Editing Old Italic scripts (section)

==Origins==
The Old Italic alphabets ultimately derive from the [[Phoenician alphabet]], but the general consensus is that the [[Etruscan alphabet]] was imported from the [[Euboea]]n [[Greek colonisation|Greek colonies]] of [[Cumae]] and [[Ischia|Ischia (Pithekoūsai)]] situated in the [[Gulf of Naples]] in the 8th century BC; this [[Archaic Greek alphabets#Euboean|Euboean alphabet]] is also called 'Cumaean' (after Cumae), or 'Chalcidian' (after its [[Colonies in antiquity|metropolis]] [[Chalcis]]).<ref name="Banti">{{Cite book |last=Banti |first=Luisa |date=1973 |title=Etruscan Cities and Their Culture |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3zzu5EjrCrsC&pg=PA193 |location=Berkeley, California |publisher=University of California Press |page=193 |isbn=978-0-520-01910-2 |access-date=24 August 2021}}</ref> The Cumaean hypothesis is supported by the 1957–58 excavations of [[Veii]] by the [[British School at Rome]], which found pieces of Greek pottery indicating that contacts between the [[Etruscan civilization|Etruscan city]] of Veii and the Greek colonies of Cumae and Ischia have existed ever since the second half of the 8th century.<ref name="Banti"/> Other scholars posit a different hypothetical Western Greek alphabet that was even older than those attested to have given rise to the Etruscan letters.<ref name="Banti"/> Whatever the case, the Etruscans added the ''c'', the ''q'' and the combination of ''vh'' or ''hv'' (for /f/) in order to spell sounds that did not exist in Ancient Greek.<ref name="Wallace">{{Cite book |last=Wallace |first=Rex E. |date=2015 |title=A Companion to the Etruscans |chapter=Chapter 14: Language, Alphabet, and Linguistic Affiliation |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=H91bCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT309 |location=Chichester |publisher=John Wiley & Sons |page=309 |isbn=978-1-118-35495-7 |access-date=24 August 2021}}</ref> The development and usage of their own Greek-derived alphabet arguably marked the end of the [[Villanovan culture]] and ushered in the Etruscan [[Orientalizing period|Orientalising period]].<ref name="Wallace"/>{{rp|19}}

As the Etruscans were the leading civilization of Italy in that period, it is widely accepted that they spread their alphabet across the peninsula, and the other Old Italic scripts were derived from theirs.<ref name="Wallace"/> Scholars provide three reasons: Etruscans and non-Etruscans had strong contacts in the 8th and 7th centuries, surviving inscriptions from other languages appear later (after the end of the 8th century) than the earliest Etruscan ones (first amongst the [[Umbrians]], [[Faliscans]], [[Latins]], and [[Sabines]] to the south, in the 6th century also in the [[Po Valley]] and amongst the [[Cisalpine Celtic]], [[Venetic language|Venetic]] and [[Rhaetic|Raetic tribes]]), and the letters used in these texts are evidently based on the Etruscan version of the Western Greek alphabet.<ref name="Wallace"/> However, some of them, including the Latin alphabet, retained certain Greek letters that the Etruscans themselves dropped at a rather early stage.{{Citation needed|date=August 2021}}

The Old Italic alphabets were used for various different languages, which included some [[Indo-European languages|Indo-European]] ones (predominantly from the [[Italic languages|Italic]] branch, but also in [[Gaulish language|Gaulish]] and probably in inscriptions interpreted as [[Proto-Germanic language|Proto-Germanic]]) and some non-Indo-European ones (such as [[Etruscan language|Etruscan]] itself).<ref>{{Cite book |last=Everson |first=Michael |url=https://www.unicode.org/notes/tn40/old-italic-glyph-variation.pdf |title=Unicode Technical Note No. 40: Old Italic glyph variation |date=2015-08-06 |access-date=2023-10-21}}</ref>