docoflove1974

No kidding...I thank you immensely, Ginevra...I'm gonna have fun (whenever I get this damned dissertation approved). I'm having a hard time understanding your question, Don Tom

Phooey. :drunk:

Google spiderbots and the like are often the culprit. My friends and I have a semi-private forum site, and guy who was in charge of 'running' the board had to install extra software, or something like that, just to keep the buggers off. It was kinda necessary there...as for this site, I guess the bots are needed.

You mean GO would be so dastardly as to contrive a malady for you, and had the audacity to instill such pity in us for you and your state of being? Get a rope :giljotiini:

As some Englishperson once said: The world today seems absolutely crackers, With nuclear bombs to blow us all sky high. There are fools and idiots sitting on the trigger, It's depressing and it's senseless and that's why... [i won't go into the rest, except to say it's a Sino-love fest.]

Also, it's not really until the 12th century that we get 'consistent' documents in any form of Italian. This is relatively late in comparison to French (8-9th c.), Spanish (9-10th c.), Galician Portuguese (10th c.) and others.

This bears repeating again...and again...and again.

All dialects, regardless of what language you are talking about, are based on whatever the 'norm' is for the language. By that I mean, you have language X, which is usually based on the standard dialect (X1), but there are various local varieties (think of them as local flavors), which are all related closely--X2, X3, X4, etc. Each local variety has unique characteristics--be it lexical, phonological, morphological, or even (less often) syntactical--but they have more in common than not. How they are formed is usually a combination of isolation and shared communication with other linguistic areas. There would be enough isolation whereby the linguistic/speech community has a shared way of speaking, as a subconscious 'means of identification', yet there would be continued communication with other linguistic/speech communities so that this semi-isolated group does not become so different as to become its own language. It's a delicate balance, and as far as I know there is no true quanitification of this balance. So, back to Latin > Italian: if one looks at the history of the Italian penninsula after the fall of the Empire, and well into the 19th century, there have always been 'principalities' (a good general term for now) based around certain geographic locations; each of these larger 'principalities' had smaller 'duchies' (another general term) which had closer-knit communities. Local dialects would come fromo these 'duchies', with the various dialects of a given 'principality' having many common aspects. In turn, the dialects of each 'principality' would have much in common with its neighbors...and so it goes. In this way, we can discuss 'Milanese', 'Gallo-Italic' or 'Gallo-Romance', and Italian!

You live in a strange, odd little world, man :smartass:

Aw shucks, Mr. Gaius...you shore do tell one fuunnnny storieee...

Not from an artichoke field? Jasminia: your Spanish will come in handy more than the Latin in learning Italian. Although my family speaks 'dialect', I truly learned Spanish first before Italian, and it helped. What will get you is past tense; the use of what in Spanish would be analogous to 'el presente perfecto' is used instead of 'el preterito'--this took me a bit to get around, particularly because both habere and essere are used. But good luck!

I thought all of the emperors called themselves (and were often called) 'Caesar'?

Much like Ursus hinted at, it's a power and money thing. My dad always said, "follow the money," and if you follow the trade partners, and who held more sway, oftentimes you'll see patterns in language change. But not always! You point to a lack of Hunish in central France...an even better example is the many Germanic tribes that settled and 'conquered' after the fall of the Empire...yet Spain and the Italian peninsula are Romance-speaking. Or Norman French in England!

Funny enough, I just finished that part of AD's Language in Danger...and I agree with him that much of the 'staying power' (or lack thereof) depends on the level of bilingualism, the presence and use of a written language, and the language policies of the 'conquering' people. Here I would also add speaker perceptions--if you were conquered by X group, who did not require you to change your language use whilst under their guardianship, but you see that knowing X's language you will move up in the world, then chances are you and your speech community will shift increasingly to the use of X's language. All of this is done usually at a slow pace--it takes generations of speakers before a total switch is noticed. Language use and change is a funny thing...every language is spoken (or, in the case of sign language, expressed via signs), but not every langauge is written. And while oral traditions will keep a non-written langauge afloat, once a society comes to rely on written records (be they laws, transactions, or a colonizer's influence), it seems that a purely oral language will eventually phase out.

Good point, Signore Dalby, one I forgot to bring up. Jozsef Herman (2000) notes Sacerdos (late 3rd c. AD) in mentioning that at that point the long vowels had been shortened in the final syllable, and an even later grammarian Sergius "explicitly comments that 'it is difficult to know which syllables are naturally long' (that is, which syllables contain a long vowel; syllabas natura longas difficile est scire, GL, IV.533)" (p. 28). His statement is that, beyond the comments from the grammarians, "there are other indications that confusion over length had come into Vulgar Latin toward the end of the Empire" (p. 29), such as the construction of poems (he notes Commodian), but I wonder if this is not just the typical lag between speech and written documentation. As I have said for years, we really need that time machine up and running, so we can go back and observe all of this!

You mean, outside of life?

I thought Freud would call it evidence of latent penis envy? (not gonna go there, tho)

Um...I'm confused. Romani, indeed, has been 'classified' as a Hindu-based language, although the language has undergone an extraordinate amount of change lexically, phonologically and morph-syntactically. Romansch is an alternate name for Rhaeto-Romance, or of a dialect of it, depending on your persuasion.

My good woman, I should hope not! :fish: *bleep bleep bleep bleeeeeeep*...Error corrected in the original post. (But damn funny, no?)

Close your eyes and imagine Sophia Loren. Or Penelope Cruz...def. a Western Mediterranean face.

17/30. That's about right. I always score low on those kinds of tests. My genius cannot be tests...it must be observed!

And depends on which Ladino you're looking at: Ladino the language of the (ex) Spanish and Portuguese Jews, who were expelled from Iberia in the reign of los Reyes Catolicos, or Ladino the Alps-based Rhaeto-Romance dialect/language. I've never head of 'Romansch' as a version of Romani...where did you get that from? My expertise in this area is lacking, but a great source is: Haiman, John, and Paola Beninc

It's more than just the lack of declensions--which didn't really happen as much as people think. There are still 3 declensions: -o, -a, -other. There were several major morpho-syntactical and phonological differences between Classical Latin and the modern Romance languages, including Italian: Nominal differences: --loss of case > fixed word order in the phrase and in the sentences, increased used of prepositional phrases --loss of the third, neuter gender > fixation of the bi-generic system (masculine and feminine) --invention of and increased use of determiners (Latin had demonstratives, but there was a much larger contingent of demonstratives in Latin, some of which became used as definite articles, other which fell out of use) --because of the loss of case and the phonogical changes, the number inflections changed a bit--although they still pulled from the nominative plural inflections of Latin (Rumanian did, too, but no other Romance language did, I'm almost positive (my Sardinain knowledge is off)) Verbal differences: --loss of the perfect (and changing of the endings) > increased use of the 'present perfect' (yes the passato remoto is still used, but its role in the language has died down considerably) --change in the simple future endings--the Latin system went by the wayside and in its place was a synthetic form (pan-Romance) which was a combination of the infinitive + habeo/habere (pres.ind.) --creation of a new perfective system, which used mostly habere (and occasionally essere) with the past participle --loss of the future perfect, the pluperfect indicative, the imperfect and perfect subjunctive, the perfect and future infinitives and the future participle. --complete dismemberment of the passive and middle system > forms of esse/essere + past participle Syntactical differences: --fixed word order, at the expense of the case system --increased use of conjunctions (which were free morphemes, instead of Latin's bound morphemes) As I understand it, there were slight changes in aspect (preterite/perfect vs. imperfect), and the move to using the compound passato prossimo would show this, but someone more qualified on Latin aspect can answer this better, perhaps. Also, I believe that the role of subjunctive increased with the modern languages, but again I defer to a Latin expert. (I need to brush up on my Latin ) Phonological differences (excuse the lack of IPA notation here): --loss of final consonants, except for borrowed words (true Italian words are almost always vowel-final) --palatalization of the yod--this takes a while to explain, but there are numerous Latin sound combinations which usually involved an alveolar or velar stop with a weak front vowel (usually or occasionally [e]), and these would create your palatal affricates and fricatives. I can go into this at depth later. --reduction of the Latin vowel system--starting with the loss of length as a phoneme, but including the paring down of the vowel options to 7 --creation of consonantal sounds: [v], the trill [r:] (no one that I have read is fully convinced that there was one in Latin, but probably there was the tap/flap [r]), the palatal liquid (the 'gl' sound), the palatal nasal (the 'gn' sound), the various fricatives and affricates which are a result of the palatalization of the yod. --Italian seemed, by and large, to have kept the Latin stress pattern better than the other Romance languages. Latin's stress patter was: if the penultimate syllable was a closed syllable (CVC) or a long open syllable (CV:), then it held the stress; if not, then it was the antepenultimate syllable. Italian is close to this: if the penultimate syllable is closed (CVC), then the vowel is short, and if the penultimate syllable is open and stressed, the vowel is long (CV:). But there are differences as to where Italian places stress--it's not always on the penultimate syllable. I know I've left some out...but I'm not much of a morning person...so excuse omissions, please. But this, as you can see, is quite a list. I will say this: of the Romance languages, Italian phonologically is closer to Classical Latin than most (I think Sardinian is the only one closer), but morphologically and syntactically it is quite a bit different.

Sounds more like a Denny Crane-ism

Egads...that was bad