Proto-Italic language
[2] On the other hand, work in glottochronology has argued that Proto-Italic split off from the western Proto-Indo-European dialects some time before 2500 BC.
[3][4] It was originally spoken by Italic tribes north of the Alps before they moved south into the Italian Peninsula during the second half of the 2nd millennium BC.
Linguistic evidence also points to early contacts with Celtic tribes and Proto-Germanic speakers.
Because Latin is the only well-attested Italic language, it forms the main source for the reconstruction of Proto-Italic.
This caused long vowels to shorten when they were followed by a sonorant and another consonant in the same syllable: VːRC > VRC.
Long vowels were also shortened before word-final *-m. This is the cause of the many occurrences of short *-a- in, for example, the endings of the ā-stems or of ā-verbs.
However, fixed initial stress may alternatively be an areal feature postdating Proto-Italic, since the vowel reductions which it is posited to explain are not found before the mid-first millennium BC.
[14] Furthermore, the persistence of Proto-Indo-European mobile accent is required in early Proto-Italic for Brent Vine's (2006) reformulation of Thurneysen-Havet's law (where pre-tonic *ou > *au) to work.
They declined for seven of the eight Proto-Indo-European cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative and locative.
This class corresponds to the second declension of Latin, basically divided into masculine and neuter nouns.
Other notes: This class corresponds to the nouns of the Latin third declension that had the genitive plural ending -ium (rather than -um).
In Proto-Italic, as in the other Italic languages, i-stems were still very much a distinct type and showed no clear signs of merging.
The largest were the o/ā-stem adjectives (which inflected as o-stems in the masculine and neuter, and as ā-stems in the feminine), and the i-stems.
Present active participles of verbs (in *-nts) and the comparative forms of adjectives (in *-jōs) inflected as consonant stems.
There were also u-stem adjectives originally, but they had been converted to i-stems by adding i-stem endings onto the existing u-stem, thus giving the nominative singular *-wis. (*alβoi) (*alβī) (*alβī) ( < *albʰéh₂oHom) (*alβoi) Declension of Personal Pronouns:[37] Note: For the third person pronoun, Proto-Italic *is would have been used.
The subjunctive of this desiderative-future, with a suffix of both -s- and a lengthening of the following vowel, was used to represent a potentialis and irrealis mood.
This is likely because the original PIE aorist merged with the perfective aspect after the Proto-Italic period.
If a verb root begins in *s followed by a stop consonant, both consonants appear in the copy syllable and the root syllable loses the *s. The perfect endings in Italic, which only survive in the Latino-Faliscan languages, are derived from the original PIE stative endings, but with an extra -i added after most of them.
