Katherine McDonald - Oscan in Southern Italy and Sicily. Evaluating Language Contact in a Fragmentary Corpus (Cambridge Classical Studies) (2015) (Retail).pdf

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OSCAN IN SOUTHERN ITALY AND SICILY

In pre-Roman Italy and Sicily, dozens of languages and writing systems com-

peted and interacted, and bilingualism was the norm. Using frameworks

from epigraphy, archaeology and the sociolinguistics of language contact,

this book explores the relationship between Greek and Oscan, two of the

most widely spoken languages in the south of the peninsula. Dr McDonald

undertakes a new analysis of the entire corpus of South Oscan texts writ-

ten in Lucania, Bruttium and Messana, including dedications, curse tablets,

laws, funerary texts and graffiti. She demonstrates that genre and domain

are critical to understanding where and when Greek was used within Oscan-

speaking communities, and how ancient bilinguals exploited the social mean-

ing of their languages in their writing. This book also offers a cutting-edge

example of how to build the fullest possible picture of bilingualism in frag-

mentary languages across the ancient world.

ka t he r i ne mc do na l d is Research Fellow in Classics at Gonville and

Caius College, Cambridge, and an affiliated post-doctoral researcher on the

project ‘Greek in Italy’, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council.

Her current research interests include the Italic languages, ancient bilingual-

ism, personal names and gender linguistics.

C AMB R I DGE CLASS I CAL STU D I ES

General editors

r. l. hunter, r. g. osborne, m. millett, g. betegh,

g. c. horrocks, s. p. oakley, w. m. beard, t. whitmarsh

OSCAN IN SOUTHERN ITALY AND SICILY

Evaluating Language Contact in a Fragmentary Corpus

KATHERINE MCDONALD

Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge