________________
ETRUSCAN AND ITALIC ALPHABETS
501
The dialect in which the inscriptions of the groups 2 to 4 are written has been called Rhaetic or Rnetic. It is considered by some scholars as a kind of Etruscan, by others as an affinity of Illyric or Celtic, having many forms of Indo-European origin. However, while it seems that the Raetic tribes, that is the population inhabiting that Alpine region, were of mixed origin, they employed alphabets which were unmistakably of Etruscan origin.
The Raetic and the other Alpine alphabets present certain features which suggest that they may be the link between the Etruscan alphabet and the runes; see the shapes of the letters e, u, 1, and so forth. There are a few extremely interesting signs, for instance the letter of uncertain meaning (representing perhaps a dental fricative) shown in the last line of the Magre alphabet in Fig. 225, the shapes of the zin the Sondrio and Este scripts, the reverse form of m in the Sondrio alphabet, and the form of l in the same script, similar to that of the Greek classical I; we may note also the absence of ph and th, as well as of some other letters. All these peculiarities of the North Etruscan varieties show that these scripts were not connected directly with the Greek alphabets, either of the western group or of the eastern, because they show some particular features of the former group and others of the latter. On the whole, there is a fairly general agreement that the North Etruscan scripts were offshoots of an early Etruscan alphabet.
The end of these scripts is as yet uncertain; they were still in use in the first half of the first century B.C., that is long after the Etruscan alphabet had fallen into disuse.
Italic Scripts (Fig. 226) The scripts of the peoples speaking Italic dialects, and thus belonging to the Indo-European family, were also offshoots of the Etruscan alphabets.
The expressions "Italic" and "Italia" (Italy) have a curious history. According to the Greek historian Hellanicus of Lesbos (a contemporary of Herodotus and Thucydides) reported by Dionysius, 1. 35. the term Italoi, the Greek name of an ancient Indo-European tribe who occupied a part of the modern region of Calabria, was derived from the indigenous name l'iteli, "calf-land" (the modern Italian word vitello means a "calf"). This name was later applied as a geographical term to indicate the whole of modern Italy, while the expression Italic" is mainly used, in contrast with the term "Latinian" (employed for the Latin und Faliscan forms of speech), to indicate the Osca-Umbrian sub-branch of the Italie branch of the Indo-European family. Another term for this sub-branch is Sabine or Satine (Safinos seems to be the indigenous term; the Greeks called them also Saphnitai or Samnitai, whence another term, Samnite).
Oscan Alphabet
The Oscans (Osca lingua was the Roman term for their speech) or Osci, in Greek, Oskoj or Opikoi, from Opsci or Opici (terms connected with the indigenous
