and the Volscian, have reached us in fragments too scanty to enable
us to form any conception of their individual peculiarities or to
classify the varieties of dialect themselves with certainty and
precision, while others, like the Sabine, have, with the exception
of a few traces preserved as dialectic peculiarities in provincial
Latin, completely disappeared. A conjoint view, however, of the
facts of language and of history leaves no doubt that all these
dialects belonged to the Umbro-Samnite branch of the great Italian
stock, and that this branch, although much more closely related to
Latin than to Greek, was very decidedly distinct from the Latin.
In the pronoun and other cases frequently the Samnite and Umbrian
used -p where the Roman used -q, as -pis- for -quis-; just as languages
otherwise closely related are found to differ; for instance, -p
is peculiar to the Celtic in Brittany and Wales, -k to the Gaelic
and Erse. Among the vowel sounds the diphthongs in Latin, and
in the northern dialects generally, appear very much destroyed,
whereas in the southern Italian dialects they have suffered little;
and connected with this is the fact, that in composition the Roman
weakens the radical vowel otherwise so strictly preserved,--a
modification which does not take place in the kindred group of
languages. The genitive of words in -a is in this group as among
the Greeks -as, among the Romans in the matured language -ae;
that of words in -us is in the Samnite -eis, in the Umbrian -es,
among the Romans -ei; the locative disappeared more and more from
the language of the latter, while it continued in full use in the
other Italian dialects; the dative plural in -bus is extant only
in Latin. The Umbro-Samnite infinitive in -um is foreign to the
Romans; while the Osco-Umbrian future formed from the root -es after
the Greek fashion (-her-est- like --leg-so--) has almost, perhaps
altogether, disappeared in Latin, and its place is supplied by