How Did Italian Arise?

[Ludovicus]

Now, for a digression. What is the status of Rhaeto-Romanic with regard to Latin?

 

My expertise in this area is lacking, but a great source is: Haiman, John, and Paola Beninc

Edited August 7, 2006 by Ludovicus

[Gaius Octavius]

The real answer to the question of how Eyetalians arose is simple. From a head of cabbage!

[docoflove1974]

The real answer to the question of how Eyetalians arose is simple. From a head of cabbage!

 

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!

[Gaius Octavius]

Gaius sees that he has befuddled affairs here.

 

The quip is from an Italian movie, 'Bitter Rice', a B&W movie made during Roman times. Starred Gina Lollabridgida (Mama mia, che bellizza!).

 

A kid asks his mother: Where did I come from? She fobs him off with: A head of cabbage. Then we see the kid destroying a head of cabbage in the garden. Mama: What are you doing you little vaggabond? Kid: Looking for more (Eyetalian) kids!

 

I hope that matters are more transparent and that none of the Moderators or Legatii are paying attention. :sneaky2:

[docoflove1974]

The quip is from an Italian movie, 'Bitter Rice', a B&W movie made during Roman times. Starred Gina Lollabridgida (Mama mia, che bellizza!).

 

A kid asks his mother: Where did I come from? She fobs him off with: A head of cabbage. Then we see the kid destroying a head of cabbage in the garden. Mama: What are you doing you little vaggabond? Kid: Looking for more (Eyetalian) kids!

 

I hope that matters are more transparent and that none of the Moderators or Legatii are paying attention. :sneaky2:

 

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

[Antiochus of Seleucia]

You should see the games he plays with my mind...

[Gini]

Thanks docoflove for the detailed comparison It explains why I understand so little Latin. I have principally a scientific background with a little psychology thown in which is why i ask you people linguistic and historical questions.

An interesting point that vulgar Latin would be more like Italian tha the formal Latin we tend to learn. Is the vulgar Latin still known?

i would also like to comment about the psycholgy of the people becasue there seems a big difference here too. Italians are more "make love not war" Romans definitely make war

I wonder if the influences of the Latin people who the Romans conquered are here and it would be interesting to understand just how these peoples retained their identity for so long.

An interesting point about the dialects also. Does anyone know about the different dialects and where they come from? The only dialect I know at all is Milanese and that has French overtones

[Ludovicus]

An interesting point about the dialects also. Does anyone know about the different dialects and where they come from? The only dialect I know at all is Milanese and that has French overtones

 

 

The historic Italian dialects come from Latin. At this website you can see a few of the dialects and how they derive from Latin.

 

http://www.abruzzomoliseheritagesociety.org/defina1.htm

[Andrew Dalby]

An interesting point that vulgar Latin would be more like Italian tha the formal Latin we tend to learn. Is the vulgar Latin still known?

i would also like to comment about the psycholgy of the people becasue there seems a big difference here too. Italians are more "make love not war" Romans definitely make war

 

It may depend which Romans you read. Catullus, Propertius, Ovid, Martial were all (in their different ways) in favour of making love!

 

Now about vulgar Latin. As you can imagine in a 'vibrant and multicultural society' (I borrow some modern scientific [!] terminology here) there was no sudden divide between classical and vulgar Latin, more a spectrum, a series of 'registers' (that's the real linguistic term).

 

Of the authors we can still read, Cicero is among the most interesting because his letters (being real private letters in most cases, not intended for publication) are written in a much more colloquial style than his speeches and philosophy. Not exactly 'vulgar Latin', but some way across the spectrum from classical. Who else? Plautus wrote before the distinction had fully developed, and in some ways his language is half way between vulgar and classical. The way the guests speak at Trimalchio's feast, in Petronius's /Satyrica/, is a good stab at vulgar Latin -- Petronius was a fine observer of linguistic differences. If you read the recipe book, Apicius, that's pretty much vulgar Latin. And many inscriptions, including of course the graffiti at Pompeii, are vulgar Latin, not classical at all. And finally the 'Vulgate', the Latin text of the Bible, is written in a language that's much closer to vulgar than to classical, naturally, because its initial audience would have been uneducated people (including slaves) in the western provinces of the Empire, people who had had no chance to learn Greek and therefore needed a translation in everyday Latin.

[Gaius Octavius]

Interesting site Ludovicus.

I THINK that there may be an error in the 'Campano' translation. I have an acquaintance with the Neapolitan spoken in the 19th century, and BELIEVE that the 'j' would have been pronounced as a 'y' or as 'gee'. The word for 'chicken' would be galline; hen, gallina - pronounced with a hard 'g' and the last vowel dropped in the former - 'gah-leen'; in the latter it would be pronounced 'gah-lee-nah'. I BELIEVE that the 'd' - 'r' usage is wrong here. The 'd' should have been retained in this case, and the last vowel dropped, thus deman'. The "c'a" (which, at best, means 'than the') should have been "c' na" ('than a'), to retain the feminine. To sum up: "... c' na gallina deman'. "

 

Was Corsican left out?

 

Caius, you :smartass:, :shutup: ! This twaddle is !

Edited August 9, 2006 by Gaius Octavius

[Ginevra]

the 'Vulgate', the Latin text of the Bible, is written in a language that's much closer to vulgar than to classical,

 

I've just bough my new schoolbooks for the next year. I've a new latin book, with many (original) texts from the Vulgata and i read something... I've been studying latin only one year, but i can easly understand the Genesis although i can't read more classical texts adapted for my level of knowledge. That's weird!

[docoflove1974]

An interesting point about the dialects also. Does anyone know about the different dialects and where they come from? The only dialect I know at all is Milanese and that has French overtones

 

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!

[Andrew Dalby]

the 'Vulgate', the Latin text of the Bible, is written in a language that's much closer to vulgar than to classical,

 

I've just bough my new schoolbooks for the next year. I've a new latin book, with many (original) texts from the Vulgata and i read something... I've been studying latin only one year, but i can easly understand the Genesis although i can't read more classical texts adapted for my level of knowledge. That's weird!

 

You're absolutely right, and I found the same (but it was a long time ago!) One of the things about classical Latin (as most people wrote it) was that it followed precise rules. The other thing was that it pulled out all the stops -- all the verb tenses, every noun case, all the word order options, all the subordinate clauses, no redundancy, no repetition, no 'noise'. When you wrote (and read) classical, you showed you could handle all this. It was an elite language.

 

The same is true of classical Greek. Pindar and Thucydides are hard. Really difficult. And Plutarch and Lucian, who wanted to show they could write this stuff just as well as the ancients, are difficult too. But the Iliad and Odyssey and Herodotus (because they haven't anything to do with the classical standard) and the Greek New Testament (because it's written by and for ordinary types) are astonishingly easy.

[Ludovicus]

According to Mario Pei in his "The Italian Language",

 

"The earliest text which is unmistakably Italian is the "Placito Capuano" of Monte Cassino (960 AD)"

 

Here is Pei's excerpt from that text, a sentence regarding property rights of a certain monastery:

 

"Sao ko kelle terre per kelle fini que ki contene trenta anni le possette parte Santi Benedicti."

 

Translation of the above sentence in the same author's book "The Story of Latin and the Romance Languages."

"I know that those lands within those boundaries which here contains (which are described herein) the Party (Monastery) of Sant Benedict owned them for thirty years.")

 

 

See also for a detailed history of Italian:

http://pagina1.altervista.org/historyaitalian3.htm

Edited August 10, 2006 by Ludovicus

[Ginevra]

"Sao ko kelle terre per kelle fini que ki contene trenta anni le possette parte Santi Benedicti

 

Oh yes! The "Placito Capuano" is vey famous. But I can easly understand it with no specifical studies, just with some imagination and using the head.

 

 

I dont study Classical Greek, Andrew, but many friends of mine do and they say the same thing!

Once my latin teacher said "it's so easy because those idiots forgot how to write in true latin"