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.
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/grammarofoscanum00buckuoft)? 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.
Thanks for the reply.
Thank you, that is quite a treasure!
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.
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.