From: Rick McCallister
Message: 59277
Date: 2008-06-17
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallisterSardinian has 5 vowels and retroflex /D.D./. Both
> <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
>