Editing Italic languages (section)

== Origin theories ==
{{Cleanup|date=April 2021|reason=This section duplicates the section 'Proto-Italic period'|section}}
The main debate concerning the origin of the Italic languages mirrors that on the origins of the Greek ones,<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Leppänen|first=Ville|date=2014-01-01|title=Geoffrey Horrocks,Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers (2nd edn.). Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, 2010. Pp. xx + 505.|journal=Journal of Greek Linguistics|volume=14|issue=1|pages=127–135|doi=10.1163/15699846-01401006|issn=1566-5844|doi-access=free}}</ref> except that there is no record of any "early Italic" to play the role of [[Mycenaean Greek]].

All that is known about the linguistic landscape of Italy is from inscriptions made after the introduction of the alphabet in the peninsula, around 700 BC onwards, and from Greek and Roman writers several centuries later. The oldest known samples come from Umbrian and Faliscan inscriptions from the 7th century BC. Their [[Old Italic alphabets|alphabets]] were clearly derived from the [[Etruscan alphabet]], which was derived from the [[Western Greek alphabet]] not much earlier than that. There is no reliable information about the languages spoken before that time. Some conjectures can be made based on [[toponym]]s, but they cannot be verified.

There is no guarantee that the intermediate phases between those old Italic languages and Indo-European will be found. The question of whether Italic originated outside Italy or developed by assimilation of Indo-European and other elements within Italy, approximately on or within its current range there, remains.<ref name=sylvestri325>{{harvnb|Silvestri|1998|p=325}}</ref>

An extreme view of some linguists and historians is that there never was a unique "Proto-Italic" whose diversification resulted in an "Italic branch" of Indo-European.
Some linguists, like Silvestri<ref>Silvestri, 1987</ref> and Rix,<ref>Rix, 1983, p. 104</ref> further argue that no common Proto-Italic can be reconstructed such that its phonological system may have developed into those of Latin and Osco-Umbrian through consistent phonetic changes and that its phonology and morphology can be consistently derived from those of [[Proto-Indo-European language|Proto-Indo-European]]. However, Rix later changed his mind and became an outspoken supporter of Italic as a family.

Those linguists propose instead that the ancestors of the 1st millennium Indo-European languages of Italy were two or more different languages that separately descended from Indo-European in a more remote past and separately entered Europe, possibly by different routes or at different times. That view stems in part from the difficulty in identifying a common Italic homeland in prehistory,<ref>{{harvnb|Silvestri|1998|pp=322–323}}.</ref> or reconstructing an ancestral "Common Italic" or "Proto-Italic" language from which those languages could have descended. Some common features that seem to connect the languages may be just a [[sprachbund]] phenomenon – a linguistic convergence due to contact over a long period,<ref>Domenico Silvestri, 1993</ref> as in the most widely accepted version of the [[Italo-Celtic]] hypothesis.{{Undue weight inline|1=Calvert Watkins paragraph ... what did he say about Italic?|reason=Among experts, opposition to the Proto-Italic hypothesis is not a widespread viewpoint anymore|date=September 2020}}