Questions tagged [italian]
A Romance language spoken mainly in Italy, but also in Switzerland, San Marino and others. For non-linguistic questions about the Italian language, visit our sister site Italian Language Stack Exchange.
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Anaphora in the VP shell
I'm trying to build a sentence with an anaphora in place of the direct object or the oblique in the VP layer in order to understand whether it's the oblique or the patient occupying SpecV.
According ...
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What is the origin of North Italian dialects' particle /g/ (cf. Italian "ci", "gli")?
I have noticed that both Lombard, Venetan and Ligurian (and I assume Piedmontese) use "gh'" (i.e. /g/) for the 3SG dative clitic (Italian "gli") and at least some of the many ...
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Are there Romance parallel descendants to Italian "cicalare" and Romanian "cicăli(re)"?
I am looking for the etymology of the Romanian verb a cicăli (to make reproaches repeatedly, to nag), which is reported of unknown origin, and I have found an almost identical word in Italian: ...
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Request for research papers on the definite article systems of French and Italian
Extrapolating from this survey of article systems throughout world languages, the only languages which brought the article system which originated in Ancient Greek to its fullest logical generality ...
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Orthography changes in Italian
How has the orthography of Italian changed in the 19th century? I’m trying to find an in-depth guide but I haven’t found any resources. Maybe it just hasn’t changed except for a few technical words?
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Is it a coincidence that both Italian and German use third person feminine pronouns for formal second-person address?
In both Italian and German, the third person feminine pronouns ("lei" and "Sie," respectively) also serve as the formal second person pronoun.
Etymologically, is it a coincidence ...
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How close are the Italian and the Romanian open central unrounded vowels?
The "a" sound in Italian and Romanian, is identified as the central unrounded vowel and represented as being practically identical, very close to [ä].
Although a is used in these images to ...
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Italian words with post-stress -/tj/-
It is well known that Italian -/.tj/- developed into -/t.tsj/- after stressed syllables (gratiam -> grazia). There are, however, several rare words that end in post-stressed -/tj/- like "òstia&...
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Auxilary verb alternation in analytic perfect for French/Italian and German languages [duplicate]
French/Italian and German have a composite past tense (passé composé/passato prossimo/Perfekt) that is formed using either auxiliary verb to be (être/essere/sein) or auxiliary verb to have (avoir/...
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the sound of "erre moscia" in Italian
In Italian we have the alveolar trill as a phoneme, but not all native speakers (me, for example) can do it: some people have what we call an "Erre Moscia" meaning we can't properly do the ...
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How Italian "dito" was derived from Latin DĬGĬTU(M)?
I'm trying to figure out which phenomena may be involved in the development of Italian "dito" from Latin DĬGĬTU(M).
I think one of them may be a loss of intervocalic -G-, as explained in ...
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Why is feeling and hearing are the same in Italian?
Sentire means hearing, and at the same time feeling, in Italian and it's used passively in both senses.
Mi sento male - I feel bad
Ho sentito il tuo nome - I heard your name
Why among all senses ...
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Origin of Italian plurals
Some sources say that italian plurals come from the nominative case, so "italiano" has the plural "italiani", and "italiana" has the plural "italiane".
However ...
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Italian 'gn' vs Spanish 'ñ' - Why does their use differ intervocalically and word internally?
First some examples. Here are the IPA transcriptions of 'bathroom' in Italian and Spanish:
bagno /baɲɲo/
baño /baɲo/
As you can see in Italian 'gn' becomes a geminate between vowels in the middle of a ...
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Why are native English speakers convinced that English language is a Romance language? [closed]
Most people I've know so far in the USA are always saying that learning Latin would be really easy because, since English comes from Latin, it cannot be a hard thing to do, and they really get shocked ...
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Latin suffixes -or and -idus, is there a correspondence?
In Latin (and daughter languages), there seems to be a correspondence between nouns of the third declension in -or/-us, -oris denoting a quality, and adjectives of the Ist class in -idus,a,um denoting ...
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Etymology of "fiamma" in Italian [duplicate]
I don't speak Italian at all, but I was a bit surprised that the word "flame" in Italian is "fiamma" (IPA: /ˈfjam.ma/) (to compare with flamme in French, flamma in Latin and llama ...
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It's very uncommon for Italian nouns and verbs to end in consonants, but vast number of Latin nouns and verbs do. Why?
Edit: I asked this question on the Italian Stack Exchange and got some rubbish comments, so I'm trying here instead.
The vast, vast majority of native Italian (i.e. not imported from another language) ...
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What is the origin of the word assassin?
I discussed this recently with some friends and different explanations regarding the words etymology were mentioned. I did some research and confirmed these two:
from Arab. aššāšīn "hashish ...
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Etymology of initial "g-" in Sicilian "giurana" (frog)
Most Romance words for "frog" derive from Latin rana (e.g. es. rana, it. rana, pt. rã. See also va. renoc ("toad")).
However, an unexpected initial g- appears in the cognates of several Gallo-:
fr. ...
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What languages reinforce imperatives with conjunctions?
In Italian, the conjunctions "ma" ('but') and "e" ('and') can preface imperatives to reinforce them as in: "ma/e vieni!" ('do come!').
Does anyone know of any languages that display this phenomenon ...
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Why is Latin considered a dead language, but Old High German simply a precursor to modern German?
Or, to put it another way: If the Church hadn't preserved Latin, would it even be considered a different language from Italian as opposed to simply an older form in the development of the Italian ...
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Usage of the implicit object-subordinate clause in Italian (i.e. Usage of the implicit objective subordinate clause in English - part II)
In a sense, the following question is a sequel of this one: Usage of the implicit objective subordinate clause in English.
In that question I asked some information about the usage of the implicit ...
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Why do some linguists say vowel length isn't contrastive in Italian?
That's what I get in Caillou & Leite (2009) and the article "Main stress in Italian nonce nouns" by Martin Krämer. The latter brings a case where vowel length is proven to be contrastive (ancóra/...
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Italian Pronunciation Lost in Translation or regional language difference?
Sometimes the "c" such as in Tortorice and Celente are pronounced as "s" which is not according Italian rules. Why?
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Historical morphology of Italian nouns from Latin 3rd declension
Italian is commonly analysed as inheriting the nominative forms of nouns from Vulgar Latin, instead of the accusative ones. But what happened to 3rd declension nouns?
It looks like for the majority ...
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Is there a General European English Accent?
I have noticed my former trainer from Estonia, fellow students from Poland and Italy, even Khabib from UFC who comes from Dagestan speak with this accent.
Here is a video of khabib from remote ...
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Phonological rule for realizations of Italian /s/
It seems that realization of Italian /s/ is not fully systematic and there are some exceptions. Is there any phonological rule for possible realizations of Italian /s/
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Is Italian the only modern language that uses the feminine 3rd person singular pronoun for formal speech?
Is Italian the only modern language that uses the feminine 3rd person singular pronoun (Lei) for formal speech, regardless of the gender of the 2nd person singular addressee?
cf. T–V_distinction#...
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Andrea Bocelli Aspiration
I have been listen to Andrea Bocelli's songs lately. A noticeable feature of his pronunciation while singing Spanish songs is that he constantly pronounces the plosives (especially at word-initial ...
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Why does Italian use definite articles before possessive adjectives, except when these are followed by a singular family noun?
In Italian possessive adjectives are preceded by a definite article: “il mio amico” (the my friend), “la nostra casa”, “i tuoi libri”. The article however is always dropped with singular nouns ...
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Calabrian/Sicilian and unstressed e/o
I sorta-kinda was "taught" that Sicilian turns all unstressed "e"s to "i"s and "o"s to "u"s.
Then I got to know a couple Calabrian songs whose dialect seemed almost Sicilian, so I extended that ...
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Any other example of "socially stigmatized phoneme" like the "th" sound in some Venetian dialect?
Older people living in some rural areas north of Venice use the voiceless dental fricative /θ/ for many words, like cena "supper" which is pronounced θena, exactly like in Spanish cena (Castilian, not ...
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English "fruit" vs Italian "frutta" plural number
So I was listening to: "Story of Human Language - John McWhorter" and I stumbled upon an example of errors foreigners could do while speaking English (at least the American variant), mainly:
This ...
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Why do Croatian and Italian contain the same grammatical endings for nouns and verbs?
Italy is a country in the Southern Europe. Croatia is a country in the South-Eastern Europe (or Central, depending on interpretation). Because of the close geographical proximity, these two could have ...
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Italian: is there an authoritative word frequency list?
I'm having difficulty finding a good frequency list for the Italian language (lemmas, not including inflected word forms). Anyone know if there's some research or website or institute where I could ...
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Expressions derived from Italian mafia
I apologize in advance for the explicit words, the question is anyway purely linguistical. Feel free to censore the words if appropriate.
I have heard that the American slang expression "Do not break ...
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Where are clitics initially Merged in Italian?
I'm trying to port Cardinaletti & Shlonsky's analysis of Italian clitic placement1 to the Minimalist framework for a term paper. The course is based on Adger's textbook2 which mostly focuses on ...
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Why do Spanish and other Romance Languages use the preposition "a" for culinary styles?
I've looked in the Real Academia Española dictionary and I can't find any information regarding why Spanish uses the preposition a for cooking styles, and I've noticed French and Italian do it too. I ...
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More or less - Widespread idiom?
I've encountered more or less in many different languages. Why is this idiom so widespread? In a few other languages such as Italian it's "more or less", but in Albanian it's "less or more".
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Where can I get data set for metaphony in Italian dialects?
The problem is that most sources refer to phonological data collected a long time ago. Where can I get some fresh stuff to analyze?
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From Italian to Spanish, consonant + "i" goes to consonant + "l"?
Why is it, that in words like plaza / piazza, or blanca / bianca, the "l" in Spanish corresponds to an "i" in Italian? Is there a preference for this kind of sound in Italian, or ...
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Do we know if the Dutch vulgar/slang term "stront" is related to the Italian vulgar/slang term "stronzo"?
I have for years known that there was a Dutch bad word "stront" meaning "shit" but I expected it was spelled "stroent" until I looked it up just now.
I have also known the Italian bad word "stronzo" ...
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grammatical role of the word "e" in Emiliano and Romagnolo languages
What is grammatical role of e word in Emiliano and Romagnolo languages? Notice the following excerpt:
>
La léngua emiliâna-rumagnōla l’é parlêda int l’Emélia-Rumâgna, int la pêrt ed sōvra dal ...
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Has the use of body gestures during speech production the same importance in every culture?
I know that different cultures may use different (hand or other body part) gestures to convey the same meaning. But is the amount of gestures similar in number among cultures?
Some recent research, ...
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What are the most specific features of Tuscan dialect of Italian?
And is Tuscan regarded as a dialect or as a language by modern Italian linguists?
I am interested mostly in its lexical peculiarities, but some interesting features of syntax would be of a great ...
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Are there glides in Italian?
Italian has diphthongs when you put together two vowels, like in the word "uomo". As far as I understand a diphthong is not necessarily a glide, because a glide has to be less sonorous than a vowel. ...
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What language do children think in?
If a child born in Canada is spoken to strictly in another foreign tongue other than english (ie. Italian), it is inevitable that this child will also think in Italian. When this child starts going ...
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Are there any specific traits in Italian which make it different from other Romance languages?
Although Wikipedia says 'the grammar is typical of the grammar of Romance languages', I suppose some ancient Italic (or perhaps even pre-italic) traits might prevail.
I am especially curious about ...
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Do I need to learn Esperanto? [closed]
I am native Armenian speaker. I know Russian from childhood. Recent years English became my second language and I am using it in everywhere except interaction with friends. Now I want to learn Italian....
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