Distance in change

[Frank Rossi]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

I (Frank Rossi) wrote:

>>However, in the area around the city of Rome itself, unlike the country
>>districts of Lazio, the language has changed even more due to the outside
>>influence of Tuscan, itself a descendant of Latin, but with an Etruscan
>>substrate.

Rick McCallister, asking me to elaborate ("Oh, dear!"), wrote:

>I've read several in several places that the fricativazation of
>medial stops is said to be from Etruscan but in others that this phenomenon
>only dates back to the 1500s or so.
>	But given that Etruscan died out around the time of Caesar, it
>could not have had too much of an effect on local Italian

I took my time answering, as I wanted to check a few things.

Facts:
a) The Etruscan language had both unvoiced stops (p, t, k) and three
"aspirated" stops (ph, th, kh).

b) Latin replaced Etruscan in Tuscany, which was "the region less affected
by processes of language mixing" (Giacomo Devoto), in part because the
Roman colonies (Sutri, Cosa, Heba) and, consequently the colonists, were
few in number. This means that the Etruscans (like the Gauls, etc.),
without going into the process by which the change took place, changed
their language and adopted Latin.

c) Florentine, which is the basis of the Italian language, developed from
the local Tuscan Latin.

d) In modern Italian, there are only the unvoiced stops (p, t, k).

e) In modern Tuscan, in various areas and with various degrees of
intensity, the unvoiced stops are replaced by the "aspirated" stops (ph,
th, kh) (the effect is a bit like Irish English, but I'm not suggesting
that the Tuscans are Gaels!).

f) The Tuscan dialects are clearly differentiated from the adjacent
dialects by concentrated sets of isoglosses. None of these dialects
exhibits the same kind of phenomenon.

Opinions:
a) One school of distinguished linguists (Ascoli, Meyer-Luebke, Pisani,
Contini, Rohlfs) maintains, as Rick says, that "Etruscan ... could not have
had too much of an effect on local Italian".

b) Another school of equally distinguished linguists (Schuchardt, Bertoni,
Merlo, Battisti, Castellani, Geissendoerfer) consider this a (delayed
effect) substrate phenomenon.

Further considerations:
- The first mention of this phenomenon, again as Rick says, dates back to
the 1500's. However, Dante also spoke of the shocking language of Tuscans
("Tusci in suo turpiloquio obtusi"), without explaining what he meant.

- The Tuscan language spread to the rest of Italy (with the notable
exception of Venice, where the local language continued in official use
alongside Tuscan until the fall of the Republic in 1797) as a written
language considered superior (thanks to Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, ...) to
all the other alternatives available.

In other words, Italian was not carried physically into the rest of Italy
by the Tuscans themselves with their own characteristic pronunciation. The
various regions adopted Italian, alongside their local dialects (*), with
people in each region reading Italian with their own local accents. This is
also why, despite some attempts in this century to create a standard
Italian pronunciation ("Prontuario di pronuncia della RAI", etc.), spoken
Italian is still largely "italiano regionale".

(*) The term "dialect" as used in Italy is also confusing. The Milanese
"dialect", for instance is considered an "Italian dialect", but it is not a
dialect of the Italian language, in the sense that Cockney or Broolyn
English are dialects of the English language. Milanese is a Lombard dialect
and part of the Gallo-Italic "diasystem" that never developed into a single
written language with official status. However, the "italiano regionale" of
Lombardy is a dialect or variant of the modern Italian language and is
used, at least outside the major cities, in a diglossic situation with the
Milanese "dialect" proper.

All this *may* mean that the Tuscans, wrote "casa" (probably for
etymological reasons), but pronounced "hasa". The other Italians in the
meanwhile adopted the written Tuscan language, but read "casa" with /k/. It
was only later, when contacts with actual Tuscan speakers became more
frequent, that other Italians who used Italian as a written language, but
whose native spoken languagage was not Tuscan, began to notice the
"strange" pronunciation of the Florentines and other Tuscans, cf. Roberto
Benigni ("Yes, in Italian too").

*****

I also mentioned in my original posting the "romanesco" dialect of Rome.

To which Rick added:

>What I notice about Roman speech is
	>/-L- > 0/ e.g. figlio > "fio"
	>/-nd- > -nn-/ e.g. andiamo > "annamo"

The first of these phenomena, although in not so extreme a version, is
common in other Romance dialects, cf. "yeismo" in Spanish.

The second, which is characteristic of Central-Southern Italian dialects,
including Neapolitan, etc., but *not* Tuscan and *not* North Italian, is
also considered a substrate phenomenon going back to pre Latin times.

According to Domenico Silvestri in the chapter of the Italic languages in
the Italian version of "The Indo-European Languages" edited by Paolo Ramat
(which I assume is similar in the English version), a number of phenomena
of assimilation (nd>nn, pan Italic; mb>m, in Umbrian only) that can be
observed in the phonetic history of the dialects of the Italo-Romance area
clearly have their roots in the Italic tradition.

This phenomenon also exists in Spain, in Aragonese, and was discussed by
Ramo'n Mene'ndez Pidal in "El Idioma espan~ol en sus primeros tiempos",
where he also discusses the delayed substrate effect.

Regards

Frank Rossi
Bergamo, Italy
iglesias at axia.it