This book makes accessible the major structural features of the dialects of Italy and of the Research Centre for Romance Linguistics at the University of Oxford .
Table of contents
- Adam Ledgeway and Martin Maiden
- The dialects of central Italy
- Dialects of central Italy - Oxford Scholarship
- The Origins Of Latin
Final -m was dropped in Vulgar Latin. Even in Classical Latin , final -am , -em , -um inflectional suffixes of the accusative case were often elided in poetic meter , suggesting the m was weakly pronounced, probably marking the nasalisation of the vowel before it. Final -t was eventually dropped in many languages, although this often occurred several centuries after the Vulgar Latin period.
For example, the reflex of -t was dropped in Old French and Old Spanish only around Old French also kept the third-person plural ending -nt intact.
Adam Ledgeway and Martin Maiden
In Italo-Romance and the Eastern Romance languages , eventually all final consonants were either dropped or protected by an epenthetic vowel, except in clitic forms e. In unstressed syllables, the resulting diphthongs were simplified: Palatalization was one of the most important processes affecting consonants in Vulgar Latin.
This eventually resulted in a whole series of " palatal " and postalveolar consonants in most Romance languages, e. Note how the environments become progressively less "palatal", and the languages affected become progressively fewer. The outcomes of palatalization depended on the historical stage, the consonants involved, and the languages involved. In both cases, phonetic palatalization must have remained in primitive Old French at least through the time when unstressed intertonic vowels were lost? This has the effect of keeping the modern spelling similar to the original Latin spelling, but complicates the relationship between sound and letter.
The following are examples of corresponding first-person plural indicative and subjunctive in a number of regular Portuguese verbs: Stop consonants shifted by lenition in Vulgar Latin. Several other consonants were "softened" in intervocalic position in Western Romance Spanish, Portuguese, French, Northern Italian , but normally not phonemically in the rest of Italy except some cases of "elegant" or Ecclesiastical words , nor apparently at all in Romanian.
The dividing line between the two sets of dialects is called the La Spezia—Rimini Line and is one of the most important isoglosses of the Romance dialects. The changes instances of diachronic lenition are as follows:. Single voiceless plosives became voiced: Some scholars once speculated that these sound changes may be due in part to the influence of Continental Celtic languages , [ citation needed ] but scholarship of the past few decades challenges that hypothesis.
Consonant length is no longer phonemically distinctive in most Romance languages. They may even occur at the beginning of words in Romanesco , Neapolitan, Sicilian and other southern varieties, and are occasionally indicated in writing, e. A few languages have regained secondary geminate consonants. While Western Romance words undergo word-initial epenthesis prothesis , cognates in Italian do not: One profound change that affected Vulgar Latin was the reorganisation of its vowel system.
There is evidence that in the imperial period all the short vowels except a differed by quality as well as by length from their long counterparts. During the Proto-Romance period, phonemic length distinctions were lost. Vowels came to be automatically pronounced long in stressed, open syllables i. This situation is still maintained in modern Italian: Soon, however, many of these vowels coalesced:. The Proto-Romance allophonic vowel-length system was rephonemicized in the Gallo-Romance languages as a result of the loss of many final vowels. Some northern Italian languages e.
The dialects of central Italy
Friulan still maintain this secondary phonemic length, but most languages dropped it by either diphthongizing or shortening the new long vowels. This vowel length was eventually lost by around AD , but the former long vowels are still marked with a circumflex. A fourth vowel length system, still non-phonemic, has now arisen: This system in turn has been phonemicized in some non-standard dialects e.
A number of authors remarked on this explicitly, e. Cicero 's taunt that the populist politician Publius Clodius Pulcher had changed his name from Claudius to ingratiate himself with the masses. An early process that operated in all Romance languages to varying degrees was metaphony vowel mutation , conceptually similar to the umlaut process so characteristic of the Germanic languages.
Metaphony is most extensive in the Italo-Romance languages, and applies to nearly all languages in Italy; however, it is absent from Tuscan, and hence from standard Italian. These diphthongizations had the effect of reducing or eliminating the distinctions between open-mid and close-mid vowels in many languages. In Spanish and Romanian, all open-mid vowels were diphthongized, and the distinction disappeared entirely.
Portuguese is the most conservative in this respect, keeping the seven-vowel system more or less unchanged but with changes in particular circumstances, e. In French and Italian, the distinction between open-mid and close-mid vowels occurred only in closed syllables. Standard Italian more or less maintains this. This is still the situation in modern Spanish, for example. By the end of the Middle French period, all falling diphthongs either monophthongized or switched to rising diphthongs: Originally, all vowels in both languages were nasalized before any nasal consonants, and nasal consonants not immediately followed by a vowel were eventually dropped.
In French, nasal vowels before remaining nasal consonants were subsequently denasalized, but not before causing the vowels to lower somewhat, e. Other vowels remained diphthongized, and were dramatically lowered: Sometimes the nasalization was eliminated: Nasal vowels that remained actually tend to be raised rather than lowered, as in French: In Portugal, vowels before a nasal consonant have become denasalized, but in Brazil they remain heavily nasalized. There was more variability in the result of the unstressed vowels. Originally in Proto-Romance, the same nine vowels developed in unstressed as stressed syllables, and in Sardinian, they coalesced into the same five vowels in the same way.
In Italo-Western Romance, however, vowels in unstressed syllables were significantly different from stressed vowels, with yet a third outcome for final unstressed syllables. This system is still preserved, largely or completely, in all of the conservative Romance languages e. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan.
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In final unstressed syllables, results were somewhat complex. Evidence of this comes from Rhaeto-Romance , in particular Sursilvan , which preserves reflexes of both final -us and -um , and where the latter, but not the former, triggers metaphony. The original five-vowel system in final unstressed syllables was preserved as-is in some of the more conservative central Italian languages, but in most languages there was further coalescence:.
The so-called intertonic vowels are word-internal unstressed vowels, i. Intertonic vowels were the most subject to loss or modification. But many languages ultimately dropped almost all intertonic vowels. The Romance languages for the most part have kept the writing system of Latin, adapting it to their evolution. One exception was Romanian before the nineteenth century, where, after the Roman retreat, literacy was reintroduced through the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet , a Slavic influence. The non-Christian populations of Spain also used the scripts of their religions Arabic and Hebrew to write Romance languages such as Ladino and Mozarabic in aljamiado.
Indeed, in Italian prose kilometro is properly chilometro. Catalan eschews importation of "foreign" letters more than most languages. While most of the 23 basic Latin letters have maintained their phonetic value, for some of them it has diverged considerably; and the new letters added since the Middle Ages have been put to different uses in different scripts. Some letters, notably H and Q , have been variously combined in digraphs or trigraphs see below to represent phonetic phenomena that could not be recorded with the basic Latin alphabet, or to get around previously established spelling conventions.
Most languages added auxiliary marks diacritics to some letters, for these and other purposes. The spelling rules of most Romance languages are fairly simple, and consistent within any language. Since the spelling systems are based on phonemic structures rather than phonetics, however, the actual pronunciation of what is represented in standard orthography can be subject to considerable regional variation, as well as to allophonic differentiation by position in the word or utterance. Among the letters representing the most conspicuous phonological variations, between Romance languages or with respect to Latin, are the following:.
Otherwise, letters that are not combined as digraphs generally represent the same phonemes as suggested by the International Phonetic Alphabet IPA , whose design was, in fact, greatly influenced by Romance spelling systems. Some of the digraphs used in modern scripts are:. Gemination , in the languages where it occurs, is usually indicated by doubling the consonant, except when it does not contrast phonemically with the corresponding short consonant, in which case gemination is not indicated.
The phonemic contrast between geminate and single consonants is widespread in Italian , and normally indicated in the traditional orthography: The double consonants in French orthography, however, are merely etymological. In Catalan, the gemination of l is marked by a punt volat "flying point": Romance languages also introduced various marks diacritics that may be attached to some letters, for various purposes. In some cases, diacritics are used as an alternative to digraphs and trigraphs; namely to represent a larger number of sounds than would be possible with the basic alphabet, or to distinguish between sounds that were previously written the same.
Diacritics are also used to mark word stress, to indicate exceptional pronunciation of letters in certain words, and to distinguish words with same pronunciation homophones. Depending on the language, some letter-diacritic combinations may be considered distinct letters, e. Most languages are written with a mixture of two distinct but phonetically identical variants or " cases " of the alphabet: In particular, all Romance languages capitalize use uppercase for the first letter of the following words: The Romance languages do not follow the German practice of capitalizing all nouns including common ones.
Unlike English, the names of months, days of the weeks, and derivatives of proper nouns are usually not capitalized: However, each language has some exceptions to this general rule. The tables below provide a vocabulary comparison that illustrates a number of examples of sound shifts that have occurred between Latin and Romance languages, along with a selection of minority languages.
Words are given in their conventional spellings. In addition, for French the actual pronunciation is given, due to the dramatic differences between spelling and pronunciation. French spelling approximately reflects the pronunciation of Old French , c. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article may be too long to read and navigate comfortably. The readable prose size is 96 kilobytes. Please consider splitting content into sub-articles, condensing it, or adding or removing subheadings. Scholars Marija Gimbutas J. Classification of Romance languages. Constructed language and International auxiliary language.
Dialects of central Italy - Oxford Scholarship
It has been suggested that this article be split into a new article titled Romance linguistics. Paul Lewis, " Summary by language size ", Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth Edition. Observatoire Linguistique, Linguasphere Press. A normal evolution to what extent? Quarterly Journal of Chinese Studies.
Qualitative and Quantitative Data from Central Spain". The American Journal of Philology. Grant and Cutler Ltd. The same happens with other prepositions: Archived from the original on Retrieved 2 December De Latino Sine Flexione. Archived from the original on June 10, A North Romance Language: The Central Italian neuters". An introduction to Old French. Modern Language Association of America. Persian agreement mismatch construction".
The more frequent Italian equivalent, however, is stesso , derived from the combination istum - ipsum. Stougaard Jensen, , —2. Not clearly distinct in meaning from the first normal preterite, cf. An Introduction to Old Occitan.
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Kontakt, Migration und Kunstsprachen: Max Niemeyer, , — The same vowel outcome occurred in a small strip running across southern Italy the Lausberg Zone , and is thought to have occurred in the Romance languages of northern Africa. Archived from the original PDF on The Modern Language Review. Cambridge UP, , Although no longer pronounced, it reveals its former presence by inhibiting elision of a preceding schwa , e.
Asturian Cantabrian Extremaduran Leonese Mirandese. Central , Sardinian and Eastern. Italics indicate extinct languages Languages between parentheses are varieties of the language on their left. Retrieved from " https: Romance languages Latino-Faliscan languages. Views Read Edit View history.
In other projects Wikimedia Commons. This page was last edited on 17 September , at By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols.
Without proper rendering support , you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help: Romance peoples adopted speakers. Originated in coastal Mediterranean and western Europe ; now also spoken all over the Americas , much of Africa and in parts of Southeast Asia and Oceania. Part of a series on. Ea semper antequam cenat fenestram claudit.
Ea claudi[t] semper illa fenestra antequam de cenare. Ella zarra siempre a finestra antes de cenar. Ella pieslla siempres la ventana enantes de cenar. Ella afecha siempri la ventana antis de cenal. Lei chiude sempre la finestra prima di cenare. Eilla pecha siempre la ventana primeiru de cenare. Ella cloudet sempre la fainestra abante da cenare. Ela fecha sempre a janela antes de jantar. From that moment on we enter what historians consider to be the middle ages — and with this we witness the continued development of all the dialects that have spun off from Latin.
For instance, contemporary French is vulgar Latin influenced by a number of Gallic dialects. What we now call Italy was awash for centuries in a number of dialects mostly descendant from Latin and many of these are dying as we speak. Did you notice that classical Latin has a different word for city? But how have we learned about these differences? And there are many other examples of similar discrepancies: How did these dialects acquire the status of languages?
The 19th century saw the birth of many new countries: Italy became a unified nation with Germany following suit, Hungary was granted autonomy, as well as Norway, Bulgaria and Albania. Composers from Chopin to Wagner were inspired not only by folk music but by historical myths and narratives. The bellic undertow of national pride would eventually culminate in the first half of the 20th century, leading to conflict and war. Estimates show that in only half of the population of France could speak French. The creation of an educational system and the adoption of French as the official language of the Republic gradually standardized the situation, but even as late as only a quarter of the population of France spoke French as their native language.
Some of the other languages spoken were Occitan and Breton, which manage to survive to this day in minority groups. And what about Spain?
The Origins Of Latin
We would be uttering words and sentences preceding Indo-European tongues with nothing in common with the Romance languages. Instead, the Iberian Peninsula developed its own versions of vernacular Latin, the most demographically successful being Castilian, Catalan, Galician and Portuguese. Romanian is geographically separate from other Romance languages, so why did it persist in an area surrounded by Slavic and Germanic tongues?
There are different competing theories around this subject, but we can outline a basic narrative. Romania has a history connected to the Dacians. They occupied the territory we now call Romania up until the 6th century, when the Romans conquered it and the Dacian language was replaced by Latin, leading to its extinction. After the Roman Empire collapsed, the territory was taken over by several Slavic and Germanic tribes. During these turbulent centuries, the language morphed gradually into what we now recognize as Romanian, but it was written in Cyrillic up until the 19th century, when Western-inspired nationalist movements latinized the script, bringing it once again closer to its origins.
Does this mean languages stopped influencing each other from behind the cultural protectionism of national borders? For instance, the R in Portuguese was historically pronounced in the exact same way as in Spanish or Italian, with a sound named alveolar flap [r], a trill of the tongue. Soon enough it spread all over the country, and now it is the most common sound heard in European Portuguese, with the alveolar flap typical of Spanish and Italian relegated to a regional variant — ironically!
Also ironic is the fact I grew up thinking the alveolar flap was in fact sophisticated and the guttural sound I grew up using in my family was basic and common. It does sound less lyrical, but personal sensibility is not historical accuracy! Latin dialects turned official national languages also spread throughout the world, from Latin America to Africa and Asia. Portuguese, for instance, traveled the Atlantic but kept evolving in Europe beyond its South American legacy, to the point where Brazilian Portuguese might give us a more accurate rendition of European Portuguese in the 16th century than contemporary European Portuguese can.
Recent research shows the death of dialects and languages all over the world continues at a speedy rate. For some, it is the inevitable consequence of migratory fluxes and the cultural dominance of English triggered by political and economic power. Whatever point of view you take, there is a visible and audible growing backlash about this dominance.
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