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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: RON-SAC |
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SABINI , an ancient tribe of Italy, which was more closely in touch with the Romans from the earliest recorded 'period than any other Italic people. They dwelt in the mountainous country east of the Tiber, and north of the districts inhabited, by the Latins and the Aequians in the heart, of the Central Apennines. Their boundary, between the southern portion of the Umbrians on the north-west, and of the Picentines on the north-east, was probably not very closely determined. The traditions connect them closely with the beginning of Rome, and with a large number of its early institutions, such as the worship of Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus, and the patrician form of marriage (confarreatio).Of their language as distinct from that of the Latins no articulate memorial has survived, but we have a large number of single words attributed to them by Latin writers, among which such forms as (I) firms, Lat. hircus; (2) ausum, Lat. aurum; (3) nouensides, Lat. nouensides (" gods of the nine seats "); (4) the river name Farfarus, beside pure Lat. Fabaris (Servius, ad Aen. vii. 715); and (5) the traditional name of the Sabine king, Numa Pont pilius (contrasted with Lat. Quinctilius), indicate clearly certain peculiarities in Sabine phonology: namely, (1) the representation of the Indo-European palatal aspirate gh by f instead of Lat. h; (2) the retention of s between vowels; (3) the change of medial and initial d to l; (4) the retention of medial f which became in Latin b or d; and (5) the change of Ind.-Eur. q to p. Not less clear is the well attested tradition (e.g. Paul ex Fest. 327 M.) that the Sabines were the parent stock of the Samnites, and this is directly confirmed by the name which the Samnites apparently used for themselves, which, with a Latinized ending, would be Sabni (see SAMNITES and the other articles there cited, dealing with the minor Samnite tribes). It is one of the most important problems in ancient history to determine what was the ethnological relation of these tribes, whom we may call " Safine," to the people of Rome on the one hand, and the earlier stratum or strata of population in Italy on the other. Much light has been thrown on this group of questions in recent
A single monument of 5th- or 4th-century Safine would be of unique value; but in the absence of any such direct evidence we are thrown back on a few cardinal facts: (I) Festus, though he continually cites the Lingua Osca never spoke of Lingua Sabina, but simply of Sabini, and the same is practically true of Varro, who never refers to the language of the Sabines as a living speech, though he does imply (v. 66 and 74) that the dialect used in the district
Ridge
tern -c-ua, cf. pas-crua, and Greek repva-fseiv, ,Lat. terra, " dry land," from tersd):, so that they would in fact offer no difficulty.There is further an important piece of evidence which connects together' all the Safine tribes' and distinguishes them sharply, at least in the 5th and following centuries n.c., from the earlier strata of population in Italy. As this point'arises in connexion with so many tribes it is desirable to offer the evidence for it here once for all. It rests upon the different character of the suffixes used by particular tribes and comtnbnities to form their ethnic Dialectic Area. -IO-. -CO-. -NO-. -TI-.. -ENSI-. Totals.. Messapii t6 .. 2 20- Peucetii . 1 15 3 19 Daunii . I 8 3 2 14 Bruttii . . . 2 . . I I 2 4 19 Lucani 2 .. 13 3 2 20 Hirpini .. 33 2 36, Frentani . . . 4 4 2 lo Samnites . i (1) 5 4 3 13 , Campani . . . 3 (1) 43 5 3 54 Aurunci I (1) 2 1 $ Volsci .. I 29 10 I 42 Hernici I I 3 2 6 Marsi I .. 3 4 I 9 Aequi . . . .. .. 6 2 .. 9 Latini 4 4 44 8 20 77. l (2) Early Rome . 2 .. 19 6 ,27 Sabini . . . .. 13 4 2 19 Etruria (including 5 2 34 9 20 70 the Falisci) Marrucini I (i) 2 I .. 4 Paeligni . . .. 5 2 7 Vestini . . .. 8 4 2 14 Piceni . .. .. (I) 15 5 14 34 Umbri . . .. .. 23 35 15, 73. Totals 27 7 354 Io6 107 _ 601 (7) The figures in brackets refer to the forms in -CINO- ; see below. 3. The names in -le- seem to have been evenly distributed over the Italian area and not to mark any particular tribe or epoch. 4. The suffix-ensi-can be shown to have borne a political significance, 1 This statement with those which follow is based upon.: the collections of the place-names of ancient Italy, arranged according to their locality, by R. S. Conway in The Italic Dialects ( Cambridge . r897),name. There are only six suffixes so used among the names of ancient Italy.' `These suffixes are : -n10-, -io-, -co -no-, -ti- (or -ati-); -ensi-. T, The suffix -ulo- appears only in a few old names, .Siculi, Rutuli, Appuli, Poediculi and *Vituli, which would have been the pure Latin form instead of Dal, which was taken over from the Grecized form 'IraOol. : - - : . 2. Excluding this small group, the frequency of the occurrence ,of these suffixes in ancient Italy is shown by the following table: Table of Ethnic Suffixes in Ancient Italy. that is to say, it was used by the Romans to form the names of the inhabitants of municipal towns, as for instance Foro-iulienses, the inhabitants of Forum Julii. There remain, therefore, the three suffixes -co-, -no-, and -ti-, and it will be seen from the table that the relative frequency of these suffixes in different dialect-areas varies very greatly. The suffix -no-, for example, has almost driven out any other in the district
5. On the other hand, the -co- suffix, which is nowhere frequent, is practically confined to the central areas. 6. The -11- suffix is comparatively frequent in the Volscian district and very frequent in the Umbrian; it is also fairly well represented in Latium and Etruria. 7. In the article VoLscI it is shown that the addition of the -no-suffix is often a mark of the conquest of an original
8. The addition of the -ati- suffix to the -no- ethnicon, as in Iguvinates, is comparatively rare, and no doubt denotes the opposite process, namely, the absorption of a -no- tribe by a population to whom it was natural to use the suffix -ti-. The two opposite processes confirm the inference that both are due to some change of race, not merely to a change of custom in the same population in a later age; for in that case the change would have been in one direction only. The assumption of the Safine origin of the -no- suffix is further confirmed by the practice of the Romans themselves. The folk of Latium after the Saline conquest were no longer Latiares but Latin; and over against the old name Quiritis was the new Populus Romanus. Just the same rough and ready nomenclature was applied to communities conquered on foreign soil; the Draprcarac became Spartan, the Zupaxboca Syracusani, and the 'Acrt rucoi Asiani, and so on. The assumption that Latin was properly the language of the Latian plain and of the Plebs at Rome, which the conquering patrician nobles learnt from their subjects, and substituted for their own kindred but different Safine idiom, renders easier to understand the borrowing of a number of words into Latin from some dialect (presumably Sabine) where the velars had been labialized; for example, the very common word bos, which in pure Latin should have been vos. And in general it may be stated that the hypothesis of such an intermixture of forms from neighbouring dialects has been rendered in recent
The conclusion, therefore, to which the evidence appears to lead us is that in, say, the 7th century, B.c., the Safines spoke a language not differing in any important particulars from that of the Samnites, generally known as Oscan; and that when this warlike tribe combined with the people of the Latian plain to found or fortify or enlarge the city of Rome, and at the end of the 6th century to drive out from it the Etruscans, who had in that century become its masters, they imposed upon the new community many of their own usages, especially within the sphere of politics, but in the end adopted the language of Latium henceforth known as lingua Latina
The glosses and place-names of the ancient Sabine district are collected by R. S. Conway, the Italic Dialects ( Cambridge , 1897), p. 351. For the history of the Sabine district see Mommsen, C.I.L. ix. p. 396; and Beloch, " Der italische Bund unter romischer Hegemonie " (Leipzig
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