--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...>
wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> The Wikipedia article on Sicilian implies that
> Sicilian did not form until after the Arabs were
> defeated, at which time, Romance speakers entered the
> island in large numbers. It implies that before then,
> everyone, or most everyone, spoke Greek. It says that
> there seems to be no evidence Sicilian was spoken
> there before then, that the earliest substrate seems
> to be Greek and Arabic but beside that, everything
> before that seems to be the same as on the mainland.
> What do you know about that?
> Curiously while I can understand Neapolitan, I can't
> understand Sicilian --or not much. I can understand
> American Italian but it's usually a mish-mash of
> Standard Italian, Neapolitan and Sicilian.
>
I wouldn't buy a used Fiat from someone who thinks Vulgar Latin was
still spoken in the 11th century and Latin had a 7-vowel system.
This particular Wikipedist appears to have conflated material from a
small number of published papers into a seemingly coherent article
without any real understanding of the topic, like the essays we were
forced to write in junior high to prove we knew how to use library
books.
If the W. article is taken seriously, we're supposed to believe that
Sicilian was somehow created in Norman times by an influx of VL-
speakers from Campania, Padania, and Lombardy. Even if we
replace "Vulgar Latin" by some division of Romance, this scenario
doesn't work. Sicilian, with its 5-vowel system and its retroflex -
d.d.- from L. -ll-, can't be derived by importing Campanians and
Gallo-Romance-speakers during Norman times. I found these comments
in _Grammatica Storica della Lingua e dei Dialetti Italiani_, by F.
D'Ovidio and W. Meyer-Lübke, tr. E. Polcari [Milano 1906], p. 182, on
Google Books:
"Le colonie gallo-italiche mostrano l'influsso del loro
consonantismo, talvolta anche del vocalismo atono attraverso il
siciliano. ... Il tipo siciliano in singoli fenomeni si estende
largamente dentro la terraferma, specialmente nel versante
occidentale dell'Appennino."
That is, these colonies planted in Norman times didn't create
Sicilian. They influenced the Sicilian spoken around them with their
phonology and loanwords, but Sicilian itself, as a distinct form of
Romance, was already there. Indeed, one could infer as much from the
colored map of Italian Romance in the W. article. I suspect that the
author read a critique of a certain radical position, to the effect
that Sicilian is "the oldest Romance language" (whatever that means),
and assumed that the critique applied to the notion that Sicilian was
already there before the Normans.
DGK