The definition is not arbitrary, but the terms refer to spelling conventions and word forms not generally found in works written under the Roman Empire.

An analysis done in 2011 declared it to be genuine "beyond any reasonable doubt"[2] and dating from the Orientalizing period, in the first half of the seventh century BC.

On the other hand, Polybius, a Greek historian of Rome who flourished in the late second century BC,[7] commented on "the first treaty between Rome and Carthage", (which he dated to 28 years before Xerxes I crossed into Greece; that is, in 508 BC) that "the ancient Roman language differs so much from the modern that it can only be partially made out, and that after much application by the most intelligent men".

The end of the republic was too late a termination for compilers after Wordsworth; Charles Edwin Bennett said, "'Early Latin' is necessarily a somewhat vague term ... Bell, De locativi in prisca Latinitate vi et usu, Breslau, 1889,[8] sets the later limit at 75 BC.

A definite date is really impossible, since archaic Latin does not terminate abruptly, but continues even down to imperial times.

Over the 377 years from 452 to 75 BC, Old Latin evolved from texts partially comprehensible by classicists with study to being easily read by scholars.

Many texts placed by various methods (painting, engraving, embossing) on their original media survive just as they were except for the ravages of time.

No inscription can be older than the introduction of the Greek alphabet into Italy but none survive from that early date.

The imprecision of archaeological dating makes it impossible to assign a year to any one inscription, but the earliest survivals are probably from the 6th century BC.

Some texts, however, that survive as fragments in the works of classical authors, had to have been composed earlier than the republic, in the time of the monarchy.

A part of old inscriptions, texts in the original writing system have been lost or transcribed by later copyists.

[citation needed] Old Latin could be written from right to left (as were Etruscan and early Greek) or boustrophedon.

In unstressed syllables, *oi and *ai had already merged into ei by historic times (except for one possible occurrence of poploe for populī "people" in a late manuscript of one of the early songs).

There are many unreduced clusters, e.g. iouxmentom (later iūmentum, "beast of burden"); losna (later lūna, "moon") < *lousna < */leuksnā/; cosmis (> cōmis, "courteous"); stlocum, acc.

Early du /dw/ becomes b: duenos > duonos > bonus "good"; duis > bis "twice"; duellom > bellum "war".

Latin nouns have grammatical case, with an ending, or suffix, showing its use in the sentence: subject, predicate, etc.

Vowel stems are formed by adding a suffix to a shorter and more ancient segment called a root.

Any paradigm selected would be subject to these constraints and if applied to the language universally would give false constructs, hypothetical words not attested in the Old Latin corpus.

The genitive plural ending -āsōm (classical -ārum following rhotacism), borrowed from the pronouns, began to overtake original -om.

[24] The locative case would not apply to such a meaning as puella, so Roma, which is singular, and Syracusae, which is plural, have been substituted.

[27] Classical Latin evidences the development ŏ > ŭ. Nouns of this declension are either masculine or neuter.

Consonant-stem declensions vary slightly depending on which consonant is root-final: stop-, r-, n-, s-, etc.

[38] The Latin neuter form (not shown) is the Indo-European nominative without stem ending; for example, cor < *cord "heart".

In Classical Latin, "ego" can be pronounced with both long and short final vowel, thus pointing at two versions of the pronoun possibly from Old Latin; the original form of the pronoun is reconstructed in Proto-Italic as *egō, with a long vowel.

The Italian director Matteo Rovere has shot the 2019 film The First King: Birth of an Empire and the 2020–2022 TV series Romulus with dialog in a reconstructed version of Old Latin.

For example, the character of the Lady of the Wolves is Lukwòsom Pòtnia (an allusion to Homer's Potnia theron) since Latin domina did not have the desired nuances.