Talk:Romance languages: Difference between revisions

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Resolving "This article possibly contains original research. (June 2019)"

The template has been here almost a year, and needs resolution. Whoever placed it there in the first place would be doing everyone a favor if s/he would point out a few examples of what s/he judges to be original research, so that they can be corrected. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 16:58, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

Pretty much all of the article is OR because a lot of it isn't sourced.

Asparagusus (talk) 16:50, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

Probably due to much of it being common knowledge at sort of the undergraduate level, found in just about any basic intro. In any case, the OR template is pretty much useless without an indication of which bits of text were felt by someone to need references. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 20:17, 29 March 2022 (UTC)

Removed Mozarabic

I removed the Mozarabic sample, added by 187.140.8.87 on April 22nd, 2016, due to various issues. First, Mozarabic is quite tentatively reconstructed phonetically, and it is questionable whether to include such an old and scantily attested language... I don't think all the words are attested. Second, and more seriously, the sample text is wrong, and does not follow the conventions of the attested Mozarabic. To mention one problem, kharjas typically show final -e either written with an Arabic yaa' (ي), or not at all, e.g. an infinitive *leváre in kharja 24 on this site written lbry (لبري), and yet in kharja 23 one can see *nóhte as nxt (نخت), and *iréyme as yrym (يريم) (right above *gárme as ġrmy (غرمي), no less!), but the guest user used alif (ا) instead. I would rather not have to make up what the Mozarabic would have been.--Ser be etre shi (talk) 13:13, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

I completely agree, we know too little about Mozarabic to create new sentences in it. --Jotamar (talk) 18:15, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

Listing/counting Romance languages

Copied form User talk:Austronesier:

I'm refraining for the moment from reverting your reversion of my attempt to clarify that the number of Romance languages can't be established, in hopes that an edit war can be avoided. You object:

This sounds as if we had some white spots in Romance linguistics, and that's certainly not the case. It's a matter of the cut-off line between language and dialect, and this is clearly stated here.

I don't know what 'white spots' means in this context, so I can't address that. It is the case that there is no definitive count of Romance languages, and any attempt to establish one runs into -- prime among other difficulties -- the intractable language/dialect of dilemma. I don't see where that is clearly stated for the general reader, who can't be expected to grasp it without exemplification from Because it is difficult to assign rigid categories to phenomena such as languages, which exist on a continuum. No small % of general readers are operating with no awareness of the underlying Romance continuum, i.e. conceptually at the level of "In France they speak French, in Italy they speak Italian". No way for them to intuit that e.g. Bolognese and Ferrarese even exist, much less that there could be any principled debate as to whether they're different languages or "dialects of" Emilian-Romagnol, nor to understand what's at work if, for example, an ingenuous native of Llanes is surprised, even puzzled, to learn that the indigenous Romance of the town is Asturleonese.

Rather than the more extensive re-write that's actually called for, including -- if mention of Dalby's count is useful at all -- noting that closely cognate different languages can be highly mutually comprehensible, thus the criterion is of dubious value at best, I tweaked the text just slightly with the goal of offering a glimpse of reality: the list offered is (necessarily) incomplete and can be expanded. I'm quite open to different wording or to a complete re-write of the paragraph beginning Because... What shouldn't be left to stand is even a hint of implication that the list below the text is in any sense complete. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 17:35, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

@Barefoot through the chollas: First to explain why I have talked about "white spots": the word "complete" in no count is definitively complete immediately evoked to me the picture of areas like the Amazon, which are still underresearched, and where the number of languages could still rise with increased knowledge and more detailed surveys. A list of Romance languages can be "complete" as long as the criteria are sharply defined. The choice of such criteria is of course relative/arbitrary.

But I fully share your worries that such a list in the lede gives in the impression to the casual reader that it is some kind of authoritative listing. I was blinded by the Dalby source, which of course becomes useless once one leaves a backdoor for "additional current, living languages". With such a backdoor, it is totally arbitrary. On second thought, your edit is useful in this respect, but comes out a bit like a piece of tape on a pot with countless cracks.

Why actually try to give a detailed list at all in the lede? We can do this in Kartvelian languages, but not here; the internal structure of Romance is just too complex to squeeze it into the lede. Ideally, the first section of the article should be "Languages", which gives a detailed outline and also explains the complexity of the matter, and the fuzziness of language/dialect divisions. An inventorizing "lingocrat" source like Dalby (which is just a catalogue/index) should not be the only reference for it. –Austronesier (talk) 11:41, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

@Austronesier: With perhaps a couple of minor quibbles that shouldn't be difficult to resolve, it sounds as though we pretty much agree. I'll try to be brief at this point.

Dalby's list based infelicitously on presumed mutual intelligibility can have a doubly blinding effect: 1) it's the only reference, thus is inevitably granted some degree of authority in the eyes of at least some readers (and attempts to solicit a reference for the more expanded list that someone set up have fallen on deaf ears); 2) it can leave the impression that mutual intelligibility is an accepted and trustworthy criterion for determining same/different language. Pursuing your metaphors, I'd claim that Dalby's list leaves its own front door wide open for the observation that even if his MI list is accurate, the MI criterion in itself disqualifies his 23 as a credible count of languages. Any other criterion or set of criteria hits a similar wall of arbitrariness. The real-world fact is that the pot is inherently cracked.

The list presented now in the lede isn't really one of languages, but sort of cladistic typologies, with a few representatives mentioned for most types (but not all, i.e. "Sardinian" stands inexplicably alone with no mention of even just Logudorese vs. Campidanese), elaborated somewhat incoherently also in that those mentioned vary from very local (Romanesco) to broad subtypologies encompassing numerous differentiated varieties (e.g. Portuguese, French/Oïl languages, Venetian -- by which is meant not actual Venetian, but Venetan). I mostly, perhaps even totally, agree with your last paragraph above. But since an exhaustive list is not possible (at any point in the article), a cleaned up version of the typological list that's there now can serve as a useful orientation.

I said I'd be brief, so I'll stop rather than finish. My overarching concern re the paragraph in question and the list below it is that the information provided be as clear and accurate as possible in limited space, and that readers not be led astray. Some minor editing can achieve that for the nonce, a holding pattern until someone with the time and knowledge chooses to carry out a more ambitious re-write. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 22:47, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

Age of the divergence of the vowel systems

Just a quick OR observation: In Latin phonology and orthography § Vowels, it is pointed out that in inscriptions, short close and long mid vowels are often confused, indicating that they were pronounced fairly similarly, like near-close and near-close vowels [ɪ] : [eː] and [ʊ] : [oː], preparing the Italo-Western Romance quantity collapse. Maybe we should go further, though: This frequent confusion could also mean that their relative vowel spaces were already encroaching on each other, and overlapping at least partly, even if their qualities might not have merged yet completely. Or, in fact, their qualities had already merged, and they were only distinguished by their relative quantities. Either way, they were approaching each other in quality so much that the quantity collapse would immediately cause their merger once it occurred.

Now consider that dialects with Sardinian-type vowel systems (once apparently spoken in several regions in the south of Italy – not only Sardinia and perhaps Corsica) show almost no trace of this merger. This indicates that short /i/ was pronounced [i ~ ɪ], not [ɪ ~ e] in these dialects before a quantity collapse occurred in them too. Even if this development may ultimately have been triggered by a Greek adstratum, or some other kind of adstratum, this conclusion seems inevitable. Hence, there must have been a genuine difference in pronunciation between (regional?) varieties of Latin already in the Classical Latin period, perhaps as early as Cicero's time. And further, this (regional?) difference foreshadowed the split into dialects that developed the Italo-Western Romance vowel system and into dialects that developed the Sardinian-type vowel system (as well as dialects that developed Romanian-like "compromise" vowel systems, which may however originally have been dialects with Sardinian-type vowel systems that were overlaid by dialects with the apparently more mainstream Italo-Western system. (It is very suggestive to propose that the first type of pronunciation was found in more northern regions of the Roman Empire, being more mainstream, and the second type in more southern regions, although I do not know if there is evidence along the lines of vowel confusion being less common in inscriptions found in southern Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and Africa.)

If this conclusion is correct (and inscriptional evidence could bolster it), this would mean that the fact that a full merger of short /i/ and long /eː/ is not found before the late third or fourth century AD is immaterial: The first signs of intra-Romance divergence can then already be dated to the Classical Latin period, and "Proto-Romance" must then be effectively identical to spoken Latin around that time (the first century BC, perhaps slightly earlier or later, but in any case significantly earlier than the third century AD; I don't know the precise dating of the inscriptions that show confusion between short close and long mid vowels). Traits that must be reconstructed to "Proto-Romance" based on the evidence of the medieval and modern languages might then have started already in the Classical Latin period, even if they were not complete even in the spoken language; and for developments like [ae] > [ɛː], there is inscriptional evidence pointing into this direction at a quite early period, even though the merger probably became general only in the first century AD (judging by the evidence of the Pompejan inscriptions), and was still resisted by more learned registers until Late Antiquity.

However, the most basilectal registers of Latin at least may have shown certain developments foreshadowing the situation throughout Romance (such as the merger of most cases, with only the nominative, accusative and to some extent genitive remaining more stable, at least in early Romance, even though they tended to merge later too) quite early, and then it makes more sense to posit that interference from other languages – such as Koine Greek, Gaulish and even Oscan – in bilingual speakers (who spoke Latin only as a second language and significantly deviated from the literary standard and even the spoken Latin of lower-class speakers who were native to Latium) triggered these changes – such as confusing the genitive with the dative and ablative, conflating the quantities, avoiding many "short words" and particles and preferring longer ones, etc. It is to be expected that these developments would be far less visible in the written record as late as the second century AD, even if they were already occurring, due to the constant efforts by learned speakers, and the influence of first-language speakers in general, to suppress these "barbarisms". It is not surprising that with the decline of Roman culture in Late Antiquity these developments would become more apparent, and that the innovations could not be as thoroughly suppressed anymore. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 16:32, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

I suggest you learn more about Romance Linguistics, preferably through reading a modern reference work or two (from cover to cover), before you embark on fantastical Quixotic quests to overturn the entire field. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1700:1150:1920:20CD:D56C:3712:BAF4 (talk) 07:18, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

Excessive examples

As suggested by @Barefoot through the chollas, I am taking up my issue with the samples section on the talk page (although there are other sections with the same problem, I'll restrict my arguments to the samples section for now). Currently, this section consists mostly of a very long list of examples followed by an unsourced bit of prose. The point of examples is to show the breadth and scope of something without having to exhaustively list every single item (in this example, languages). I quote from MOS:LONGSEQ: "Keep lists and tables as short as feasible for their purpose and scope: material within a list should relate to the article topic without going into unnecessary detail; and statistical data kept to a minimum per policy." I believe that the samples section does just that; rather than keeping it to a minimum it's seems to invite "maximums", which everyone translating their favorite Romance language and adding it to the list. I can't even fit all of them on one page, and I have a decently large monitor. Excessive examples is something that is a problem with a lot of language articles I have found.

Having made my point, I now ask other people on this page what should be done. As far as I see, these are the options:

A: Keep it as is and allow more examples to be added freely.

B: Make it a collapsible list.

C: Limit the examples as recommended by the policy (how to choose which ones to cut will be decided later)

I vote for C. I think that curating the examples will provide a much better reader experience rather than bombarding them with minute differences between closely related varieties. I have explained why I don't like option A, and I'm willing to discuss option B if there is enough interest.

Megaman en m (talk) 23:43, 11 September 2021 (UTC)

Not the central point now, but let me say that I agree with an opinion that a lot of the text in the Romance article can and should be condensed, and much of it left to e.g. Hispano-Romance, Gallo-Italian and the like.

To the point, I also agree entirely with the guiding principle "Keep lists and tables as short as feasible for their purpose and scope". The question at issue is the purpose of the list of Romance renditions of the sentence, and what the list's scope should be.

Cap'n Obvious here: One of the many great merits of Wikipedia is enabling a wide gamut of readers to find information of interest to them at the click of a mouse. Some are "just" curious, some are seriously searching for knowledge. Judging from experience, the latter especially, but also many of the former once they get a whiff of what's going on, want an answer to "How many Romance languages are there?" The article skirts that question with Dalby's scanty undercount, followed by a list of typological groupings with a few languages listed for each (but not for all: Sardinian tout court?). Not until Samples does the reader get a clear view of some of the vast variety of Romance.

I vote for C above, but not in a version that necessarily implies cutting examples (nor that totally precludes judicious additions). With that, some minor culling might be in order, given that sub-types are not treated uniformly. Just one version for Occitan, Picard, Sicilian, for example, but three Emilian types and two Lombard. I wouldn't be against reducing Emilian to one major type, perhaps Bolognese, and similar for Lombard, but with the location identified, again a major center if possible. Ladin should be reduced. Some relabeling is called for, such as Campidanese and Logudorese rather than the vague Southern and Northern Sardinian, and, if they can be established, locales for what's listed now as Northern and Southern Corsican.

The vote for C assumes a brief paragraph under Samples that introduces the list and explains that it is only a sampler, not by any means complete -- perhaps illustrating there the difficulty of achieving a full count of Romance languages by comparing Reggiano and Bolognese very briefly, mutually understandable and only 60 kilometers apart, yet distinct in grammatical detail. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 03:57, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

How many Catalan-speakers are there?

In the first paragraph, listing populations of speakers, the number for Catalan has been recently changed from 4.5 million to 14.5 million. A website called <theculturetrip.com> says 9 million, "with more than 4 million speaking it as a native language, according to official census data". Who's right, and where can we get unbiased figures? Kotabatubara (talk) 16:10, 17 April 2022 (UTC)

Excellent questions, for which answers are hard to come by. What can be said for sure is that 14.5 million is absurdly large, given that the population of Catalunya is a bit over 7.7 million, and a large contingent of residents, especially in Barcelona, do not speak Catalan fluently. Speakers outside of Catalunya will add up to a substantial number, but not many millions. But wait! There's more! The count is meant to be "by number of native speakers", meaning that those who immigrated to Catalunya (or Andorra or Valencia) for work years after first-language acquisition but who over the years became fluent in Catalan are not to be counted -- which makes the figure of 14.5 million even more absurd. I haven't found figures that seem trustworthy, but this source might be sort of a start: https://www.idescat.cat/pub/?id=eulp&lang=en&utm_campaign=home&utm_medium=cercador&utm_source=estad Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 07:03, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

I can remember that there was a pretty serious study which estimated the number of native speakers at around 4.3 million. I haven't been able to locate that study so far, however I've changed the figure in the page because the previous one was completely ludicrous. --Jotamar (talk) 16:39, 23 April 2022 (UTC)

Re Vowel prosthesis: The association of /i/ ~ /j/ and /s/ also led to the vocalization of word-final -s in Italian, Romanian, certain Occitan dialects, and the Spanish dialect of Chocó in Colombia.

This claim should be deleted of it's not fleshed out. As it stands it is not relevant to the syllable structure basis of vowel prosthesis which is the topic of the paragraph, it misstates Sampson's p. 63, and there is no example from chocoano nor reference to it. It could, perhaps, if stated more carefully and illustrated, be weaved into discussion of the fate of final /s/ in the apocope section. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 02:42, 31 July 2022 (UTC)

Portuguese: first, or second language for Africans?

The article says Portuguese "is spoken as a first language by perhaps 30 million residents of that continent, most of them second-language speakers." It looks like a contradiction to me. Kotabatubara (talk) 22:58, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

My bad. I replaced first language with primary language, which doesn't imply native. A quick search on the internet makes me think that the figures for Portuguese speakers in Africa are not reliable, and in any case they're growing with every year. --Jotamar (talk) 06:17, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Most spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers - sources

The lead currently has an invisible comment saying:

Do not change the following numbers! THE REASON NOT TO CHANGE IT IS BECAUSE WE NEED TO USE RECOGNIZED ESTIMATES FROM A SINGLE SOURCE THAT PROVIDES FIGURES FOR ALL LANGUAGES. OTHERWISE PROPONENTS OF EACH LANGUAGE WILL SIMPLY CHERRY-PICK THE HIGHEST NUMBERS FROM WHICHEVER RANDOM SOURCES THEY HAPPEN TO FIND

followed by a listing of the 6 most spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers. Recently, an IP editor did in fact increase the number of speakers of Catalan to 10 million, even though that figure includes non-native speakers. I think I'll undo that edit, but I'm wondering where do the older figures come from? Ethnologue? Erinius (talk) 06:06, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

Information in the lead

On at least three occasions (the first as an IP editing on the 4th of November between 8:30 and 8:39), the user Venezia Friulano has tried to do two things: to remove information from the lead and to add new information to the effect that Spanish ranks third in closeness to Latin. I do not wish to engage in edit warring, so I am simply stating here the reasons why the arguments he provides for those changes are wrong.

1) Regarding similarity to Latin. This user has stated that the sources employed (sources 2, 3 and 4, although 3 and 4 are actually the same) support the idea that Spanish comes third in the similarity ranking. But that’s plainly false. In the first place, the Britannica source only mentions Italian and Sardinian. And, on the other hand, Friulano’s statement that Pei’s percentages concern "phonology, inflection, syntax, vocabulary, and intonation" is, quite simply, wrong. I am quoting literally from the paper, which is open access and can therefore be downloaded from here:

"Let us give a brief and very incomplete demonstration of this tentative methodology, which is all that the space at our disposal permits. For the purposes of this demonstration, we shall restrict ourselves to a single division of phonology, accented vocalism, and to seven of the principal Romance varieties: standard literary French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Rumanian, standard literary Old Provençal, and Logudorese Sardinian. A fuller demonstration, including unstressed vowels, consonants, the divisions of morphology and those of syntax, and applied to a larger number of Romance varieties, is reserved for a lengthier work."

It is pretty obvious, by the way, that a twelve-pages paper is simply too short to contain any thorough comparison of "phonology, inflection, syntax, vocabulary, and intonation" in all Romance languages. The author is simply restricting himself to a very specific phenomenon, and he is not even comparing all Romance languages. You only need to check page 138, which is the place where the percentages representing the degree of similarity were extracted from, and you will see that they only concern accented vocalism (and only in a limited set of languages). I.e., you need not even read the full paper.

2) Regarding the removal of Catalan. The user asks "why six languages instead of five". But the question can be reversed: why five instead of six? Only because evolution gave us five fingers per hand? By the same token, it could be argued that the list of languages most similar to Latin should be reduced to just two instead of three (after all, we only have a pair of legs). All six languages are state-level official and I don't see why one of them should be removed (is Andorra any less than Italy or Romania?). As for Friulano's argument to the effect that "The difference in speakers between Romanian and Catalan is large enough", it is debatable at least. If understood in absolute numbers, the difference between both languages is 19.5 million (L1) speakers, which is far less than that between, say, Italian and Romanian (48 million). If understood percentually, the situation is a bit different, for it is true that the difference between the two is the largest in the list (Romanian has five times as many speakers as Catalan), However, I do not think that it is that far away from the second largest difference in the list, namely that between Portuguese and French (3.6 times). And on the other hand, if we considered speakers with a native level instead of just L1 speakers, the numbers would vary drastically (and many sources provide larger numbers, see this and this, for example.

3) Regarding the removal of the dates. I think it is pretty clear that the approximate dates in which Romance languages started to exist is important enough to be left in the introduction. That's how it is done in similar pages such as the one on Semitic languages, whose introduction states even the dates in which they started to be studied scientifically.

4) Regarding the change from "less commonly referred to as Latin languages" to "sometimes referred to as Latin languages". Again, it is quite obvious for anybody familiar with this field of study that the former is the most common name. A simple search on Google (or better, on Google Scholar) should confirm it.

2A0C:5A81:302:1D00:954A:5080:3B4A:5418 (talk) 18:06, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

1)I have not looked into it, but if in fact Pei's work is misquoted and misused then we should intervene. Britannica states that by most measures, Sardinian and Italian are the least divergent while French and Romanian are the most differentiated. No ranking, no mention of Spanish on par with Italian and Sardinian, so i agree with you. That being said, I think User: Venezia Friulano is in good faith but a bit concerned (in general on Wikipedia) that Spain and Spanish are neglected in various articles. Venezia, i think you should look at the positive side here. No one is neglecting Spain and Spanish, no one reading these articles gets that idea.

2)Should we mention Catalan on par with the 5? Honestly, i think the national Romance languages are universally considered to be Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian. I don't think Catalan is generally included in that category. Yes there is Andorra with Catalan, but it's a micro-state; Catalan is more of a regional language.

Barjimoa (talk) 11:00, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

1) Well, lets see: "... analyzing the degree of difference from a language's parent (Latin, in the case of Romance languages) indicated the following percentages (the higher the percentage, the greater the distance from Latin): Sardinian 8%, Italian 12% , Spanish 20%, Romanian 23.5%, Occitan 25%, Portuguese 31%, and French 44%" - Source of the article.

It is evident that it makes it clear that Spanish is the third closest to Latin, the other sources only indicate that the closest are Sardinian and Italian, which doesnt exclude that the third closest is the Spanish. I don't understand the controversy. If you want, we write all the languages from least to greatest differentiation with Latin. I also see no problem with the source, they are all estimates, not accurate maths. All the studies on the subject are like this, including about Sardinian and Italian, they are methodologies that are difficult to calibrate and are never perfectly complete, they are estimates. Mario Andrew Pei was renowned linguist on the subject, their sources are and have been reliable and used on Wikipedia.

2) I also believe that User:Barjimoa has good faith, but believes that Italy deserves more recognition. No one is neglecting Italy and Italian, no one reading these articles gets that idea. Im Italian, like you, so that point here is worthless, just we dont need Fratelli d'Italia in Wikipedia. I live in Spain and know Spanish, its not a problem if Im mainly interested in Spanish articles.

3) Catalan language is not a main language by many measures, thats why its not necessary to include the 4M of its speakers.

Venezia Friulano (talk) 12:07, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

User: Venezia Friulano, did you read the discussion between me and 2A0C:5A81:302:1D00:954A:5080:3B4A:5418 (talk)? this quote

:::::: "...analyzing the degree of difference from a language's parent (Latin, in the case of Romance languages) indicated the following percentages (the higher the percentage, the greater the distance from Latin): Sardinian 8%, Italian 12% , Spanish 20%, Romanian 23.5%, Occitan 25%, Portuguese 31%, and French 44%..."" 

only refers to accented vocalism. The author of the paper is analysing the degree of difference from Latin specifically with regards to accented vocalism. It's not about grammar, not about vocabulary, etc etc. You cannot use it to to make a general statement. The only general statement here is that of Britannica: by most measures, Sardinian and Italian are the least differentiated and French the most divergent. No ranking provided. And regarding you being an Italian that moved to Spain, again I don't see how these articles are pro-italian and anti-spanish.

I have to remove that information. It's wrong, it's a mistake.Barjimoa (talk) 14:28, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

Well, by itself that source deleted by you, which is valid, even if you don't like it, should be a valid sign of the closeness of Spanish with Latin, there are also quite a few sources (some in the article itself) that indicate that the Spanish is intrinsically close to Latin, even by Romance language standards. The source of Britannica is not even the result of a study that can be seen, it is literally just a mention that Sardinian and Italian are the closest, nothing more, that could be improved, good options exist. I'm wickedly curious as to what you think is the third closest language to Latin. Surely you know that the third most similar is Spanish, but for some reason that fact is annoying. It is exactly the same case with Trajan and Hadrian, it bothers some Italians that these Roman emperors have Hispanic origins and were not born in the Italian Peninsula, and therefore their Italicity must be mentioned as much as possible in order to make them understand that they are like "Italians" or something exclusively from Italy and its history:

"Its very annoying that another country that is not Italy can have or be proud of something Roman, and on top of that it is about Trajan! The Roman emperor who led the Roman Empire to its maximum historical extension, what a humiliation for us Italians! No, we can allow it, that fact must be Italianized! Christopher Columbus? He was not a Genoese from the Republic of Genoa, he was Italian! Like the current ones!"

It is the classic paranoia and rhetoric of Italian fascist nationalism of the early and mid-20th century: Feverishly thinking that Italy, as a country, is millennia old and establishing an anachronistic continuity between ancient Rome and present-day Italy, a country born in the middle of the of the 19th century, claiming that Roman heritage, history and culture is an exclusively Italian phenomenon, and therefore only applicable to the Italian population the right to be heirs of ancient Rome, repudiating other nationalities of Latin heritage as mere borrowers of their culture.

That is the idiosyncrasy and politics of Italian fascism for much of the 20th century, and the seed of the problems and shame it inflicted on itself. Of course, I'm not saying that you are that, but there are traces and I recognize well someone Italian nationalist. I am not at all surprised by the current political situation and inclination of Italy or that it has the only ultra-right government in Western Europe.

You can pretend I've made a movie out of this or that Im exaggerating, of course, but we both know the reality and how it works. Anyway, I'm not going to follow an Edit Warring or continue talking about the topic. I do not want to be fined or expelled, besides, it is a waste of time considering the panorama.

All the best. Venezia Friulano (talk) 16:17, 14 November 2022 (UTC)