SUBGROUPING IN THE SABELLIAN BRANCH OF INDO-EUROPEAN By JAMES CLACKSON University of Cambridge ABSTRACT The Sabellian branch of the Italic languages of Indo-European comprises Oscan, Umbrian, South Picene and a number of smaller varieties. This paper analyses the current model for subgrouping these languages and gives detailed consideration to a number of phonological and morphological isoglosses. The publication of a new corpus of the Sabellian inscriptions allows a better understanding of the relative chronology for language change in the Sabellian branch, and this leads to a new perspective on the interrelations between the Sabellian languages. 1. INTRODUCTION The last fifty years have seen dramatic advances in our knowledge about the Sabellian branch of the Indo-European language family. 1 In 1973 three new sixth-century inscriptions were discovered at Penna Sant’Andrea, in the Italian province of Abruzzo, employing a script and language which are now known as South Picene. Marinetti’s (1995) publication of these and twenty other previously known South Picene inscriptions, which could now be securely read and interpreted, gave scholars access to the earliest stages of the languages of what is now called the Sabellian group. There have been other important finds in the last fifty years, for example, the sixth-/fifth-century legal text from Tortora in Calabria in a hitherto unattested Sabellian variety (Lazzarini & Poccetti 2001), and numerous other shorter texts. There have been two major editions of the Sabellian texts this century (Rix 2002; Crawford et al. 2011). The new material has led to numerous articles and books dedicated to the Sabellian languages, including major studies of the phonology, morphology and lexicon. 2 However, despite these discoveries, reconstructing the detailed family tree of the Italic languages has remained controversial. Although scholars agree that it is possible to identify a Sabellian branch of the Italic subgroup of Indo-European, comprising South-Picene, Oscan, Umbrian and the ‘minor dialects’ of central Italy (see further below for these languages), there is still uncertainty about the internal relationships within Sabellian (see for example, Coleman 1986; Meiser 1987a; 1996; Adiego Lajara 1992; 1993; Rix 2003; 2009; Wallace 1984; 2007). In this paper I aim to re-examine the question of the interrelationships within the Sabellian branch, taking advantage of the most recent edition of the texts (Crawford et al. 2011) which gives more information on the dating and archaeological context of the texts themselves and which, for most inscriptions, provides a photograph or drawing to allow the user to check the 1 I wish to thank Nicholas Zair and two anonymous referees for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article and numerous suggestions for improvement. 2 Many of these feature in this paper, but it is worth noting here in particular the phonological studies of Meiser (1986), Stuart-Smith (2004), the dictionary of Untermann (2000), the case-grammar of Tikkanen (2011) and the description of the demonstrative system in Dupraz (2012). Transactions of the Philological Society Volume 00 (2013) 1–34 DOI: 10.1111/1467-968X.12034 © The author 2013. Transactions of the Philological Society © The Philological Society 2013. Published by John Wiley & Sons, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.