Distance in change

[Rick Mc Callister]

What you're saying makes me wonder if there wasn't some sort of diglossia
going on all along with the upper classes pronouncing casa as /kaza/ and
the lower classes as /haza/. Would this work?

[snip]
>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.

[snip]

>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.

	Not quite because whenever I've spoken to Romans, I've noticed a
complete dropping of /-L-/. I hear /fio/ rather than /fiyo/. But, OTOH,
I've spoken to Italians in Latin America and the US. Yei/smo is a bit more
complicated since it runs through a whole gamut of sounds including /y^, j,
zh & sh/ --with /y^/ representing the "tense <y>" similar to that of <yolk>
rather than that of <yes>, which in Spanish is represented by <iV> [compare
<yerba> vs. <hierba>]

>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.

	"Nabolidan" as I've heard it among both US ethnic Italians and
Neapolitans visiting the US had /nd/, as in something similar to /andyamu/
or /andyammu/. But they may have been trying to use a standard
pronunciation.

[snip]

	It is said that Roman settlers to Spain were principally from the
area around Naples, who brought in characteristics of Osco-Umbrian as well
as Greek. But I've usually just heard this remark in passing or seen it as
a "truism"