Lesson 1.1: The Oscan Alphabet

What alphabet system does Oscan use?

As it turns out, Oscan can actually be written in many alphabets! Oscan has its own alphabet, influenced by other native Italic languages, Latin, and Greek, but could also be written in Latin and Greek scripts, often depending on the location of the speaker. Think about how Mandarin Chinese can be transliterated in both the pinyin system and the hanzi system.

In the south of Italy, the boot, Greek influence dominated. This even led to the entire region being called “Magna Graecia” (Greater Greece). As thus, many Oscan inscriptions in the south in Campania and Lucania were written in with the Greek alphabet.

However, in the north of Oscan’s influence area, around Etruria and Latium in the middle of modern Italy, the Latin and Phoenician alphabets were sometimes used to write Latin. This just goes to show the linguistic diversity of ancient Italy, with Oscan being adaptable to different regions.

However, Oscan also had its own alphabet, which is most common.

Unlike our modern English, Latin alphabet with 26 letters, the Oscan alphabet has 21 letters. Unlike the alphabet in which you’re reading this, Oscan featured the special í and ú, the last two in the chart below, which were variants of the regular i and u. These were developed later to represent e and o as vowels. Thus, Oscan has six vowels. However, the letter o itself is absent from Oscan. Meanwhile, while Oscan featured the letter z, its sound was different from how we use it today, with a ‘ts’ sound. Finally, unlike our modern English, double vowels and diphthongs are also common in Oscan to show the length of the vowel.

Finally, in many instances, Oscan was written boustrophedon, i.e. right to left instead of left to right. Quite interesting!