| South Picene | |
|---|---|
| Old Sabellic | |
| Native to | Picenum |
| Region | Marche, Italy |
| Era | attested 6th–4th century BC[1] |
Indo-European
| |
| Picene alphabets | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | spx |
spx | |
| Glottolog | sout2618 |
 Ethnolinguistic map of Italy in the Iron Age, before the Roman expansion and conquest of Italy | |
.JPG)
South Picene (also known as Paleo-Sabellic, Mid-Adriatic or Eastern Italic)[2] is an extinct Italic language belonging to the Sabellic subfamily. It is apparently unrelated to the North Picene language, which is not understood and therefore unclassified. South Picene texts were at first relatively inscrutable even though some words were clearly Indo-European. The discovery in 1983 that two of the apparently redundant punctuation marks were in reality simplified letters led to an incremental improvement in their understanding and a first translation in 1985. Difficulties remain. It may represent a third branch of Sabellic, along with Oscan and Umbrian (and their dialects),[3], or the whole Sabellic linguistic area may be best regarded as a linguistic continuum. The paucity of evidence from most of the 'minor dialects' contributes to these difficulties.
- ^ South Picene at MultiTree on the Linguist List
- ^ Farney, Gary D.; Bradley, Guy (2017). The Peoples of Ancient Italy. Walter de Gruyter. p. 582. ISBN 978-1-5015-0014-5.
- ^ Rix, Helmut (2004). Sabellische Texte: Die Texte des Oskischen, Umbrischen und Südpikenischen. Heidelberg: Carl Winter University Press. p. 4ff.