LATIN LANGUAGE. 'The language of an cient Rome. It was originally the vernacular of the Latini, a small tribe of Central Italy, occu pying the plain of Latium (q.v.) south of the Tiber between the Apennines and the sea, and was thus the language of the founders of Rona.. With the growth and conquests of that city it spread until it became the almost universal language of the ‘Vestern civilized world. Latin belongs in its origin to the so-called ('Indo Germanic,' Aryan) group of languages, which comprises, in Asia, the non-Dravidian tongues of India. Persian, and Armenian; and in Europe, the Italic. Celtic, Teutonic (Germanic), Ballo-Slavonic. and Albanian languages. A simi larity of sound. inflexion, and vocabulary shows that all of these are descended from a common source, or Ursprache.
The Latin language is not original in Italy. A wave of migration from the north in prehis toric times brought into the peninsula the hordes of italic people. who pushed their way to the southward, driving before them or assimilating the earlier inhabitants. until they occupied all the central and northern regions from sea to sea. Of these Italic invaders there were two ethnic and lingni-tic divisions of quite unequal extent: the Umbro-Sabellians and the Latino. Ealkeans. The former. with closely related dia lects. occupied in historie times all the vast mountainous country south of the Rubicon and east of the Tiber, far into Apulia and Lucania in fact. all Central Italy except the narrow coast plain north and south of the Tiber mouth. which was held by the lesser division of Latins and Faliscans. Doubtless in earlier times they had extended still farther to the north and west, whence they were dislodged by the invasions, first of the Etruscans:. then of the Gauls.
The Umbro-Sabellian races—Umbrians, Vol s•ians, „Equians. 'alines, Ilirpini, Fren taM, Samnites, and others—spoke a congeries of related dialects, of which relatively little is known to-day, and that mainly from inscription,, place-names, and glosses or casual references in the ancient writers. But it is certain that there were two main divisions of language, the Umbrian and the Oscan; the former spoken in the north, the latter in the centre and south of the region.
Umnatax is known from many inscriptions, but best from the famous Eugubine Tables (q.v.). with inscriptions in Umbrian and Latin, discovered at Iguvium (now Gubbio) in 1444. Umbrian used the Etruscan alphabet and was written from right to left.
OscaN was spoken over a more extended region and has left more numerous monuments. notably the earlier inscriptions of Pompeii, and espe cially the famous Tabula Bantina, a bronze tablet found at Tiantia in Apulia in 1793. Oscan lies nearer to Latin than Umbrian; it has a peculiar alphabet derived from the Etruscan and written from right to left. Both Umbrian and Oscan
ceased to lie spoken before the end of the first century.
The second—the FaliscO-Latin—group of Italie dialects was spoken over a very limited area, the low plateaus to the south and north of the Tiber. here we hind two cognate dialects, the Latin south of the Tiber. in Latium, and the Faliscan in a few scattered settlements to the north. Ilad not Rome by its position become the con queror of Italy, Latin would surely have be come extinct as did Faliscan, which we know only from a few inscriptions. For further ac count and bibliography. see ITALIC LANGUAGES.
But of all the members of the italic group. Latin alone, so far as we know, attained the rank of a literary language, and, owing in part to Roman conquests, extended itself not only over all Italy, but over Northern Africa and all Western Europe. where it still holds ground. as it were. in the form of the Romance tongues.
Three stages or states of development are dis tinguishable in the history of the Latin lan guage. The first is anterior to the beginning of literary culture, and may he termed the archaic stage. This period may lie regarded as continuing to the time of EIM (n.c. 239). Its monuments consist in the main of inscriptions; some isolated forms have been preserved by the grammarians. and a few characteristic tendencies tire revealed by the early dramatists. This early Latin is seen to be as crude and undeveloped as the Oscan or Umbrian. Among the most an cient relics are the quadrangular cippus of tufa, inscribed with very primitive characters running alternately from left to right and right to left. found in 1899 in the Roman Forum; the gold fibula of Numasios found in a tomb at Prameste (Palestrina) ; and the vase inscribed with a long `curse,' known as the `Duenos Inscription.' found on the Quirinal Hill in Rome in 1880. Other monuments are the very ancient Carmine Sa ngria preserved by Var•o (De Ling. Lat.. vii., 26, 27) ; the Carmen Fratrum Arralium, dating from the time of the kings, and engraved on a bronze tablet of the reign of EIngabalus, which was dug up in 1778 on the very site of the grove of the ancient college; the text of the twelve tables (about B. c. 450), which is known to its in quotations and has not been preserved in its in tegrity; and the Seipionton Efogia, or epitaphs of the Scipios, the earliest of Which is perhaps that of L. Cornelius Scipio, son of Barbatus, and consul in fix. 259. Most of these and many others are given by Wordsworth, Fragments and Npecimens of Early Latin (Oxford, 1874), and Allen, liCninants of Early Latin (Boston, 1880).