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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| 4. Gradually the need for Italians to talk to one another across the dialectical divide led to the rise of Vulgar Italian, which tended to use the familiar (to many people) Latin sounds and eschewed the local idiosyncratic sounds. |
I agree that "this means Italian is not a natural language", but here you have forgotten to emphasise the writing of Italian. Writing gradually/eventually escaped its formal confines and made vernacular writing useful (and the more it spread the more useful it was), so there is a period of growth and diversity, as people experiment with writing their natural tongue for the first time; which must inevitably lead to the need for standardisation, if not rationalisation.
Italian ought to have a period equivalent to "Middle English". Lo and behold:
"The earliest surviving texts which can definitely be called Italian are legal formulae from the region of Benevento dating from 960-963. What would come to be thought of as Italian was first formalized in the first years of the 14th century through the works of Dante Alighieri..."
This middle period at the same time as that of English (and the rest, presumably) goes to the linguists' argument that such-and-such linguistic changes are natural developments.
But remember:
"Dante's much-loved works were read throughout Italy and his written dialect became the "canonical standard" that all educated Italians could understand. Dante is still credited with standardizing the Italian language and, thus, the dialect of Tuscany became the basis for what would become the official language of Italy."
As a first approximation, the written form of the language doesn't affect the way it is spoken: the script of Coronation Street is written in Standard English, but comes off the lips of the actors in many and various ways. {That's Historical Linguistics up the swanny in a single stroke.} But the education system is geared to the "proper" learning of English and Received Pronunciation. It's RP that is unnatural: the spoken form of the written form and not a regional dialect of English at all. I suspect the same is true of Italian (German, French...): that the standard, schoolroom, textbook, HighStreet form is effectively a lingua franca, different from (and probably taking over from) all its natural dialects.
(Standard) Italian is rather more rationalised than English. (Was Italy ever a great power since it became so?)
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Italian (please correct me if I'm wrong) is now a completely phonetic language. |
This is much easier said than done, since the High Street, perhaps the linguistics industry, doesn't make the proper distinctions. You need someone with the right understanding of Italian-on-the-ground. When the French translation of THOBR was going on, I asked a Frenchman a couple of things, but he was no help: so even a native Italian speaker is not necessarily equipped to answer.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| DPCrisp wrote: | | As a first approximation, the written form of the language doesn't affect the way it is spoken: the script of Coronation Street is written in Standard English, but comes off the lips of the actors in many and various ways. {That's Historical Linguistics up the swanny in a single stroke.} |
Not quite.
The primary effect of alphabeticization may be to promote internal consistency. Individual letters may be pronounced differently between dialects but within the dialect itself, each letter slowly takes on a consistent sound.
This is all conjecture, of course. And I've never been convinced that alphabeticization has much of an impact on speech (because until quite recently, most everyone was damn illiterate). Moreover, if alphabeticization has the effect of promoting linguistic consistency, it makes the detection of an "artificial" language that much more difficult -- as the characteristics of artificiality and of age are essentially the same.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Spanish is as phonetic a language as Italian; is it a coincidence that the two languages most closely akin to Latin are written as they sound?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| but here you have forgotten to emphasise the writing of Italian |
Ah but this was my Big Idea Of The Day (Yesterday). It's true that writing tends to promote one dialect over others but ever since the Irish discovered that you could write down non-phonetic languages simply by teaching each person general alphabetical rules and then leaving each person to work out individual words for themselves, there is no reason to go phonetic.
However...however...wherever there is a large sector of the population that has some familiarity with an alphabetic phonetic language then it follows that the ordinary processes of regionalisation then nationalisation then internationalisation will promote whatever common sounds everybody is familiar with -- in the case of Western Europe that will be the sounds of the Latin alphabet. In time, and hey presto, the entire language will eventually be limited to those sounds.
Interestingly I think French has gone further than Spanish or Italian. French probably attained complete phoneticisation by the late medieval period but then the Upper Classes required a new way of differentiating themselves (now that even the plebs spoke Latinate Phonetic French) and hence began leaving the last letter off each word. Oh, the affectation!
This new doctrine will turn out to solve various problems with Arabic and Persian. (And possibly Japanese/Chinese....Dan, think on't.)
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Interestingly I think French has gone further than Spanish or Italian. French probably attained complete phoneticisation by the late medieval period... |
Not according to a book I am reading (slowly) called The Discovery of France. The author didn't intend it that way but I'm choosing to read the book as extreme historical revisionism.
According to the author, many villages in post-revolutionary France didn't even speak a language that could be understood by people from the capital -- or by people from the next village over. The picture he paints is of a wild country full of unconnected strangers who were as likely or more to kill a visitor for looking funny as they were to recognize him as a fellow Frenchmen.
P.S. It is impossible to read this book and maintain belief in Vercengetorix.
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I've come up with another very revisionist reason for why there seems to be so much overlap between English and French vocabulary. The English were ruled over for a very long time by French speakers. So a lot of French seeped into English.
The Norman invasion was one group of French speakers overthrowing another. The Anglo-Saxon part is made up. (And of course, written languages came into existence much later than orthodoxy accords. This is why no one remembers history properly before the Renaissance era.)
The French-speaking elite left the Celtic-speaking elite on the fringes alone, but maybe some French crept into Celtic. I wonder what percentage of Welsh vocabulary could be considered of Latinate origin. How much of Breton has seeped into French?
Though I don't know why the French would lose their power if they held sway for a thousand years or more.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Dante is still credited with standardizing the Italian language and, thus, the dialect of Tuscany became the basis for what would become the official language of Italy." |
This is another standard mistake made by linguists. The equivalent in Britain is "South Oxfordshire". But if you actually go to South Oxfordshire (and I'm sure it's the same in Tuscany) you find that the local dialect is the usual sort of rustic ee-ah.
Since none of this is written down at the time, linguists just ask themselves where such-and-such comes from and then declare that to be the local dialect that won the race to become the standard national form. 'South Oxfordshire' we are assured is where the university and the court met...or somesuch...it varies with the telling.
This is all clear bollocks. It is fairly obvious from our own findings about the nobs always speaking a different language from the peasantry, to go one step further and say that there is a national genteel 'dialect'. Actually this is a case of 'What is is what was' since the situation today is exactly that: there is National RP (with regional versions like Kirsty Wark's beautifully modulated Scots) and there are local 'peasant' accents (hardly dialects now).
The only difference today is that practically everyone can speak in RP -- it is instantly recognisable when they can't -- and it's this RP that is faithfully transcribed into the written form. Or rather, as we keep reminding one another, RP gets repronounced to fit in with the written form!
All this is worth following up because my guess is that it's this error that is responsible for the need to adumbrate the Great Vowel Shift.
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If the earliest French documents date from c. 900 AD, and the earliest Latin documents from c. 250 BC, why did it take the French so long to learn how to write their language? (I'm not picking on the French, they're just an example.)
Surely someone would have wanted to do this just for the fun of it, even if there was no other reason.
It makes me wonder if you have to move the advent of Latin up a number of centuries.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| why did it take the French so long to learn how to write their language? (I'm not picking on the French, they're just an example.) |
Because it would seem an absurdly impossible task. Even now, now that RP English has spent seven hundred years becoming more and more like the written form, it is still impossible to transcribe ordinary speech. Go on, try it..."Geowon, treayit." I defy you to write down that last 't' which is halfway between a glottalstop and absent. We only know it's a 't' because it gets sounded when 'it' comes before a vowel instead of at the end of a sentence.
If you are a French-speaker in Gaullish times you 'know' that an already phoneticised language (such as Latin) can be written down, by definition, but a non-phoneticised language like Gaullish French can't, by definition. It is no accident that it was the only Western European people not conquered by phonetic language speakers (ie the Irish) who discovered that you could, after all, render phonetic the apparently non-phonetic.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| If the earliest French documents date from c. 900 AD, and the earliest Latin documents from c. 250 BC, why did it take the French so long to learn how to write their language? |
You're asking this from the wrong end of the telescope: the end where literacy is taken for granted.
(So taken for granted that, as Mick points out, we are quite unaware of what we're doing.)
| Surely someone would have wanted to do this just for the fun of it, even if there was no other reason. |
Actually, there's a limit to when any particular thought could have crossed one's mind, but let's say this desire to write your own language might have occurred at any time in history. What could come of it?
Something did become of Esperanto, Elvish and Klingon... but look how much effort has gone into them never catching on. Mass media means you have heard of them, but could you begin to put pen to paper, to promulgate the language, to join the community? (Language is a community affair.)
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | It is no accident that it was the only Western European people not conquered by phonetic language speakers (ie the Irish) who discovered that you could, after all, render phonetic the apparently non-phonetic. |
But you claim in THOBR that there were English speakers in Ireland at that time. So then why didn't the English speakers in Ireland write down English like their Irish-speaking neighbours wrote down Irish?
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| ...could you begin to put pen to paper, to promulgate the language, to join the community? (Language is a community affair.) |
Irish bards are said to have been not just singers of tales, more like historians or sages (whatever that means). Would Irish, and Welsh, bards have been catalysts in transcribing their poetry or is that cart before horse? Same as Icelandic saga-makers, are they seen as precursors because the ability to write the language down was already in place?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| But you claim in THOBR that there were English speakers in Ireland at that time. So then why didn't the English speakers in Ireland write down English like their Irish-speaking neighbours wrote down Irish? |
Same reason as the English-speakers in England (and South Scotland and East Wales) didn't. They were the underclass and would have no more apparent use for literacy than they would have for chain mail. It's the same reason the French-speakers of France didn't or the Italian-speakers of Italy didn't. But as soon as these people ceased to be the underclass and the Irish had shown them how they all started writing down their own languages.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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Writing is a technology and requires an infrastructure to be developed. English might have been written a billion times at the kitchen tables of Ireland, but that wouldn't count as writing English.
Who is allowed to learn to write? What for? Who to? Why be the first to write something new when by definition it's a secret code known only to you...?
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