South Picene (Routledge World Languages)

South Picene is the pre-Roman language spoken in the Adriatic sector of central Italy. This book presents a description of what we know about the structure of this language.

South Picene is (together with Umbrian, Oscan, Latin, and Faliscan) one of the few members of the Italic branch of the Indo-European family and is also one of the European languages with the oldest existing texts (550 BCE). Besides a grammatical outline of the language, the book contains the linguistic (and often stylistic) analysis of all the 21 inscriptions that compose the South Picene epigraphic corpus and a word list.

South Picene will be of interest to students and scholars of Indo-European languages, Italic languages, and in general, ancient languages of the Italian peninsula.

Raoul Zamponi works primarily on little-known, extinct languages and is currently a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. He has previously held positions at the University of Siena and as principal investigator on a range of linguistic projects in Italy, Germany, and the USA.