Oscan, Umbrian, their phonetics.

[Estoniacus Inoriginale]

How was the word Oscan 'nuvlanúí'- was it with a w like in classical and Old Latin, or was it realy nuvlaanuuii? with the same v as in Italian today, or perhaps a bilabial one?
It seems I have no idea how to pronounce Oscan in most ways. Where was the stress, like in Etruscan, or not?
Was the final m in Oscan and Umbrian fully ptonounced? I speculate that it might have been, because it was written more often than in Latin inscriptions.

[modus.irrealis]

Have you looked at C. D. Buck's "A Grammar of Oscan and Umbrian", which is old but you can get it free online (e.g. at http://www.archive.org/details/grammaro ... 00buckuoft)? My understanding is that "v" was [w] but was also used to indicate diphthongs so Oscan "av" = Latin "au" and so on. So "úv" would be the diphthong [ou] (since "ú" represents [o]). You're word has "uv" but I don't know if that's something different or just the word wasn't fully marked since I understand that originally "u" was used for both and [o], but the book by Buck has such examples as Núvlanús which seems to be the same stem. In that case the pronunciation would be [noulanoi] with two diphthongs. I believe this is a dative and the final [oi] corresponds to the Greek ωι.

Buck also has a section on the accent but it's basically to say there's not enough information to decide. I don't know if anything has been resolved in more recent works, but I do know that Oscan did not undergo the various vowel weakenings that Latin did during the time when the stress fell on the first-syllable (I mean the sort of thing that gave rise to things like capio vs. incipio), so I would suspect the two languages had fairly different accent systems. Oscan is actually very conservative with its vowels, like Greek, so perhaps it preserved a pitch accent like Greek did.

[Estoniacus Inoriginale]

Thanks for the reply.

[benissimus]

Have you looked at C. D. Buck's "A Grammar of Oscan and Umbrian", which is old but you can get it free online (e.g. at http://www.archive.org/details/grammaro ... 00buckuoft)?

Thank you, that is quite a treasure!

[quendidil]

I shan't provide any direct links in view of the moderators' disapproval but Phonetics and Philology: Sound Change in Italic has been uploaded on uz-transations.

[timeodanaos]

My experience is that final -m is seldom written in Oscan - e.g. the pronoun ekak corresponding to hanc with the same deictic particle -k(e). But then again, I haven't read that many inscriptions of Oscan lately, ever since this semester started.