The history of the Latin sound system of Etruria (Tuscany) from Augustus to Charlemagne

Abstract This paper presents the history of vowel mergers from the 1st century B.C. to the 8th century A.D. over five periods, analysing LLDB data of a purely phonological nature from various perspectives, such as the proportion of mergers compared to all vowel errors, the proportion of mergers involving front vowels compared to the proportion of mergers involving back vowels, and the proportion of mergers in stressed and unstressed syllables. The results of this study confirm that the Latin linguistic features of the 8th century parchment charters of the Chartae Latinae Antiquiores (ChLA) organically continue and complete the earlier processes in Latin mainly observed in inscriptions, leading to the development of the local Italo-Romance language in the 9th–10th centuries.