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 eleven answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Source	Holds	License	Status	Holdings (as of 19 September 2026)
`wiktionary-recon`	dictionary	attribution	wired · manual	30,261 entries
`isicily`	inscriptions	attribution	wired · manual	6,723 docs / 17,921 passages
`itant`	inscriptions	nc	wired · manual	1,160 docs / 1,283 passages
`sabellic-loans`	dictionary	attribution	wired · frozen	85 entries
`ceipom`	inscriptions	attribution	wired · frozen	3,871 docs / 5,303 passages
`open-etruscan`	inscriptions	attribution	wired · frozen	8,047 docs / 8,047 passages
`larth-etp`	dictionary	attribution	wired · manual	1,122 entries
`lexlep`	inscriptions	nc	wired · manual	494 docs / 570 passages
`lexlep-words`	dictionary	nc	wired · manual	627 entries
`tir`	inscriptions	nc	wired · manual	389 docs / 434 passages
`burman-concordance`	feature module	open	wired · manual	nothing held yet

Private research materials under personal grants are not listed.

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 19 September 2026): ett 7,874 · sga 6,564 · gem-pro 5,717 · gmw-pro 5,551 · sla-pro 5,431 · eng 3,290 · grc 3,201 · lat 2,662 · ine-pro 1,905 · osc 954 … and 24 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 axis 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 twenty-five research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.