Re: [tied] Re: Sardinian.

From:

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Sunday, August 13, 2000 2:33 PM

Subject: [tied] Re: Sardinian.

Mark Odegard wrote:

> I seem to be missing something about Sardinian (the language).
> There is the modern Romance language, which I gather is the closest
> to Latin of all Romance languages.

It's a popular myth based on the fact that in one of Sardinian
dialects Latin c, g before front vowels (kentu, gente <-- Lat.
centum, gentem) have been preserved, while everywhere else in the
Romance world they were palatalized.
There are also a few other archaic features in Sardinian phonetics but
perhaps no more than very advanced developments. Some grammatical
constructions are strikingly innovative as well. There is a number of
archaisms in vocabulary and some traces of the non-Indoeuropean
substratum.

To sum up, I don't think Sardinian could be called the closest
to Latin of all Romance languages. However, the question is how we
should assess (measure?) the proximity of languages in a really
objective and verifiable way.

Nemo

My knowledge of the situation with Romance Sardinian is slight. Having said this, however, it's obvious the situation is analogous to that of Icelandic, where you had a language existing in isolation, free of adstratal influences at the borders. The result is a spectacularly 'archaic' language. The time depth for Icelandic vis-a-vis Old Norse is shallower, however. Sardinia is less isolated and has had more foreign influences through a foreign elite, most recently Italian, but Spanish in earlier days.The only foreign elite the Icelanders knew were a few Danish bureaucrats.

 

An interesting thing about Sardinian is that it has never achieved literary status. There is some folk poetry, but beyond this, it does not really exist as a literary language. I came across a web page that suggested they are still strugging to establish a common spelling system. Standard Italian, of course, is the official language of the island. The issue now seems one of fully documenting Sardinian before it withers away.

 

Mark.