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Catalan: intelligibility | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4943 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes  Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 25 of 26 29 January 2015 at 4:33pm | IP Logged | ||
I've found that Italians in general tend to use the word "dialect" as a geographic marker rather than a linguistic one. Not just lay people, either. Even people involved in linguistics will call it a dialect when others might call it a proper language. In any case, the difference between a dialect and a language has never been clear cut. R. == 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6516 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 26 of 26 29 January 2015 at 6:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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According to Wikipedia only 22,4 % of the population of Alghero speak the traditional language of the area today, but that doesn't remove it from its position as the traditional language there. And 'Algherian' may be a dialect of Catalan, but definitely not of Italian - it is light years away from Italian. And saying that Sardinian is a dialect of Italian is also without foundation in the linguistical facts. However it is easier to see why the Alghero speech isn't some kind of Italian because it is so much nearer to Catalan than it is to Italian.
I read through a fair amount of texts some years ago and also listened to clips on the internet, and it just struck me that this kind of Catalan used more /u/-sounds than normal Catalan, where the generel 'drift' is in the direction of /a/-sounds. But it seems that the spelling is fairly ortodox - the texts I checked before writing this did not even have the Balearic s- articles. Have a look at the following quote from www.ciutatdelalguer.it: La ciutat posa a disposició dels sous ciutadans, virtuals i no, una realitat a dins de la qual siguerà possible desenvolupar relacions amb altres visitadors, passejar pels carrers dels centre històric, conèixer la història dels edificis i dels adveniments més importants i sobretot mantendre i desenvolupar la coneixença de la llengua catalana de l'Alguer. Italian? No way. And now we are at it: Is Valencian a dialect of Catalan? Yep, the Valencians don't like to hear it, but in diplomatic terms we could say that Catalan (incl. Balearic Catalan) and Valencian are dialects of the same language - whatever that language is called. But no matter what you call it, it is quite far from Castillian in all respects: phonology, morphology, syntax and idiomatics. And it has been different from Spanish all they way back down to their common ancestor Vulgar Latin. Actually they were more different before the fatal marriage of Los Reyes Catolicos in 1469 - back then it had a lot in common with Occitan, but then Southern France and Occitan were crushed by the (Northern) French kings, and from then on the Castillian influence in North-Eastern Spain just grew and grew.. It is correct that the limit between dialects and languages can be unclear, but the oversees ties of the old language of Alghero to Catalan makes it clear where it belongs. Sardinian (or Sardic) doesn't have that kind of background, so in principle it would be possible to claim that it just was one extremely conservative dialect out of many in the area now covered by Italy. But based on a sober assessment of the differences between Sardinian and 'Mainland Standard Italian' (and the dialects that went before it) the scales tip in the direction of status as an independent language. But there are cases where a language/dialect due to political circumstances becomes more and more like a dialect of a neighbour language due to lexical loans, loss of idiomatic particularities and - not less - loss of the feeling that your speech variant is something fundamentally different from the speak of your neighbours. Low German is definitely in this situation, and I suppose you could say the same about the remnants of the old Northern Italian dialects. I once read a number of texts from Venezia from different epochs, and it was very clear that they crept closer and closer to the dialects in Central Italy (mainly Tuscany) ... and they become more and more comprehensible to somebody like me in the process. The Venetian vernacular ended up as something I wouldn't hesistate to call Italian, but it started out close to the Romance language/dialect bundle, and maybe there are still pockets where a more conservative version is spoken. Edited by Iversen on 29 January 2015 at 6:42pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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