FRANCIS W. NEWMAN, LATE PROFESSOR OF LATIN AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON. 23 LONDON: TRÜBNER AND CO., 60, PATERNOSTER ROW. -- 1864. PREFACE. IN laying before the public the whole of the Iguvine Inscriptions, with a continuous translation of some sort, I must first explain some peculiarities in the text as here presented. The VIth and VIIth Tables are engraved in Roman letter; so is nearly all on the back of the Vth. All the tables have the peculiarity of not doubling consonants, except in a few cases which look like inadvertence. We may call this peculiarity Oriental, as it was probably imported with the Phoenician Alphabet into Etruria, and so became a practice in Umbria also. The Phoenicians, perhaps, like the Hebrews and Arabs, had some mark to denote that t means tt, and s means ss: a Dagesh," or a "Teshdied;" but we know that Oriental MSS. to this day often omit the mark: in which case it is the duty of an editor to restore it, to the best of his ability, and with the risk of doing wrong, exactly as in the case of ordinary punctuation. In Latin, when adprobo, adservo, change into approbo, asservo, a reader would find aprobo, aservo, mislead him; so is it in Umbrian. In fact, owing to the Umbrian tendency to assimilate n even in the middle of words (as in Hebrew), the embarrassment is here greater: thus, if instead of appettu, 166 |