Pre-Samnite was an ancient language spoken in southern

Campania Campania is an administrative Regions of Italy, region of Italy located in Southern Italy; most of it is in the south-western portion of the Italian Peninsula (with the Tyrrhenian Sea to its west), but it also includes the small Phlegraean Islan ...

, in Italy. The name ''Pre-Samnite'' refers to the fact that the language was spoken in early times in an area that was later colonized by Samnites, who spoke

Oscan Oscan is an extinct Indo-European language of southern Italy. The language is in the Osco-Umbrian or Sabellic branch of the Italic languages. Oscan is therefore a close relative of Umbrian and South Picene. Oscan was spoken by a number of t ...

.Sabellian Languages, R. E. Wallace, in The Ancient Languages of Europe, Ed. R. D. Woodward. Pre-Samnite is recorded in a few short inscriptions dating from around 500 BC. The language belongs to the

Osco-Umbrian The Osco-Umbrian, Sabellic or Sabellian languages are an extinct group of Italic languages, the Indo-European languages that were spoken in central and southern Italy by the Osco-Umbrians before being replaced by Latin, as the power of ancient Rom ...

group of languages, and may be closely related to Oscan, but shows a number of archaic features which were lost from Oscan.Sabellian Demonstratives: Forms and Functions, Emmanuel Dupraz. However, the material is too scant to enable a precise determination of the relation of Pre-Samnite either to Oscan or to the other Sabellian languages.

Sample text

The following text is a proposed reconstruction of a Pre-Samnite inscription found in Tortora: The proposed translation for this text reads: Another proposed reconstruction of the Tortora inscriptions reads: Another possibly Pre-Samnite inscription which was probably from

Capua Capua ( ; ) is a city and ''comune'' in the province of Caserta, in the region of Campania, southern Italy, located on the northeastern edge of the Campanian plain. History Ancient era The name of Capua comes from the Etruscan ''Capeva''. The ...

reads: The original text was written in ''

scriptio continua (Latin for 'continuous script'), also known as or , is a style of writing without spaces or other marks between the words or sentences. The form also lacks punctuation, diacritics, or distinguished letter case. In the West, the oldest Greek ...

'' and in the

Oscan alphabet The Old Italic scripts are a family of ancient writing systems used in the Italian Peninsula between about 700 and 100 BC, for various languages spoken in that time and place. The most notable member is the Etruscan alphabet, which was the im ...

References

{{Italic languages Osco-Umbrian languages Samnites Extinct languages of Europe Languages extinct in the 5th century BC