Meanings
- hypothetical reconstructed ancestor language of the Osco-Umbrian language family, alternatively called the Sabellic languages
In some cases, Clackson and others have attempted to cast doubt on the validity of certain traditionally proposed Proto-Sabellic changes by claiming they happened later and diffused but not all the way to South Picene.
2017 October 23, Benjamin W. Fortson, edited by Jared Klein, Brian Joseph, and Matthias Fritz, The dialectology of Italic, De Gruyter Mouton, →DOI, →ISBN, page 8501 more example
As we are going to see, both the mechanic reconstruction of a Proto-Sabellic stage and the tacit assumption that secondary, contact-induced phenomena -which changed the appearance of dialects even after thay have acquired a personality as individual entities- are scarce or dubious, may have given us a strongly biased vision of the relative chronology of Italic sound shifts
2020 February 1, Blanca María Prósper, “The Sabellic accusative plural endings and the outcome of the Indo-European sibilants in Italic”, in Journal of Language Relationship, volume 18, numbers 1-2, →DOI, →ISSN, pages 41–79
Origin
Cite this entry
Proto-Sabellic. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Proto-Sabellic
“Proto-Sabellic.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Proto-Sabellic. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “Proto-Sabellic,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Proto-Sabellic.
Source: Proto-Sabellic on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.