Prehistory and the Italian Dialects

Abstract

The title of this article is more pretentious than the subject that I propose to treat in these few pages.' My concern here is with a question of method; accordingly I shall defer a more comprehensive treatment to some future publication, and refrain from burdening the present essay with details and examples. The purpose of this paper is to show how, through a study of pre-Romance archeology, anthropology, and ethnology,2 the Italian dialects can be made to appear in a new and perhaps brighter light. The chief linguistic problem involved here is the validity of the substratum theory. Much has been written in defense as well as in repudiation of it, in most cases with illustrative examples which evidently and sufficiently either prove or discredit the theory. Such procedure is acceptable in each separate instance; but what has been established for a certain period and a certain place cannot be transferred, in toto, to another sphere. There can be no question of assuming substratum influence everywhere, or of rejecting it categorically, on the basis of an investigation limited to a single area. On the whole, the substratum theory has not fared well among scholars. But curiously enough, the possibility of a superstratum, e.g. Langobard in northern Italy, is in general less reluctantly, though by no means unanimously, accepted. I can really see no intrinsic difference between the two phenomena; but I daresay that the possiblity of a substratum is present more frequently than evidence for it can be brought to light.3 Indeed it seems only reasonable to surmise that when a new language is learned by an entire social group, the members of this group cannot help pronouncing this new language with a certain 'accent'.4 Besides their