From: Rick McCallister
Message: 63107
Date: 2009-02-18
> From: Francesco Brighenti <frabrig@...>You can add that most "dialects" of Italian are not readily mutually comprehensible. I can understand standard Italian and to a lesser extent Romanesco and Napolitano. I don't understand Sicilian and Northern Italian. Northern Italian, of course, is Gallo-Italian and as such, is structurally closer to Gallo-Romance --or probably more likely to Occitan-Gascon-Catalan.
> Subject: [tied] Re: Franco-Provençal
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Wednesday, February 18, 2009, 3:01 PM
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Arnaud Fournet"
> <fournet.arnaud@...> wrote:
>
> > [Corsican is] basically the same thing as most other
> dialects of
> > Italian. Latin evolved and mixed up with adstrates and
> substrates.
>
> "Dialects" of Italian -- and, as I suspect, also
> what
> you "nationalistically" refer to as mere
> "dialects" of French,
> Spanish etc. -- are historically languages by full right
> (in certain
> cases even endowed with distinctive literary productions
> that date
> from many centuries ago). I fully concur with the following
> remark
> made in the Wikipedia article entitled "Italian
> dialects":
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_dialects
> > The oft-heard expression "dialects of
> Italian" is both inaccurate
> > and very misleading, since the dialects did not derive
> from
> > Italian, but directly from spoken Latin, often termed
> Vulgar
> > Latin: it was Italian that derived from the dialects,
> not the
> > other way around.
>
> Please bear in mind that both Romance national languages
> and Romance
> regional dialects evolved from various provincial (=
> spoken,
> or "Vulgar") forms of Latin, a "State
> language" that was initially,
> and continued to be for a long time, *foreign* to most of
> the
> European populations whose idioms subsequently developed
> into the
> multifarious Romance "languages" and
> "dialects" (the distinction
> between the two is not that clear to me). This is different
> from
> other known processes of linguistic development such as,
> e.g., the
> differentiation of Germanic "languages" and
> "dialects" from Proto-
> Germanic. Latin was no "Proto-Language". It was a
> pre-packaged
> official language (of the administration, trade etc.) that
> was
> politically superimposed on the natives of the various
> parts of
> Europe whose populations became the speakers of Romance
> "languages"
> and "dialects" during the Middle Ages.
>
> A mosaic of Romance regional idioms, some of which became
> "national"
> languages due to political processes, is a more faithful
> representation of the situation in medieval
> Romance-speaking Europe
> than the absurd claim that "national" languages
> like French or
> Italian constitued a sort of Ur-model from which dialectal
> forms of
> Romance somehow deviated, but to which they are all
> reconducible
> (like Arnaud's Corsican would be to Italian).
>
> Regards,
> Francesco