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Second New Oscan sentence:
pun ços cesturis censo-eiren ça toda Bansen
whenthecensors assess.future-3P the.F people Bansu-in
/pu~ So(S) Ses`turiS Se~soeire~ Sa `todu as `Ba~ze~/
'When the censors assess the people at Bantia'
This is from Old Oscan:
pon censtur Bansae tautam censazet.
Explanation:
pon (in Latin spelling) = pun (in Oscan alphabet).
ços is the new definite article made from the demonstrative exo-. The plural was probably *exusc This would become /Sos/, with loss of the unstressed vowel (I am presuming that the initial was unstressed. If it wasn't, it became so). Also, the loss of the final -c happened, but only after the lowering of the vowel in the context of a consonant cluster.
cesturis = censtur. This r-stem in Old Oscan did not differentiate between singular and plural (like many consonant stems in Oscan, I gather). Anyway, an i-stem ending was extended to this case, since consonant and i-stems were very close in Old Oscan. Incidentally, this shows that final -s was not lost unlike other consonants.
censo-eiren = censaum herie[n]t 'they want to assess'. Here, the Old Oscan censaze[n]t was replaced with a periphrastic construction with the verb heri- plus the infinitive, this later became fused together.
ça = exa[m]c. This feminine form of the article was originally the accusative form but it was later generalized to all contexts. The final <a> is actually pronounced /a/ here since it is stressed (or at least was at one point).
toda = tautam. This is obvious.
Bansen = Bansae + en This is the Old Oscan Locative case plus a post position -en, which fused to create a new locative case ending in -en. Thus, I must revise my earlier statement that Oscan has only two cases. Apparently now it has three: nominative, accusative/genitive and locative/dative.
Here is a sample verb paradigm:
censon 'to assess' /Se~zo~/
censu censaus
censas censade[s]
censa censan
/Se~zu/ /Se~zauS/
/Se~zuS/ /Se~zadZi(S)/
/Se~zu/ /Se~za~/
The 1st and 2nd plural endings are conjectures. They are from -mus and -tes respectively.
- Elliott
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