Woods wrote:linguoboy wrote:I used to live with a Tuscan--Standard Italian is supposedly based on the Florentine variety of the Tuscan dialect--and his natural speech wasn't remotely similar to what my books taught me.
So you think most Italians speak their local varieties and standard Italian is more a between-dialect means of communication, like Hochdeutsch and bokmål?
Exactly. Italy has similarly high levels of dialect usage to Germany. (In a 2019 survey, only 17% of Italians said they never use dialect.) And--as in Germany--usage is higher in the south (and probably for similar reasons).
Woods wrote:That looks quite complicated, I'll have to read it again and process it.
It is pretty complicated. Here's another account that kind of walks you through the possibilities:
https://www.portuguesepedia.com/portuguese-word-stress/.
Woods wrote:I've tried to track differences between French /o/'s (au, ô and o) but to my disappointment, the speakers I observed have them the same - something between the /o/ and /u/ in corn and choose.
Same with ê and è and also ai - as far as I know in modern standard French they are the same.
I think this is true of modern
Parisian French. (You can still hear both an open and closed /e/ in this variety, it's just that their distribution is predictable from the word structure as opposed to being etymologically determined.) In other varieties, the difference can be quite striking. In Quebecois, for instance,
ê is always longer than
è, and it basilectal speech it gets diphthongised to [ɛɪ̯] or even [aɪ̯].
Woods wrote:linguoboy wrote:The origins of the Portuguese distinction are different
(Curious) (and flapping my hands on the table!!!) (is this the correct way to express what I mean in English
Are you trying to express frustration? I think "smh" might be what you want.
It's actually pretty straightforward. The modern Portuguese values correspond to those of Proto-Western-Romance. For instance, Vulgar Latin /i/ and /e:/ fall together as /e/ while VL /e/ becomes /ɛ/. Spanish took this a bit further and diphthongised /ɛ/ to [jɛ] (and Catalan did something really wacky which ended up with the current values of /e/ and /ɛ/ being reversed in most varieties) whereas French embarked on a huge range of complicated developments dependent not only on stress but also syllable shape and adjacent segments.
Woods wrote:The doubling in Italian isn't to "remind it was there"; it's because Standard Italian has
geminated consonants. Assimilation of heterogeneous Latin consonant clusters is only one source of geminates in Italian.
Where did they come from in Latin?
Some are inherited, like in
gatto or
matto (Late Latin CATTUS and MATTUS, respectively).
Some are from consonant assimilation, like
latte (from LACTEM, accusative of LAC) or
sette (< SEPTEM).
Others are harder to explain, like TŌTUS >
tutto or BRŪTUS >
brutto. I think there might be some connexion here to the quality of the preceding vowel, but I'm not sure. Syllable structure also seems to play as role as in BIBŌ >
bevo but BIBIT to
bevve. In some cases, the segment was geminated in Latin but just not spelled that way, i.e. MAIUS is reconstructed as [ˈmai̯.i̯us] in Classical Latin, yielding Italian
maggio [ˈmad.d͡ʒo].
Woods wrote:linguoboy wrote:Woods wrote:Also what happened to -ct- and such combinations? One Portuguese guy was complaining to me that the word "factura," which was pronounced /fatura/ but written in a more etymologically correct way would now "because of the stupid Brazilians have to be written in a new way." (...) Is that the new spelling forced to speakers of Portuguese by Brazilians?
Your sentence is so convoluted I'm not really sure what your Portuguese informant is complaining about. In general, the 1990 agreement (see below) did away with these etymological clusters when they don't reflect current pronunciation.
I didn't know it's that old, I got the impression that it happened in recent years. He was complaining about five years ago.
As I understand it, the agreement was finalised in 1990 but the reforms were only instituted gradually and at different times in different countries.
Woods wrote:So nobody writes factura nowadays?
I'm not going to say "nobody does", since there are still lots of people around who completed their schooling before the reforms were adopted and some of them probably won't ever change how they write.
Woods wrote:Are
s, x and
z /z/ or /ʒ/ in
turismo, ex-mulher and
felizmente?
[z] in Brazil and [ʒ] in Portugal (at least normatively speaking).
Woods wrote:linguoboy wrote:there are two schools of thought in contemporary Galicia. One (known as reintegracionismo) considers Galician a variety of Portuguese not just historically but synchronically. It is championed by the Academia Galega da Língua Portuguesa, which is pursuing Galicia's admission to the Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa. The opposing school (isolacionismo) considers Galician and Portuguese historically one language which have become separate over time. This is the view held by the Real Academia Galega, the only Galician language body with official state support and recognition.
Is that because the Castellanos in Madrid want that part of Spain to be less associated with Portugal or for some other reason?
I think it reflects the will of a majority of Galicians. (They're the ones who elect the local government, after all.) Support for separatism has always been pretty weak in Galicia compared to Catalonia or the Basque Country.
Woods wrote:And so we have three bodies: Academia Galega da Língua Portuguesa, Real Academia Galega and Associaçom Galega da Língua. I already asked which one of the first two is more prominent and I'm pretty sure the Spanish government puts its money in the second one (and maybe the first one gets some support from Portugal?) - but then where does the third one come from and can it convince anyone to abandon whatever view they're holding?
There are actually more than those three. There's also the Instituto da Lingua Galega, which collaborated with the RAG to produce the current standard, and maybe other bodies as well. You can find Wikipedia articles on all of these bodies with links to their websites, so maybe you'll find the answers to your questions there.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons