Pre-Samnite language

Pre-Samnite was an ancient language spoken in southern Campania, in Italy. The name Pre-Samnite refers to the fact that the language was spoken in early times in an area that was later colonized by Samnites, who spoke Oscan. Pre-Samnite is recorded in a few short inscriptions dating from around 500 BC. The language belongs to the Osco-Umbrian group of languages, and may be closely related to Oscan, but shows a number of archaic features which were lost from Oscan. However, the material is too scant to enable a precise determination of the relation of Pre-Samnite either to Oscan or to the other Sabellian languages.

Sample text

The following text is a proposed reconstruction of a Pre-Samnite inscription found in Tortora:
The proposed translation for this text reads:
Another proposed reconstruction of the Tortora inscriptions reads:
Another possibly Pre-Samnite inscription which was probably from Capua reads:
The original text was written in scriptio continua and in the Oscan alphabet.