Talk:List of ancient peoples of Italy

Split

I split this off from the Ancient peoples of Italy article. Both articles need a lot of work.Dave (talk) 00:50, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

End material

I just copied the end material, mainly various kinds of categories, to this article. The Bibliography is not over yet. I'm not sure we will need the whole thing. If you go through the notes and see that an item is missing, that is where it is.Dave (talk) 00:55, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Removed intro

"Informations about the people living in the Italian peninsula before the Roman civilization are mostly incomplete, or subject to continued revisions.

Indo-European populations had arrived to Italy from Central and Eastern Europe in different migration waves (Veneti, Umbro-Sabellians, Latins, etc.), merging or absorbing the pre-existing cultures, or establishing a pacific coexistence with them.

These migrations began presumably around the mid-Bronze Age (mid 2nd century BC) and lasted until the 4th century BC, with the arrival of the Gauls in the Padan Plain. Among the populations of pre-Roman Italy, the most notable were the Etruscans who, starting from the 8th century BC, created a refined civilization which largely influenced Rome and the Latin world. The origins of this non-Indo-European people, which originated from the Tyrrhenian coast of central Italy and later expanded to Emilia and Campania, are uncertain.

Other peoples living in northern Italy include the Ligurians, originally a non-Indoeuropean people which later partially merged with the Celts and which lived in what are now Liguria, southern Piedmont and the southern French coast; and the Veneti of north-eastern Italy. In the peninsula, alongside the Etruscans, lived numerous tribes, most of the of Indo-European origin: the Umbri in Umbria, Latins, Sabellians, Falisci, Volsci and Equi in the Latium; Piceni in the Marche and northern Abruzzo; Samnites in southern Abruzzo, Molise and Campania; Daunians, Messapii and Peucetii (forming the Apulian or Iapygian confederation) in Apulia; Lucani and Bruttii in the southern tips of the peninsual; Sicels, Elymians and Siculi in Sicily. Sardinia, since the 2nd millennium BC, was still inhabited by the Nuragic people. Among them, apart the Latins from whom originated the Roman civilization, the most successful were perhaps the Samnites, who were able to create a large federation across the central Apennines and effectively contrasted the Roman expansions until the Samnite Wars.

Some of these population, living in southern Italy and the island, from the 8th to the 3rd century lived alongside new colonie founded by the Phoenicians and the Greek, later absorbed into the Roman state.

The Ancient peoples of Italy, then, can be showed here divided into:"

I removed this. I am sorry to have to say, it has no merit. It was either not written in English or it was written in English by someone not fluent in written English. In spoken English, of course, you can get away with just about any utterance, resorting to hand gestures if necessary. This has to be educated English, would you not agree? However, that is not the main problem, which is its sweeping generalizations unaccompanied by any references. It also adopts Kossinna's Law, which is that the ethnic cultures can be identified with the archaeological ones. In addition to those editorial opinions we get ethical and moral ones, such as the "pacific coexistence." Exactly what do you mean by that, editor? If there was peaceful coexistence, quite a number of unrelated languages would still be spoken in peaceful Italy today. I don't see such events as crucifying thousands of slaves along the road from Rome to Capua or stringing Il Duce up by the heels in a village as being too pacific, do you? If pacifism prevailed, what are all these engravings of warriors and battle scenes? No, empires are not built through pacific coexistence, my dear editor. I dare say Italy has been one of the bloodiest peninsulas on the Earth, but that is my opinion only. I don't have a reference for mine and you don't have one for yours. And next to last but not least, you are giving us ideological English with a bad accent. Finally, this intro repeats everything that follows and throws in trivial corn to boot, such as information being subject to continual revisions. Just what information, pray tell, is not? Is there any anywhere? I really can't do anything with this badly written and completety inaccurate intro so I am removing it. We don't need much of an intro anyway, as this is a list.Dave (talk) 01:20, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

References

Very little is known

The editor seems to have very little else to say. This over-worked expression has to go. It is overworked.Dave (talk) 01:50, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Magical Nuragics

There are no Nuragics. The term was given by archaeologists to a Bronze Age civilization on Sardinia and elsewhere. We can't just jump them to the 2nd century BC. The Bronze Age people might be unrelated to any subsequent people there. That is the sort of connection you would have to prove in a professional article. Here it is original research. I'm altering the capton of the pic.Dave (talk) 02:16, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

OK, I read the Nuragic article quickly. I think that one needs a lot of work also. I'm going to add it to my list. I don't know if they were still building the nuragi in the 2nd century BC. I do know that over that length of time neither the language nor the ethnicity can be the same. Besides the Bronze Age nuragi were not confined to Sardinia. Let's not make assuptions in this article. The map is not one of Nuragic structures. We can't assume the people on the map have anything at all to do with Nuragi. Castles are something similar. The castle has been around for quite a long time. That does not warrant a presumption of some ethnicity and language speakers, "castle-builder." The issue should be addressed in the Nuragic article.Dave (talk) 02:36, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Proposed merger of Italic peoples into this list

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

To not merge on the grounds of no sufficient WP:MERGEREASON. Klbrain (talk) 13:41, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

---

The article Italic peoples should be merged into this list. Here are some reasons:

1. Even if we accept the linguistic concept of Italic languages, languages and "peoples" are distinct things. The term "X people" has traditionally been used in Wikipedia to refer to an ethnic or national group called "X"; and "ethnic group" means a lot more than just "people who speak the same language", much less "people who speak linguistically related languages". The term implies a group of people who behaves like a single society, e.g. geographical promiscuity, intermarriage, communal practices, common governance, etc.. There are many examples of groups of people who speak the same language but are quite distinct ethnic groups, and groups that speak different languages yet are a single ethnic group. For many of the proposed "Italic peoples" in that article, we simply do not know whether they were distinct and cohesive ethnic groups.
2. There must have been hundreds of somewhat independent tribes and kingdoms, and distinct ethnic groups, in Italy during the Iron Age (say, 700 BCE to 100 BCE), of the same size and importance as the Latins. Most of them probably disappeared without trace; as well as hundreds or thousands of similar communities in the preceding 130,000 years that humans have lived in the peninsula. We only know a few dozen of those Iron Age tribes/states, thanks to Roman historians. For many of those few dozen, we barely know their names and general location. So, even if we accept that a Wikipedia "people" can be a political rather than an ethnic entity, listing (or omitting) those historical tribes from an article because they are assumed to be "Italic" (or not) would be highly problematic. On the other hand, we can safely list them here, and just note that their language is unknown, or only assumed by Y or Z.
3. Since languages does not equate with "peoples", a taxonomy of the "peoples" based on the linguistic classification of what languages they are supposed to have spoken is rather pointless. The Romans had much better relations (genetic and historical even) with their non-IE Estruscan neighbors than with other "Italic" tribes in the surrounding areas.
4. The linguistic record itself is very sparse. Some "Italic languages" are attested only by a couple of short inscriptions. While those remains can be enough to prove that the language existed, and give some idea of its features and classification, it is a dangerous assumption that the tribe that lived there — maybe centuries later — spoke that language. In Mesopotamia there are thousand of Sumerian tablets written in times and places where no one had spoken Sumerian for a thousand years. Ditto for Latin and Hebrew texts written all over Europe in the Renaissance. The inscriptions may have been made for or by a small number of foreign traders or expatriates, for example. On the other hand, for many of the tribes that were mentioned in the historic record (and the hundreds that were not) there is no surviving evidence of their language.

For these and possibly other reasons, the separate article on the "Italic peoples" is misleading and ill-conceived. The little information in that article can be merged into this article or other more general articles, such as Prehistoric Italy.
--Jorge Stolfi (talk) 18:34, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose - Though long, this proposal does not refer to a single source or Wikipedia policy. It is strictly based on original research pushing the fringe theory that the Italic languages are a nonexistant language family. List of ancient peoples of Italy is a list of all ancient peoples of Italy, including Etruscans, Greeks, Celts and others. Italic peoples is limited to the ethnolinguistic group speaking Italic languages. The articles therefore cover two very different subjects, namely, geography and ethnolinguistics. The bulk of the content in the latter article consists of text solidly referenced from Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language and other quality sources. Such content cannot possibly be merged into a list, and a merger would therefore be tantamount to a deletion. As there is clearly no significant overlap, this proposal fails WP:MERGEREASON and is a bad idea. Krakkos (talk) 19:33, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

• There are several problems with this objection.
  First, linguists themselves admit that there are two branches of the "Italic languages" that may have split outside Italy. That is neither a "fringe theory" nor my own "original research"; just check the sources. It is not scientific to group those two language subfamilies into one category, just because the surviving inscriptions are found only in Italy, while separating them from Messapic and other IE, just because relatives of those are attested also outside Italy.
  Second, as explained above, calling the tribes who spoke "Italic" languages an "ethnolinguistic group" is not even a "fringe theory", it is just wrong. There is no evidence that those peoples were an ethnic group. In fact, ethnic groups often cross language barriers. For example, we know that the Romans were genetically, politically, and culturally closer to the Etruscans than to most other "Italic" peoples. It is a safe bet that several other "Italic peoples" had ethnic ties with non-IE ones.
  Third, there is nothing that could be said about the "Italic peoples" besides the fact that they spoke "Italic languages". So the "Italic peoples" article would be largely a duplication of "Italic languages".
  Fourth, the material in "Italic peoples" would also be duplicated here.
  --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 10:15, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

Rome was a Latin city. The Latins were part of the Italic peoples. The Etruscans controlled Rome for a time, but that doesn't make the Latins non-Italics. Barjimoa (talk) 10:13, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

• For a related proposal, see Talk:List of ancient Italic peoples#Merge discussion. Krakkos (talk) 19:36, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
• Pinging users Izzat Kutebar, Florian Blaschke, Spinningspark and Dimadick, who have participated in a similar discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Anatolian peoples. Krakkos (talk) 19:37, 20 May 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose "Italic peoples" is limited to the speakers of Italic languages. This article covers Celts, Greeks, and several ethnic groups which were not Indo-European at all. Dimadick (talk) 19:53, 20 May 2019 (UTC)

• Yes, and that is what is wrong with Italic peoples. Why should they discussed in a separate article, if the only thing that sets them apart is the fact that they spoke distinct but related languages?

• Oppose Historians and linguists routinely employ the term "Italic peoples". The concepts Italic languages and ethnolinguistic group are well-established and it is intellectually dishonest (to put it mildly) to suggest otherwise. This is POV-pushing, to be frank. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 14:04, 21 May 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose As it has already been noted, the Italic populations (an ethno-linguistic group identified by their use of the Italic languages, a particular branch of Indo-European spoken across the Italian peninsula) denote a different thing from the ancient peoples of Italy, who comprise a number of diverse groups regardless of their affiliation. I personally don't see any reason as to why we should potentially mislead the reader into assuming that the two concepts are one and the same. If anything, I would rather merge this article into the main one speaking about the Italic peoples; however, I think that leaving everything as it is would be the best course of action, at least for the time being.--Dk1919 (talk) 23:07, 16 September 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose for the points made above, altough we need more clarity in this multitude of articles. Barjimoa (talk) 11:02, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.