Amongst material collected for Part II. of the Pre-Italic Dialects is a plaster cast of a bronze fibula of the ‘simple bow’ or ‘arched’ type found in the neighbourhood of Chur. The cast was sent by Dr. R. von Planta to Professor Conway, who passed it on to me. Study of the inscription, however, which is not, so far as I am aware, hitherto published, shows that it is not, as was thought, Raetic, but Gallo-Latin, as its provenance would suggest.

An inscription found in 1912 near Praeneste,1 and now easily accessible in the new edition of Vol. I. of the Corpus of Latin inscriptions , records a dedication in honour of Juno PALOS-CARIA , an epithet previously unknown, and not yet, I believe, satisfactorily explained. Rosenberg's attempted explanation will not secure many adherents, while that of Lommatzsch , who would connect the word with palus -udis, and see an allusion to the ‘paludes Pomptinae,’ involves us in serious, though not insuperable, (...) phonetic and morphological difficulties. If we were reduced to accepting the derivation from palus ‘marsh,’ I should prefer to see rather a reference to the festival of Juno on the Nonae Caprotinae , which took place near the Caprae palus in the Campus Martius. There would then be at least a definite connexion of the goddess with the palus, whereas there is no such connexion, so far as I know, of Juno with the Pomptine Marshes. (shrink)

All students of Greek epigraphy are familiar with the abecedarium discovered in 1805, ‘prope Bastam ruri quodam dicto Melliche,’ by Luigi Cepolla, amongst whose papers Mommsen found and published it in his Unteritalische Dialekte . Cepolla's copy, though inaccurate, is not so bad, as I hope to show, as has usually been supposed. To be sure, he proposed to interpret an alphabet as a complete inscription, and actually ‘translated’ it! Nor, I think, could it be properly deciphered until more Messapic (...) inscriptions than were known to Mommsen had been collected and their alphabet more closely studied. It has, however, long been recognized that the Vaste alphabet should be rightly regarded as essentially a Messapic alphabet, although, as is well known, the alphabet of the Messapic inscriptions agrees in the main with the Tarentine-Ionic variety of the Western Greek alphabet; but the proposed explanations of Cepolla's transcript of the Vaste alphabet have been most diverse, not to say perverse—certainly they have been largely arbitrary. They may be sought in the places cited in the footnote below. (shrink)

A Famous group of heraldic dedications, with inscriptions in the Oscan dialect, the iovilae-inscriptions as, in the uncertainty that prevails as to their real character, scholars have generally been content to call them , have long been a standing puzzle to students of the Italic dialects. A visit made in the spring of 1922 to the Museo Nazionale at Naples, where a number of the iovilae are now preserved, provided an opportunity of reconsidering, with the actual objects before me, a (...) new explanation of these most interesting dedications which I now venture to publish. (shrink)