SABINI. This was an ancient tribe of Italy which was more closely in touch with the Romans from the earliest recorded period than any other Italic people. They dwelt in the mountain ous country east of the Tiber, and north of the districts inhabited by the Latins and the Aequians in the heart of the Central Apen nines. Their boundary, between the southern portion of the Urn brians on the north-west, and of the Picentines on the north-east, was probably not very closely determined. The traditions connect them closely with the beginning of Rome, and with a large number of its early institutions, such as the worship of Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, and the patrician form of marriage (confarreatio).
Of their language as distinct from that of the Latins no artic ulate memorial has survived, but we have a large number of single words attributed to them by Latin writers, among which such forms as (I) fircus, Lat. hircus; (2) ausum, Lat. aurum; (3) novensiles, Lat. novensides ("gods of the nine seats") ; (4) the river name Farfarus, beside pure Lat. Fabaris (Servius, ad Aen. vii. 715) ; and (5) the traditional name of the Sabine king, Numa Pompilius (contrasted with Lat. Quinctilius), indicate clearly cer tain peculiarities in Sabine phonology : namely, (I) the representa tion of the Indo-European palatal aspirate gh by f instead of Lat. h; (2) the retention of s between vowels; (3) the change of me dial and initial d to 1; (4) the retention of medial f which became in Latin b or d; and (5) the change of Ind.-Eur. q to p. The tradi tion (e.g., Paul ex Fest. 327 M.) that the Sabines were the parent stock of the Samnites is directly confirmed by the name which the Samnites apparently used for themselves, which, with a Latin ized ending, would be Safini (see SAMNITES and the other articles there cited, dealing with the minor Samnite tribes).
To determine the ethnological relation of these tribes, whom we may call "Safine," to the people of Rome on the one hand, and the earlier stratum or strata of population in Italy on the other, lin guistic and archaeological material must be examined. Arch
aeological evidence connects the Sabines with the patricians of Rome, (see ROME, Ancient History). What language did the Sabines speak? Was it most nearly akin to Latin or to Oscan or again to Umbrian and Volscian? Festus, though he continually cites the Lingua Osca, never spoke of Lingua Sabina, but simply of Sabini, and the same is practically true of Varro, who never refers to the language of the Sabines as a living speech, though he does imply (v. 66 and 74) that the dialect used in the district differed somewhat from urban Latin. The speech therefore of the Sabines by Varro's time had become too Latinized to give us more than scanty indications of what it had once been. The language of the Samnites was that which is now known by the name of Oscan.
It appears that in, say, the 7th century, B.C., the Safines spoke a language not differing in any important particulars from that of the Samnites, generally known as Oscan ; and that when this war like tribe combined with the people of the Latian plain to found or fortify or enlarge the city of Rome, and at the end of the 6th century to drive out from it the Etruscans, who had in that cen tury become its masters, they imposed upon the new community many of their own usages, especially within the sphere of politics, but in the end adopted the language of Latium henceforth known as lingua Latina.
See R. S. Conway, Italic Dialects p. 351 (Cambridge, 5897). For the history of the Sabine district see Mommsen, C.I.L. ix. p. 396 ; and Beloch, "Der italische Bund unter riimischer Hegemonie" (Leipzig, 188o) and "La Conquista Romana della regione Sabina," in the Rivista di scoria antics ix. p. 269 (19°5).