SOME REMARKS ON THE NEW OPIC (“PRE-SAMNITE”) INSCRIPTION OF NIUMSIS TANUNIS Ignasi-Xavier Adiego V ery recently, Luciano Agostiniani and Giulio M. Facchetti pub- lished a new inscription, probably from Capua, and written in “Pre-Samnite”, that is, the language spoken in diferent zones of South- ern Italy before the expansion of the Oscan-speaking Samnites (Ag- ostiniani-Facchetti 2013). The inscription, incised on a skyphoide pot dated by the archaeologist Federica Chiesa between the end of the ifth century and the beginning of the fourth, is not particularly long (57 let- ters), but it contains some very interesting new material regarding this very poorly attested Sabellic dialect. 1 The editio princeps is exemplary and the commentaries are detailed and full of ideas. Of course, as with any text in a fragmentary language, doubts and uncertainties remain (see the very prompt reactions of Triantaillis 2014 and Prosdoscimi 2014 regarding some of them). In any case, there is no doubt about the non-Oscan, and therefore “pre-Samnite”, character of the text : this is proven by the presence of a third singular perfect ending in –ud (fufuhud ‘fuit’, less probably ‘fudit’, pace Prosdocimi 2014 : 320), which recalls South Picene opsút, opsúq. This morphological trait would be absent if the text were in Oscan. Also signiicant, though less decisive for a dialectal classiication, is the monophthongation of ei in e in the singular genitive ending –es < *ei £ s. It is true that this monophthonga- tion is a trait of Pre-Samnite vs. the conservation of the diphthong in Oscan, but we ind occasional examples of –eis > -es in Oscan (see Rix 1996 : 246-247), and, conversely, the Pre-Samnite inscription from Sor- rento shows genitives in –eis. 2 Here is the text of the inscription, according to the editors : 1 See the corpus in Rix (2002). I agree with Rix and others regarding the idea that the Pre-Samnite constitutes a Sabellic dialectal group together with South Picene. For the problems that the label “Pre-Samnite” may cause, see the inal part of this article. 2 Published in Russo (2005). Note that the new inscription of Niumsis Tanunis clearly conirms the existence of Pre-Samnite genitives in –es, thus disqualifying the attempts of Russo (2005 : 52-55) and others to explain them as nominatives.