronouns next? Please let me know if I've left gaps or holes anywhere, or if there's anything you want me to cover next.
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

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Realised pronouns are a bit of a pain, so I'll leave them in the workshop for a bit. Here are the numerals, almost as painful due to their poor attestation.

Numbers

1. The number one is unstressed but the likely form is úíns, and might have followed the pronominal declension as Latin ūnus did. The ordinal number would be either prismús (would the suncope of ú be blocked by the cluster or what? Maybe become prisem, prismú, prismúm) or prúms depending on whether it follows Paelignian or Umbrian, more likely the former as it's more closely related to Oscan.

2. The number two is also unattested. The form may be duus, duvas, following the plural of o-/ā-stems rather than continuing the dual as in Latin. The word altter 'other' could likely be used as an ordinal, but it may have had the form dutis, dutiú, dutim as well. Where Latin has bi-, Osan most likely had di-.

3. Oscan trís (although it should be tríís) is attested as the masculine and feminine accusative. It has the root treí- and follows the plural i-stem conjugation. The ordinal would be tertis, tertiú, tertim.

4. We run into difficulty with four as Wallace and Buck disagree. There are the forms pettiur (Wallace), petora (Buck) and petirú- (both). Wallace's forms could be in the same relation to each other as the n-stem nouns, with -i- in place of -iu- in oblique forms. Buck's form is however easier to explain from the PIt form *kwetwor. Wallace would require a form *kwetur, with samparasana of the *w after syncope, u > ju after a dental and then lengthening of a voiceless stop before /j/. All in all possible but not as likely. Buck also gives a possible cardinal trutum which believe it or not is explainable as a zero form of the PIE numeral, *kturīya- > *ktru-to- (in which case it would be turz, turtú, turtúm.

5. From here on the cardinals are indeclinable (not sure about ordinals). Five is púmpe and its ordinal is púnz, púntú, púntúm.

6. The cardinal might be seks (or should it be sííks?) and the ordinal sest- (is /sts/ a valid final cluster? I need a way to resolve awkward consonant clusters)

7. There is no evidence for the number seven, but it might be of the form seftúm, with the ordinal sefz, seftú, seftúm.

8. The cardinal is probably úhtu and the ordinal úhtavis as in the name, although I don't know how likely that is.

9. The ordinal is probably núvems, núv(e)mú núv(e)múm or something similar, following the cardinal rather than the Latin nōnus?

10. The cardinal is probably dekem, with the ordinal dekems, dekmú, dekmúm although there is also a possible form deket-.

Edit: Here's a little chart :)

úíns, úínú, úínúm ... priísmús, priísmú, priísmúm
duus, duvas, duvú ... dutis, duttiú, dutim
tríís, triiú ... tertis, tertiú, tertim
pettiur, petirú ... trutis, truttiú, trutim
púmpe ... púnz, púntú, púntúm
sess ... sestús, sestú, sestúm
seftúm ... seftús, seftú, seftúm
úhtu ... úhtavis, úhtaviú, úhtavim
núvem ... núvems, núvmú núvmúm
dekem ... dekems, dekmú, dekmúm

Unresolved questions: would *prīsmos, *sekstos, *septos keep the o because of the cluster or deal with it in some other way? Also, what about the word dekez, deketú, deketúm?
Would duttiú and truttiú lose or generalise the double tt or just leave it as is? The doubling of consonants before /j/ (and sometimes before /r/ and /w/) seems to be a later development and possibly still productive by 100BCE.
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by Sleinad Flar »

Re: Imperfect
Fair enough. At gun-point, I'd suggest an imperfect suffix -sa-. The reasoning for this is as follows: In Latin the imperfect looks like a 'subjunctive' to the future. Compare for example: pres. ind. regit : pres. subj. regat :: fut. erit : impf. erat:: fut. parābit : impf. parābat. If we use a similar 'rule' for Oscan we get pres. ind. didet : pres. subj. didad, fut. fust : impf. *fusad and fut. faamast : impf. *faamasad.

Re: Future
Nothing wrong with it IMO.

Re: Imperative
Why wouldn't the -tu : -tuto :: -mu: -mumo equation work in Oscan as well? You could have something like -tud : *-tutod :: -mur : *-mumor. The ending -ns could stil be an alternative 3pl imperative ending.

Re: Passive
Oh boy. That's a toughy.
Maybe a comparison with related and less related languages is in order, in this case Latin and Old Irish:
Latin: -or, -ris, -tur, -mur, -minī, -ntur
Old Irish: -ur, -ther, -thir, -mir, -the, -tir
Oscan: ?, ?, -ter, ?, ?, -nter
Let's look at the 1st person endings first. Both Latin -or and Old Irish -ur go back to PIE *-ōr, so there's no reason why the Sabellic endings wouldn't go back to those at well. This would yield 1 sg *-ur if I'm not mistaken.
The 1pl endings rhyme with the 3 sg/pl endings in both Latin and Old Irish, so why not in Oscan as well => *-mer.
The 2nd person endings are tougher. Old Irish points for 2sg to PIE *-th2e, Latin to PIE *-se or *-so (alt. Latin endings are -re and -rus). Both are legitimate PIE middle endings, so take your pick. Suggestions: *-tar, *-túr, *-se, *-sú(s).
The Latin 2pl ending (both indicative and imperative) apparently goes back to a participal formation in *-mVnoi. Wouldn't this lead to *-mnei or something similar in Oscan? Another possibility would be *-mumor, identical to the passive plural imperative ending, just like in Latin. One way or the other, according to Michael Weiss (Comparative Grammar of Latin, first draft, Ch. 28) it's almost certain the 2pl passive ending had an /m/ in it.

That's enough from me for now, will look into the rest later on (you're going too fast for me to keep up! :)).
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by kanejam »

I'll start with the passive, because why not. I like -ur for 1SG, it works well. I'm not convinced about -mer, I think it could just as easily be -mur or -múr.

Now for 2SG, I wonder if the attested case of an ending in -tar is actually a second person form? It still doesn't explain the case of -tir unless it's actually some kind of perfect passive and instead just represents the regular ending -r. I like -tar because it coincides with what you suggested. I'm hesitant about either of the forms without r as they are a bit unexpected, although that could just be some bias from me.

The 2PL form is going to cause more trouble. Buck thinks the form -mur from *-mōd and -minī from *-mnōi are indeed related, but the Latin form is weird enough that I don't think we can assume the same form for Oscan.

In terms of imperative, I didn't think it would work because the proto form would need to be *tōd-to and *mōd-mo, which don't really give the desired forms. I thought the '-ns as the plural of -d' explanation was pretty cute and the sort of thing that would happily happen through analogy. You're right that maybe it's only an alternate form as it does raise the difficult question of the passive plural.

I'm glad you like the future! I will go and think about the imperfect a bit. I sort of see what you mean about the whole subjunctive to the future thing and something like that could turn out through analogy. Thanks do this though, this is exactly the type of feedback that I want.
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by Sleinad Flar »

No sweat, I'm having fun with this!

Heh, those 'alternative' 3sg passive endings are from one inscription, the Curse of Vibia (Buck page 244), and their meanings are quite uncertain (in italics in Buck). It isn't even 100% certain they are verbs. Don't put too much faith in it.
The 2pl passive ending could be anything really, I don't think it can be resolved without actual attestations.
Ah, I can see why the analogy wouldn't work, and indeed *-tutod seems a little far-fetched (although it does have a nice ring to it). Maybe you could go back to PIE *-te for the 2pl (which IIRC is still the Latin imperative plural ending) and use -ns for the 3pl.

I'm gonna edit this post later to remark on the numbers.
Quattuor: pettiur is the actual attested form, 'pitora' is a Latin transcription mentioned by Festus ('..alii Osce quod hi quoque pitora quattuor vocent'), 'petiro' is found in the compound adverb petiropert 'four times'. There's quite a lot of contamination going on here, but that's not surprising (the number 'four' and its derivations are seldomly regularly derived from *kwetwor-).
Last edited by Sleinad Flar on Wed Feb 12, 2014 4:46 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by Sleinad Flar »

kanejam wrote: The perfect participle according to Wallace was formed with -us- on the basis of the one form sipus 'knowing'. I'll try to check this with Buck, especially because Wallace doesn't say what declension they might follow other than possibly an s-stem.
According to Das Wörterbuch, this form goes back to to a proto-form *sēpwōs, which is a PIE perfect active participle formation in *-wos/us-. In Volscian, and probably in Oscan too, this was transformed into an wo-stem (Volscian abl. sg. sepu). I don't think that 'perfect active participle' is a valid grammatical category for Italic (it usually isn't, IIRC only in Greek and Indo-Iranian); it's not uncommon for an adjective with the meaning 'knowing' to survive when all other wos-forms are lost (usually it's *widwōs however).
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by hwhatting »

Sleinad Flar wrote: I don't think that 'perfect active participle' is a valid grammatical category for Italic (it usually isn't, IIRC only in Greek and Indo-Iranian);
It also survived in Slavic (as the past active particple). For the rest, I agree with you that we'd need some more forms to posit this as a living grammatical category for Sabellic, as opposed to an adjectivised remnant.

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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by kanejam »

Alright well we'll just discard the perfect participle completely.

I like the idea of -te for the 2nd person plural so that -ns wouldn't be a 2nd person form. Supposedly the 2SG imperative ending is from *-mōd and the r comes by analogy... Maybe the plural could be -mutte? Or -mur(u)te? But it's sort of weird isn't it? I think it should just be the same as the usual 2PL passive ending, and at one point, if need be, I think we'll just have to make some arbitrary decision about that. Meh. Still need to sort out the imperfect as well.

I found pettiur in de Vaans as well so we'll assume that's the proper form. De Vaans gives *kwetwōr, so the ō > ū change would drive out the w and then through regular sound change yield pettiur. To get from there to the oblique stem in petir-, the whole declension needs to be completely reinvented from pettiur with respect to n-stems, which is far fetched but I like it! So the declension of the numeral four might look like this:

... M/F ... N
Nom/Voc ... pettiur ... petirú
Gen ... petirum ... petirum
Dat/Abl ... petiríss ... petiríss
Acc ... pettiur ... petirú

Happy with that? So we then have a relatively complete set of cardinals and ordinals of 1-10.
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by kanejam »

I've added a list of numerals to the bottom of the numeral post. There a still a few issues with syncopation around clusters which I'm trying to resolve and wouldn't mind help with. One of the main issues are *-stVs clusters. Should the second /s/ disappear leaving only /st/? Maybe the /sts/ simplifies to /ss/? Or else the syncopation might not happen at all?

I just found three forms, Paelignian lexe, Marrucinian leexe and another legie. De Vaans lists them all as cognates of Latin legere 'to collect, read' and lists them as 2PL perfect forms. So maybe the Sabellic langs, like Latin, had a different set of endings for some perfect forms? I'm not sure where the Latin forms come from. Otherwise, maybe -z as the 2PL ending is wrong. None of them are necessarily correct forms and so I'm not too fussed about just ignoring them.

I promise to do pronouns next, in the mean time here's the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives which I realized I left out of the adjective post.

The comparative is formed in -is from *-jos from the regular adjective. There aren't a whole lot of examples but here are too: mais/maister 'larger', maims 'largest'; minster 'smaller'. There are a few holes in how the whole system worked. minster contains an irregular suffix.
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by Sleinad Flar »

Latin quattuor is uninflected, so I don't see why its Oscan counterpart should be inflected, especially since pettiur isn't a regular plural plural form. The form petirú might only appear in compositions.

I'm not sure why you want to resolve -stVs clusters.(EDIT: Ah, it's because of the ordinals. I'll try and get back on that later).

A lot of the Latin perfect come from PIE endings, often augmented e.g. 1sg < *-h2e + *-i, 3sg -it < *-e + *-t, (early) 3pl -ēre < *-ēr +*-i. The 1pl ending is from the present endings. The real kickers here are the 2nd person endings -is-tī and -is-tis, and the 3pl ending -er-unt. While the second parts of those endings are easy (-tī < *-th2e + *-i, plurals from the present), it's this -is/er- element that requires explanation. Maybe it's from *-us-, the same element which forms the Sabellic future perfect. Maybe it's just the 2sg present ending. Then again, maybe not.

Nevertheless, 3pl -ns (and in a lesser extend 1sg -úm) shows that Sabellic used secondary endings for the perfect, and that ye olde perfect endings were lost. Best to leave le(e)xe alone, it clouds the picture (although the forms are intriguing....)
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by kanejam »

Okay I'm having a few troubles with the pronouns so in the meantime here's a spreadsheet I've been working on:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... _web#gid=1

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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by R.Rusanov »

Looks like you're just taking what the two researchers wrote then guessing at the rest.

To present this as an objective reconstruction is fairly misleading.
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by kanejam »

R.Rusanov wrote:Looks like you're just taking what the two researchers wrote then guessing at the rest.

To present this as an objective reconstruction is fairly misleading.
Yes that's exactly what I'm doing. If you read the first post, then you might see that I'm trying to create an Oscan descendent and reconstructing what Oscan might have have been like solely for that purpose. I like to think the reconstruction is likely and I've left out a lot of bits that are entirely unclear such as the 4th and 5th declensions. I like to think that anyone reading closely will gain an understanding of the actual state of Oscan and I don't think I've been misleading. If you want to help out with this reconstruction, please do :)
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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by CaesarVincens »

kanejam, if you haven't already, I recommend looking at Andrew Sihler's "A New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin". It's an updated version of Carl Buck's and while it's focused on the histories of Greek and Latin, he does draw in Oscan material and comment on Proto-Italic forms.

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Re: Oscan Reconstruction

Post by marconatrix »

Thanks for this thread. I've always been curious about the other Italic langs but never found any detailed info. I'm only about half way through the thread but when I saw this :
Salmoneus wrote:
kanejam wrote: Some examples of Oscan names are Vibis Smintiis, Dekis Rahiis, Stenis Kalaviis.
Shock discovery: Oscans actually all eastern european mafia.
I couldn't resist commenting that the noun paradigms keep reminding me of Latvian, which a looked into a bit a while back. Sort of the same level of deviation from PIE, simplification of endings and so on. Obviously a parallel development but maybe of interest to someone?
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