Italic — The Italicist

The Italicist — the languages of pre-Roman Italy, Oscan to Etruscan to Raetic.

The Sabellic, Etruscan, Venetic and Raetic epigraphic shelves (CEIPoM, ItAnt, the Etruscan editions, TIR), Lepontic at the Celtic border, I.Sicily’s island mix, and the Sabellic-to-Latin loan lane.

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The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these thirteen answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Private research materials under personal grants are not listed.

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 7 November 2026): ett 8,087 · eng 3,290 · grc 3,201 · lat 2,662 · osc 1,373 · ita 705 · xum 686 · xlp 633 · cms 591 · osc-Ital-x-oscetr 501 … and 21 more (nabu axis italic lists all).

Carried in by multilingual packs (wiktionary-recon — whole-source members whose other languages ride along, as of 7 November 2026): zho 327,296 · xcl 8,541 · sga 6,688 · gem-pro 5,749 · gmw-pro 5,578 … and 18 more (nabu axis italic lists all).

The desk’s instruments

• The languages of pre-Roman Italy: Sabellic — Oscan, Umbrian, Faliscan (CEIPoM), Etruscan (open-etruscan, larth-etp), Venetic and Raetic (TIR, ItAnt), Lepontic at the Celtic border, I.Sicily’s island mix.
• The equivalence tier: CEIPoM’s scholar-curated Classical-Latin keys sit on the pre-Roman passages — search --lemma precor reaches the Iguvine Tables’ pesnimu, tagged [equivalence] (never counted as attestation; --gold-only excludes it).
• Etymology: the Sabellic-to-Latin loan lane (sabellic-loans) and the Proto-Italic reconstructions reachable through nabu etym.

Working the italic desk

The generic desk surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable italic               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync italic                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis italic          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis italic                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis italic   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

This desk’s own surfaces:

nabu search --lemma precor --axis italic  # the CEIPoM equivalence key onto the Iguvine Tables
nabu etym rufus                       # the Sabellic-loan etymon chain (Old Italic headwords)
nabu search tular --axis italic       # the Etruscan boundary stones — tular raśnal
nabu define "*deiwos"                 # a Proto-Italic reconstruction, with its attested reflexes

Ask your model

With the MCP server connected, this desk answers conversational research questions. Each example ran live against this library:

• “Etruscan inscriptions naming Larth?” → nabu_search larth (lang: ett) — CIE 1772 with both faces of the stone transcribed — the Tyrsenian shelves answer alongside the Sabellic ones on this desk.

Terminal setup

• Old Italic (osc/xum): the inscription text is stored in Latin transliteration (the language tags, e.g. osc-Ital-x-oscetr, name the alphabet). The U+10300 block itself appears only in the sabellic-loans etymon headwords (𐌓𐌖𐌚𐌓𐌉𐌉𐌔) — install font-noto-sans-old-italic to read those.

The full guidance, per script, is on the display page.

One of the 30 research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.