engleski

Two pre-Roman alphabets of Northern Italy : Venetic and Raetic

The dissertation, conceived as a pilot study for a project which would encompass all the Etruscan-derived pre-Roman scripts of northern Italy, concerns itself with the transmission processes, developments and adaptations resulting in alphabets of Etruscan origin which were used to write two languages, Venetic and Raetic, during the first millennium BC, and with the cross-fertilisation between these local alphabets. Following a discussion of the relationship between Etruscan orthography and the phonological system, with special attention given to the problem of the “aspirate letters, ” the main body of the thesis is taken up with detailed description and analysis of individual signs appearing in Venetic and Raetic inscriptional evidence, and their relationship to the phonology of the respective languages. These data are used to analyse the development of the alphabets from their source(s) in terms of the modifications of the source writing system that constitute its adaptation for the target language, and to identify particular strategies employed in adaptation and the reasons for them. The Venetic alphabets are shown to all ultimately derive from a single Etruscan source, which is argued to be a southern Etruscan system, and the differences between local Venetic alphabets to originate in internal reforms which were caused or supported by reasons of phonology or graphemics, script economy, and a desire to maintain local identities. A very tentative reconstruction of the Raetic phonological system is attempted, based on features of the alphabets that served as sources for its writing systems. The differences between Raetic alphabets are argued to originate in different sources and/or different patterns of adaptation or influence from Venetic and Etruscan ; cross-fertilisation between Raetic alphabets and the persistent influence of different alphabetic variants of Venetic on them is emphasised.

Venetic language; Venetic alphabet; Rhaetic language; Rhaetic alphabet; Etruscan language; Etruscan alphabet; writing systems

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