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Venetian language

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Venetian or Venetan is a Romance language spoken by over two million people, mostly in the Veneto region of Italy. The language is called vèneto in Venetian, veneto in Italian; the variant spoken in Venice is called venesiàn/venessiàn or veneziano, respectively. Although commonly referred to as an Italian dialect (diałeto, dialetto), even by its speakers, it does not descend from the Italian language.

Venetian should not be confused with Venetic, an apparently unrelated (and extinct) Indo-European language that was spoken in the Veneto region around the 6th century BC.

History

Venetian descends from Vulgar Latin, possibly influenced by the Venetic substratum and by the languages of the Germanic tribes (Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Lombards) who invaded northern Italy in the 5th century. The earliest texts that can be recognized as "Venetian" date from the 13th century.

The language enjoyed substantial prestige in the days of the Venetian Republic, when it attained the status of a lingua franca in the Mediterranean. Notable Venetian-language authors are the pplaywrights Ruzante (1502–1542) and Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793). Both Ruzante and Goldoni, following the old Italian theater tradition (Commedia dell'Arte), used dialeto in their commedies as the speech of the common folk. They are ranked among the foremost Italian theatrical authors of all time, and Goldoni's plays are still performed today. Other notable works in Venetian are the translations of the Iliad by Casanova (1725–1798) and Francesco Boaretti, and the poems of Biagio Marin (1891–1985). Notable also is a manuscript titled "Dialogue ... on the New star" attributed to Galileo (1564–1642).

However, as a literary language Venetian was overshadowed by the Tuscan "dialect" of Dante, and by the French languages like Provençal and the Oïl languages. After the demise of the Republic, Venetian gradually ceased to be used for administrative purposes; and when Italy was unified, in the 19th century, the Tuscan language imposed itself as the basis of the national language of Italy. Since that time Venetian, deprived of any official status, has steadily lost ground to Italian. At present, virtually all its speakers are bilingual, and use Venetian only in informal contexts.

On the other hand, Venetian was spread through the world by the massive emigration from the Veneto region between 1870 and 1905. Those migrants created large Venetian-speaking communities in Brazil, Mexico, and Romania, where the language is still spoken today. Internal migrations under the Fascist regime also sent many Venetian speakers to other regions of Italy.

Geographic distribution

Venetian is spoken mainly in the Italian regions of Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia and in both Slovenia and Croatia (Istria and the Kvarner Gulf). Smaller communities are found in the provinces of Lombardy, Trento, Emilia (in Mantova, Rimini, and Forlì), and in Romania. It is also spoken in North and South America by the descendants of Italian immigrants. Notable examples of this are the city of Chipilo, Mexico or the Talian spoken in Brazilian states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina.

Classification

Venetian descends from Vulgar Latin — like all other Romance languages, including Italian and the other so-called Italian dialects. However, in the traditional classification of Romance languages, Venetian and Italian belong to different sub-branches of the Italo-Western branch: Venetian is a member of the Gallo-Iberian group, which also includes Spanish and French; whereas Italian is a member of the Italo-Dalmatian group. More precisely, Venetian belongs to the Gallo-Romance sub-branch of Gallo-Iberian, which includes French but not Spanish. In that classification, therefore, Venetian is more closely related to French and Spanish (in that order) than to Italian.

On the other hand, although French and Venetian are now mutually intelligible only to a small degree (mostly due to major changes in French pronunciation over the last few centuries), Spanish and Venetian are mutually comprehensible to some extent — certainly more so than Spanish and Italian.

Regional variants

The main regional variants and sub-variants of Venetian are

All these variants are mutually intellegible, with a minimum 92% between the most diverging ones (Central and Western). Modern speakers reportedly can still understand to some extent Venetian texts from the 1300s.

Other noteworthy variants are spoken in

Language features

Familial attributes

Like all Romance languages, Venetian has mostly abandoned the Latin case system, in favor of prepositions and a more rigid subject-verb-object sentence structure. It has thus become more analytic, if not quite as much as English. Venetian also has the Romance articles, both definite (derived from the Latin demonstrative ille) and indefinite (derived from the numeral unus).

Venetian also retained the Latin concepts of gender (masculine and feminine) and number (singular and plural). Nouns and adjectives can be modified by suffixes that indicate several qualities such as size, endearment, deprecation, etc. Adjectives (usually postfixed) and articles are inflected to agree with the noun in gender and number:

  • el gat gras, the fat (male) cat.
  • ła gata grassa, the fat (female) cat.
  • i gati grassi, the fat (male) cats.
  • e gate grasse, the fat (female) cats.
  • el gaton gras, the fat big (male) cat.
  • ła gatona grassa, the fat big (female) cat.
  • un bel gateo, a nice small (male) cat.
  • na bea gatea, a nice small (female) cat.

Specific attributes

Sound system

Venetian has only one sound not present in Italian, an interdental fricative [θ] spelled ç and similar to English th in thing and thought, to Castilian (not Latin-American) Spanish c(e,i)/z (as in cero, cien, zapato), and to Greek θ (theta); it occurs, for example, in çena (supper), which sounds the same as Castilian Spanish cena (same meaning). However this sound, which is present only in some variants of the language (Central Venetian, around Padua, Vicenza and the mouth of the river Po), is considered provincial and is therefore being replaced by other sounds like [s], [z], [ʃ].

Some linguists also distinguish a normal L from a soft L (spelled ł). The pronunciation of this phoneme varies from an almost e in the region of Venice, to a partially vocalised l further inland, to void in some mountaneous areas. Thus, for example, góndoła may sound like góndoea, góndola or góndoa. In the latter variants, the "ł" spelling prevents possible confusion between pairs like skóła ("school") and skóa ("broom").

Venetian does not have the doubled consonant sounds characteristic of Tuscan and many other Italian dialects: thus Italian fette, palla, penna ("slices", "ball", and "pen") are fete, bała, and pena in Venetian. The masculine singular ending, which is usually -o in Italian, is often voided in Venetian, particularly in the countryside varieties: Italian pieno ("full") is pien, and altare is altar. Also, the masculine article el is often shortened to 'l.

Lexicon

The Venetian lexicon has a large number of original word forms, such as tosàt ("lad", in Italian ragazzo), técia ("pan", pentola), caréga ("chair", sedia), còtoła ("skirt", sottana), bìsi ("peas", piselli), sgorlàr ("to shake", scuotere), and many more.

Redundant subject pronouns

A peculiarity of Venetian grammar is a "semi-analytical" verbal flexion, with a redundant "clitic subject pronoun" before the verb in some sentences, "echoing" the subject:

  • Italian: (Tu) eri sporco ("You were dirty").
  • Venetian: (Ti) te jèra sporc or even Ti te jèri/xeri sporco (lit. "You you were dirty").
  • Italian: Il cane era sporco ("The dog was dirty").
  • Venetian: El can 'l jèra sporc[o] (lit. "The dog he was dirty").
  • Italian: (Tu) ti sei domandato ("You have asked yourself").
  • Venetian: (Ti) te te à/gà/ghè domandà (lit. "You you yourself have asked").

The clitic subject pronoun is used with the 2nd and 3rd person signular, and with the 3rd person plural. This feature may have arisen as a compensation for the fact that the 2nd- and 3rd-person inflections for most verbs, which are still distinct in Italian and many other Romance languages, are identical in Venetian. (The Pieomontese language also has clitic subject pronouns, but the rules are somewhat different.)

Interrogative flection

Venetian also has a special interrogative verbal flexion used for direct questions, which also incorporates a redundant pronoun:

  • Italian: (Tu) eri sporco? ("Were you dirty?").
  • Venetian: (Ti) jèritu sporc? or even (Ti) xèrito sporco? (lit. "You were-you dirty?")
  • Italian: Il cane era sporco? ("Was the dog dirty?").
  • Venetian: El can jèrelo sporc[o]? (lit. "The dog was-he dirty?").
  • Italian: (Tu) ti sei domandato? ("Have you asked yourself?").
  • Venetian: (Ti) te àtu/gatu/ghètu/ghèto domandà? (lit. "You to-yourself have-you asked?")

Auxiliary verbs

Reflexive tenses use the auxiliary verb aver ("to have"), as in English, German, and Spanish; instead of essar ("to be"), which would be normal in Italian. The past participle is invariable, unlike Italian:

  • Italian: (Tu) ti sei lavato (lit. "(You) yourself are washed").
  • Venetian: (Ti) te te à/ga/ghè lavà (lit. "(You) you yourself have washed").
  • Italian: (Loro) si sono svegliati (lit. "(They) themselves are awakened").
  • Venetian: (Luri) i se ga/à svejà (lit. "(They) they themselves have awakened").

Continuing action

Another peculiarity of the language is the use of the phrase drìo a, literally "behind to", to indicate continuing action:

  • Italian: Mio padre sta parlando ("My father is speaking").
  • Venetian: Me pàre 'l e drìo a parlàr (lit. "My father he is behind to speak").

Another form uses the construction "essar là che" (lit. "to be there that"):

  • Venetian: Me pàre 'l e là che 'l parla (lit. "My father he is there that he speaks").

The use of progressive tenses is more pervasive than in Italian; E.g.

  • English: "He wouldn't possibly have been speaking to you".
  • Venetian: No 'l sarìa mìa stat drìo a parlarte (lit. "Not he (he) would possibly have been behind to speak-to-you").

That construction does not occur in Italian: *Non sarebbe mica stato parlandoti is not syntactically valid.

Subordinate clauses

Subordinate clauses have double introduction ("whom that", "when that", "which that", "how that"), as in Old English:

  • Italian: So di chi parli ("(I) know about whom (you) speak").
  • Venetian: So de chi che te parla (lit. "(I) know about whom that (you) yourself speak").

Spelling systems

Traditional system

Venetian does not have an official writing system, but it is traditionally written using the Latin alphabet — sometimes with the addition of a couple of letters and/or diacritics for the sounds that do not exist in Italian, such as ç for [θ] or (recently) ł for the "soft" l. Otherwise, the traditional spelling rules are mostly those of Italian, except that x traditionally sounds [z], as in English "zero".

As in Italian, the letter s between vowels usually represents the [z] sound, so one must write ss in those contexts to get a simple [s]: basa for ['baza] ("he/she kisses"), bassa for ['basa] ("low"). Also, because of the numerous differences in pronunciation relative to Italian, the grave and acute accents are liberally used to mark both stress and vowel quality:

à [a], á [ɐ], è [ɛ], é [e], ò [ɔ], ó [o], ù [u]

Venetian allows the consonant cluster [stʃ] (not present in Italian), which is usually written s-c or s'c before i or e, and s-ci or s'ci before other vowels. Examples include s-ciarir (Italian schiarire, "to clear up"), s-cèt (schietto, "plain clear"), and s-ciòp (schioppo, "gun"). The hyphen or apostrople is needed because the combination sc(i) is conventionally used for the [ʃ] sound, as in Italian spelling; e.g. scèmo (scemo, "stupid"); whereas sc before a, o and u is pronounced [sk]: scàtoa (scatola, "box"), scóndar (nascondere, "to hide"), scusàr (scusare, "to forgive").

However, the traditional spelling is subject to many historical, regional, and even personal variations. In particular, the letter z has been used to represent different sounds in different written traditions. In Venice and Vicenza, for example, the phonemes [θ] and [z] are written z and x, respectively (el pianze = "he cries", el xe = "he is"); whereas other traditions have used ç and z (el piançe and el ze).

Proposed systems

Recently there have been attempts to standardize and simplify the script, e.g. by using x for [z] and a single s for [s]; then one would write baxa for ['baza] ("she kisses") and basa for ['basa] ("low"). However, in spite of their theoretical advantages, these proposals have not been very successful outside of academic circles, because of regional variations in pronunciation and incompatibility with existing literature.

The Venetian speakers of Chipilo use a system based on Spanish ortography, even though it does not contain letters for [j] and [θ]. The American linguist Carolyn McKay proposed a writing system for that variant, based entirely on the Italian alphabet. However the system was not very popular.

Samples texts

Ruzante returning from war

The following sample, in the old dialect of Padua, comes from a play by Ruzante (Angelo Beolco), titled Parlamento de Ruzante che iera vegnú de campo ("Dialogue of Ruzante who came from the battlefield", 1529). The character, a peasant returning home from the war, is expressing to his friend Menato his relief at being still alive:

    

Orbéntena, el no serae mal
star in campo per sto robare,
se 'l no foesse che el se ha pur
de gran paure. Càncaro ala roba!
A' son chialò mi, ala segura,
e squase che no a' no cherzo
esserghe gnan. [...]
Se mi mo' no foesse mi?
E che a foesse stò amazò in campo?
E che a foesse el me spirito?
Lo sarae ben bela.
No, càncaro, spiriti no magna.

    

"Really, it would not be that bad
to be in the battlefield looting,
were it not that one gets also
big scares. Damn the loot!
I am right here, in safety,
and almost can't believe
I am. [...]
And if I were not me?
And if I had been killed in battle?
And if I were my ghost?
That would be just great.
No, damn, ghosts don't eat. "

Discorso de Perasto

The following sample is taken from the Perasto Speech (Discorso de Perasto), given on August 23, 1797 at Perasto, by Venetian Captain Giuseppe Viscovich, at the last lowering of the flag of the Venetian Republic (nicknamed the "Republic of Saint Mark).

    

Par trexentosetantasete ani
le nostre sostanse, el nostro sangue,
le nostre vite le xè sempre stàe
par Ti, S.Marco; e fedelisimi
senpre se gavemo reputà,
Ti co nu, nu co Ti,
e senpre co Ti sul mar
semo stài lustri e virtuoxi.
Nisun co Ti ne gà visto scanpar,
nisun co Ti ne gà visto vinti e spauroxi!''

    

"For three hundred ad seventy seven years
our souls, our blood
our lives have alvays been
for You, St. Mark; and very faithful
we have always been regarded,
You with us, we with You,
And always with You in the sea
we have been illustrious and virtuous.
No one has seen us with You flee,
No one has seen us with You defeated and fearful!"

Francesco Artico

The following is a contemporary text by Francesco Artico. The elderly narrator is recalling the church choir singers of his youth, who naturally sang much better than those of today:

    

Sti cantori vèci da na volta,
co i cioéa su le profezie,
in mezo al coro, davanti al restèl,
co'a ose i 'ndéa a cior volta
no so 'ndove e ghe voéa un bèl tóc
prima che i tornésse in qua
e che i rivésse in cao,
màssima se i jèra pareciàdi onti
co mezo litro de quel bon
tant par farse coràjo.

    

"These singers of the past,
when they picked up the Prophecies,
in the middle of the choir, in front of the gate,
whith their voice they went off,
who knows where, and it was a long time
before they came back
and landed on the ground,
especially if they had been previoulsy "oiled"
with half a liter of the good one [wine]
just to make courage."

English words of Venetian origin

See also

  • Veronese Riddle, the first document in the Venetian and perhaps Italian language

References

Venetian edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Venetian_language&oldid=41760635"