North Umbrian Inscriptions in the Valle di Ospitale: A Second Harvest

After describing the geography of Valle di Ospitale in Modena Apennines & sketching the history of prehistorical settlements & subsequent Umbrian-Roman contacts & conflicts, a detailed description of a collection of North Umbrian inscriptions found on the rocks in the Valle di Ospitale is presented, discussing: (1) the characteristics of the alphabet; parallels between Etruscan, Latin, & Umbrian letters; (2) grapheme-phoneme correspondences: the representation of sounds & absence of some graphemes; (3) ligature patterns & improvisations & the decipherment difficulties they cause; (4) the morphology represented in the inscriptions: word formation & parts of speech; (5) the vocabulary retrievable from the inscriptions, including a lexicon of high-frequency words, their meanings, etymology, & derivation; (6) readings of individual inscriptions; & (7) the authorship & dating of the inscriptions. Z. Dubiel