--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...>
wrote:
> Francesco:
>
> If I remember correctly, you are from Bologna.
No, I am from Venezia (= Venice). Still in the North, anyway, though
the dialect I speak, called venexiàn/venesiàn (the variety of speech
used in Venice, which was once, and is to some extent still today, a
literary language as well as, together with Latin, one of the official
languages used by the administration of the Repubic of Venice) is a
variant form of the so-called 'lingua veneta' (= Venetian language).
> If so, I'm guessing you are familiar with some transitional dialect
> between Gallo-Italian and Standard Italian. Can standard speakers
> understand Gallo-Italian?
Gallo-Italian idioms are not inherently intelligible to speakers of
standard Italian, but some of them are more intelligible than others.
Yet there are some varieties of dialect spoken in Liguria, Lombardy
and Romagna that may sound as 'foreign' languages to standard Italian
ears!
> Can you understand Sicilian and Neapolitan?
Neapolitan is often unintelligible to speakers of standard Italian; in
its purest (i.e. not 'Italianized') form, it is certainly
unintelligible to _me_. Ditto for Sicilian, though it is, for some
reason, generally easier to understand than Neapolitan.
The degree of mutual intelligibility between Gallo-Italian and
southern Italian dialects compares to the one between standard Italian
and standard French. They are distinct enough to be considered (at
least by some scholars) separate languages.
Kind regards,
Francesco