osco

Oscan was the principal Sabellic (Italic) language of the Samnites and of Campania, spoken across central-southern Italy from roughly the 5th century BCE until the 1st century CE, when it was displaced by Latin in the wake of the Social War (91–87 BCE) and the Augustan-era Romanization of Italy. It is sister to Umbrian and South Picene, and a more distant relative of Latin. The corpus is fragmentary — comprising the long bronze Tabula Bantina, the Cippus Abellanus, the Agnone Tablet, and several hundred shorter inscriptions and dipinti, including a remarkable concentration of Pompeian eituns electoral notices and graffiti buried by Vesuvius in 79 CE. Oscan was usually written right-to-left in a native Etruscan-derived alphabet (with later experiments in the Greek alphabet in the south and the Latin alphabet in the late period), and shows several Italic-internal innovations distinguishing it from Latin, including retention of PIE *kʷ as p (cf. Oscan pis "who" vs Latin quis) and a striking five-vowel system with phonemic vowel length marked by gemination.