A comprehensive and up-to-date account of the languages of ancient Sicily by an international team of experts.

A groundbreaking new interpretation of the relationship between Greek and Oscan, two of the most widely spoken languages of pre-Roman Italy.

In pre-Roman Italy and Sicily, dozens of languages and writing systems competed and interacted, and bilingualism was the norm. Using frameworks from epigraphy, archaeology and the sociolinguistics of language contact, this book explores the relationship between Greek and Oscan, two of the most widely spoken languages in the south of the peninsula. Dr McDonald undertakes a new analysis of the entire corpus of South Oscan texts written in Lucania, Bruttium and Messana, including dedications, curse tablets, laws, funerary texts and graffiti. She demonstrates that genre and domain are critical to understanding where and when Greek was used within Oscan-speaking communities, and how ancient bilinguals exploited the social meaning of their languages in their writing. This book also offers a cutting-edge example of how to build the fullest possible picture of bilingualism in fragmentary languages across the ancient world.

This volume contains a new and up-to date selection of case studies which offer new insights on various topics in Indo-European linguistics, with a focus on contact, variation, and reconstruction, and with methods that straddle the divide between Linguistics and Philology.

Writing in the ancient Mediterranean existed against a backdrop of very high levels of interaction and contact. In the societies around its shores, writing was a dynamic practice that could serve many purposes – from a tool used by elites to control resources and establish their power bases to a symbol of local identity and a means of conveying complex information and ideas. This volume presents a group of papers by members of the Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) research team and visiting fellows, offering a range of different perspectives and approaches to problems of writing in the ancient Mediterranean. They focus on practices, viewing writing as something that people do within a wider social and cultural context, and on adaptations, considering the ways in which writing changed and was changed by the people using it.

The island of Sicily has for centuries been a meeting point where civilizations transformed one another and gave life to the cultural developments at the foundation of European modernity. The essays collected here explore Sicily as a place where these cultural interactions have produced conflict but also new material and intellectual exchange.

The book deals with the concept of fragmentation as applied to languages and their documentation. It focuses in particular on the theoretical and methodological consequences of such a fragmentation for the linguistic analysis and interpretation of texts and, hence, for the reconstruction of languages. Furthermore, by adopting an innovative perspective, the book aims to test the application of the concept of fragmentation to languages which are not commonly included in the categories of ‘Corpussprache’, ‘Trümmersprache’, and ‘Restsprache’. This is the case with diachronic or diatopic varieties — of even well-known languages — which are only attested through a limited corpus of texts as well as with endangered languages. In this latter case, not only is the documentation fragmented, but the very linguistic competence of the speakers, due to the reduction of contexts of language use, interference phenomena with majority languages, and consequent presence of semi-speakers.