Proto-Romance and Romance Languages

[ASCLEPIADES]

There's another aspect of the dialect vs language controversy. My parents' generation spoke a dialect inherited from their Abruzzi parents. What I could see growing up was that this dialect had a very small vocabulary. I'm sure that you couldn't have described open heart surgery using their words. Others say that the definition of a language is a dialect with an army. So political power, never an option in my grandparents' region (a least not in the past 1000 years), is an important factor. Perhaps here is where the dialect of Castille, Spain, became a language and triumphed over Leonese and the other stillborn tongues.

Salve, L

 

This link goes to a brief Abruzzi : Italian Lexicon (Vocabolario Abruzzese).

 

I hope we're talking about the same language/dialect here.

[Ludovicus]

There's another aspect of the dialect vs language controversy. My parents' generation spoke a dialect inherited from their Abruzzi parents. What I could see growing up was that this dialect had a very small vocabulary. I'm sure that you couldn't have described open heart surgery using their words. Others say that the definition of a language is a dialect with an army. So political power, never an option in my grandparents' region (a least not in the past 1000 years), is an important factor. Perhaps here is where the dialect of Castille, Spain, became a language and triumphed over Leonese and the other stillborn tongues.

Salve, L

 

This link goes to a brief Abruzzi : Italian Lexicon (Vocabolario Abruzzese).

 

I hope we're talking about the same language/dialect here.

 

 

Thanks so much for the brief Abruzzese lexicon. I recognized several words from this dialect that conserves many Latin words that didn't survive in Italian. Here are two examples:

"lloche" for in quel posto, from Latin "locus"

"is" for egli or lui

 

The fact that I didn't recognize a lot of the words underscores another problem with dialects: neighboring villages had their own lexicons all under the name of Abruzzese.

Edited June 9, 2008 by Ludovicus

[docoflove1974]

ASCLEPIADES said:

Salve, Amici

 

These are some of my own questions for Docta about the fascinating topic of quantitative linguistics:

 

- Exactly how is lexical similarity measured? (BTW, I've noted Ethnologue gives figures under 90% for similar languages; ie, Spanish/Portuguese or Italian/French).

 

- Ethnologue gives also figures for mutual intelligibility, a related but clearly different concept. How is it measured? Are intelligibility and Comprehensibility synonymous?

 

- I understand intelligibility might be asymmetrical (ie, it may be easier for Dutch subjects to understand written Afrikaans than it is for South African subjects to understand written Dutch). Can this be a significant problem for the dialect/language definition?

 

- Can any of the previous (or additional) measures be used as standard cut-off values for the quantitative definition of language vs dialect?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

As I told Asclepiades, I needed a bit to figure this puzzle out, so to speak. So sorry for the delay...and for the long answer upcoming!

 

Part 1: Lexical similarity:

 

I really went through Ethonologue's site and their web-based edition for the answers...and to be honest, I found none. They do not define how they measure 'mutual intelligibility' save for this (taken from their website😞

 

Ethnologue.com said:

Not all scholars share the same set of criteria for what constitutes a “language” and what features define a “dialect.” The Ethnologue applies the following basic criteria:

 

• Two related varieties are normally considered varieties of the same language if speakers of each variety have inherent understanding of the other variety at a functional level (that is, can understand based on knowledge of their own variety without needing to learn the other variety).
• [Where spoken intelligibility between varieties is marginal, the existence of a common literature or of a common ethnolinguistic identity with a central variety that both understand can be a strong indicator that they should nevertheless be considered varieties of the same language.

Where there is enough intelligibility between varieties to enable communication, the existence of well-established distinct ethnolinguistic identities can be a strong indicator that they should nevertheless be considered to be different languages.

 

But Asclepiades' question was the manner in which these concepts of 'mutual intelligibility' and lexical similarity are measured. Ethnologue doesn't discuss this anywhere on their site, that I could find. So...in general, how is this done?

 

I was taught by my professors to use certain 'core' categories of words when judging or evaluating lexical similarity:

• family terms, particularly that of parents, children, siblings;
• numerals 1-10, and often the number for the 10s;
• body parts, particularly 'head', 'hand', and 'leg';
• pronouns meaning 'I/me', 'we/us', 'you';
• function words (prepositions, articles);
• basic verbs for everyday life ('to eat', 'to sleep', 'to bathe' and the like)

This is not an exhaustive list; some include a wider scope of words. The work of Joseph Greenberg, particularly on African and American languages, includes words for all family members, the numerals for the 100s, and others. The reason behind this 'core vocabulary' is that these words are less likely to be borrowed across languages. There are some anomalies, but they tend to be rare. But just as a comparison, look at the following table which samples these types of 'core lexicon' from English, French and German (from Hock 1991: 559-560):

 

English: to; too; two; twenty; eat; bite; father; mother; three; thou

French:

[docoflove1974]

Part 2: Mutual Intelligibility:

 

Another slippery topic...one which doesn't have an exact definition, as mentioned earlier. Again quoting from Hock (1991:381), mutual intelligibility as an 'exact measure', doesn't always work. As he states, a Norwegian and a Swede will tell you they speak different languages...yet the two 'languages' are nearly identical; same with a Serb and a Croat. The various 'dialetti' of Italy are another question.

 

What these varying results and failures of the mutual intelligibility test show is that there is no clear line of demarcation between 'different dialect'and 'different language': Linguistic similarity or difference is a matter not of 'yes' or 'no', but of 'more' or 'less'; it is gradient not discrete.

 

Put another way, it's a linguistic and a sociolinguistic element, one which is part of a continuum.

 

So, when one goes to measure, or attempt to measure, mutual intelligibility, one looks at a few criteria (this is taken both from Hock (1991:385) and what I've been taught over the years):

• Basic vocabulary (same topics I talked about in Part 1);
  
• Morpho-syntactic simiarlities in the Noun Phrase, Verb Phrase, and Prepositional Phrase structure
  

Now, there are serious complications with all of these criteria. With basic vocab, while it generally isn't borrowed, there are instances. Rumanian provides a good example of this; there are so many layers to Rumanian, that at times the 'basic vocabulary' is not Latin-based: vatră 'hearth' (possibly Dacian or Slavic); g

Edited June 12, 2008 by docoflove1974

[docoflove1974]

One last note on the language vs. dialect discussion...as seen above, it is a difficult and controversial topic, one which (like mutual intelligibility) employs both linguistic and sociolinguistic elements. As an observation, I find that it depends on the background of the linguist at times; one who deals with syntax will make a cut-off perhaps in a different place than one who deals in sociolinguistics. Certainly the nebulous 'mutual intelligibility' is a factor, but I think each linguist uses their own judgment.

 

As a linguist who works with historical linguistics and language change theory, the cut-off is when there are larger changes to the overall language--the morpho-syntax, the phonology, the semantics. I'm more likely to say that Italian has various dialects, and that there are few instances of different languages; for me, the question of different lexicon is important, but not crucial. I also look at the history and see the strong independence of the various regions until the 20th century, and how this helped to maintain the various speeches of Italy. But many others would disagree, saying that because of this independence and linguistic isolation (or there abouts), the Italian peninsula is home to various Italian languages.

 

I like Hock's (1991: 380-381) comment on language vs. dialect:

 

Put very simply, varieties of speech which are relatively similar to each other, whose divergences are relatively minor, are called different 'dialects' of the same 'language'. A 'language', then, is the ensemble of such dialects--whether they are standard or vernacular, urban or rural, regional or supra-regional. Varieties which differ from each other more noticeably, whose divergences are major, are called different languages.

 

Still not quite concrete, but I think it's about as good as it gets, at least in order to get a consensus!

[Silentium]

As far as proto-romance is concerned, I think it is clear that we are not talking about a perfectly homogeneous linguistic system, Hall never claimed that and saying otherwise would mean to misquote him.

 

I would not dismiss Proto-Romance tout-court without having illustrated it, nor make it sound like the ravings of an individual linguist. Moreover, the evidence of what he and many other romance linguists say (Hall is certainly not the only one who worked on Proto-Romance, there is plenty of evidence from many other studies) is so overwhelming that I think it is really difficult to disprove it, unless one has a better hypothesis to explain the systematic similarities in the evolutional patterns of the romance languages. Hall is very moderate in what he says, he takes into account different isoglosses, substratum, dialectal/geographical peculiarities etc., as Pulgram pointed out:

 

[docoflove1974]

About the language vs dialect question, I believe giving a clear-cut definition would somehow be erroneous. There are languages that can be defined as such on merely linguistic grounds and other linguistic varieties that are regarded as distinct languages for social, cultural, political, historical (as well as linguistic) reasons. I am thinking of Heinz Kloss' division between Abstandsprachen and Ausbausprachen, maybe I should expand on this with another post.

 

By the way: Giovanni ha rUbato una mela.

 

Please do, Silentium...as my knowledge of German is non-existent, I'd love to read what Kloss' says.

 

As for the example...shame on me. I typed it as Hock wrote it, without even thinking. Thanks for the correction!

[Silentium]

Please do, Silentium...as my knowledge of German is non-existent, I'd love to read what Kloss' says.

 

You can find the article in English on the Anthropological linguistics review. As you pointed out earlier those involved in sociolinguistics will probably tend to give a different definition of language and dialect from that of an historical linguist, and that is the case with Kloss.

However, are we sure language can really be separated from its political and social context? Isn’t language a social construct?

Take French, for example. Without the Franks coming to power at a certain point in history I don’t think it would have been the same language we know today.

Also, how can one ignore the part played by religion in the distinction of Serbian and Croatian, for example? A purely linguistic definition of language that does not take these variables into account cannot work, in my opinion. About the commonplace according to which languages have a literature and dialects don't, Occitan has a quite prestigious literature but in today’s France it is nothing more than a dialect, in terms of status.

 

What Kloss says is essentially that Abstand languages or “languages by distance” are those varieties considered as separate languages because of their distance from all other languages (like Basque, for example), while Ausbau Languages (languages by extention, or construction) are associated with geographical dialect continua and therefore depend on cultural factors for their status. This means Ausbau languages are potentially temporary entities. Some languages are languages by both criteria, like English for example.

 

This means intelligibility can hardly work as a distinctive criterion between Ausbau languages, as Northern Neil mentioned earlier. The Italian-Spanish example comes to mind.

 

The same would be true for a Spanish and an Italian speaker, if neither speaker were educated in foreign Romance languages; there are various differences which would keep a speaker of one from fully understanding a speaker of the other. That's not to say that there wouldn't be a little bit of intelligibility; let's face it, Europeans and Latin Americans are educated in at least one other foreign language anymore, as long as they are not of the poorest social class.

 

Spanish is not necessarily less intelligible to an Italian speaker from central Italy than Sicilian or Lombard, so I don’t think it is a matter of intelligibility here. Czech, Slovak and Polish are together the West Slavic dialect continuum; there is mutual intelligibility and a Polish could easily hold a conversation with a Slovak, but each has a different standardised norm and different cultural parameters.

Edited June 16, 2008 by Silentium

[Ludovicus]

Sometimes there is a problem with terminology. Napolitano, Abruzzese, etc. are called Italian dialects. This leads one to think that evolved from Italian when, really, it was Latin.

 

 

I've found these books on the history of the Italian language to be of value to the layperson, like me:

The Languages of Italy, Giacomo Devoto

 

The Italian Language, Mario Pei

 

 

The Story of Latin and the Romance Languages, Mario Pei

 

All of the above are out of print but available from used book dealers.

[Aurelia]

 

The same would be true for a Spanish and an Italian speaker, if neither speaker were educated in foreign Romance languages; there are various differences which would keep a speaker of one from fully understanding a speaker of the other. That's not to say that there wouldn't be a little bit of intelligibility; let's face it, Europeans and Latin Americans are educated in at least one other foreign language anymore, as long as they are not of the poorest social class.

 

Spanish is not necessarily less intelligible to an Italian speaker from central Italy than Sicilian or Lombard, so I don

[Northern Neil]

I found Neapolitan particularly easy to understand and was surprised to hear some expressions that were nearly identical to what I myself used.

Are there any traces of Greek in Napolitano and Oscan?

[docoflove1974]

As I recall (and I'll check up on this later when I get home), there are Greek lexical elements in not just Neopolitan but in many of the southern Italian dialetti, but little-to-no morphological and syntactical elements in the area.

[Ludovicus]

I found Neapolitan particularly easy to understand and was surprised to hear some expressions that were nearly identical to what I myself used.

Are there any traces of Greek in Napolitano and Oscan?

 

 

I seem to remember in my reading that the general southern Italian tendency in the dialects to substitute "u" for "o" can be traced to Oscan. This may be a weak hypothesis because so little of written Oscan has survived. Perhaps our linguistically trained friends can help us in this.

 

e.g. of this feature in Abruzzese, a south central dialect/language:

 

cuntente=contento

cusci` or acusci` = cosi`

 

utante=otanta

menumale = meno male

Edited March 13, 2009 by Ludovicus

[docoflove1974]

Ok, in quickly consulting Elcock's (1960) The Romance Languages (p. 197-203), the Greek which was the influencing factor was, as he notes from Rohlfs (1968's Grammatica storia della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti) of Doric roots, meaning that it was Greeks left behind once Magna Graecia was taken over by Rome. It seems to have left some lexical traces into Latin, but overall not much is shown to be of true Greek influence; instead, it seems as though there were Greek-speakers in the area who were bilingal with Latin--and not just on a local level. Indeed, the word for 'rock' in many the Romance languages comes from the Greek petra, not from Latin lapis (Spanish piedra. French pierre, Italian pietra, Rumanian pĭatră, Proven

Edited March 14, 2009 by docoflove1974

[Kosmo]

the word for 'rock' in many the Romance languages comes from the Greek petra, not from Latin lapis (Spanish piedra. French pierre, Italian pietra, Rumanian pĭatră, Proven