11
votes
Accepted
How close are the Italian and the Romanian open central unrounded vowels?
Short answer: there is more variation than what is expected, but the data could be interpreted 'on average' to show that Romanian has more instances of a back /a/ than Italian.
The /a/ phoneme covers ...
- 7,281
10
votes
From Italian to Spanish, consonant + "i" goes to consonant + "l"?
Spanish and Italian are both languages descended from Latin. As such, many of their words are cognate sharing a common Latin ancestor, but the sounds in these words evolved over time and evolved ...
- 3,102
10
votes
Accepted
Why do Croatian and Italian contain the same grammatical endings for nouns and verbs?
These all derive from the original Proto-Indo-European inflections.
Compare Classical Latin present-tense verb endings:
sg pl
1 amō amāmus
2 amās amātis
3 amat amant
And Ancient Greek (...
- 64k
8
votes
Accepted
Etymology of "fiamma" in Italian
Syllable-initial Latin "Xl" clusters, where X is a consonant, regularly become "Xi" in Italian.
Examples:
platea -> piazza ('square')
clamare -> chiamare ('call')
flumen -&...
- 7,424
7
votes
Italian 'gn' vs Spanish 'ñ' - Why does their use differ intervocalically and word internally?
The most obvious reason for the difference is that Spanish, like English, does not have geminate consonants (aside from occasional “fake” geminates that arise from the same consonant occurring on ...
- 17.8k
6
votes
Historical morphology of Italian nouns from Latin 3rd declension
Actually, it seems that the most common modern point of view is that most Italian plurals come from the accusative plural, after the regular transformation that turned final /s/ into /j/. This ...
- 557
6
votes
Accepted
Calabrian/Sicilian and unstressed e/o
Not all Calabrian is the same
Calabrian (it: Calabrese) is the name given to the romance dialect continuum spoken in Calabria. It is commonly divided into two different language groups:
In the ...
- 3,102
5
votes
What is the origin of the word assassin?
The origin appears to come from the name of the Nizari Ismaili state founded by Hassan-i Sabbah who termed his followers Asāsiyyūn أساسيون, the root of which translates as "fundamentals". ...
- 82k
4
votes
Italian: is there an authoritative word frequency list?
For many languages, SUBTLEX is considered a good source for realistic frequencies. There is an Italian version, SUBTLEX-IT, available at http://crr.ugent.be/subtlex-it/; (Crepaldi, Keuleers, Mandera, &...
- 2,502
4
votes
Any other example of "socially stigmatized phoneme" like the "th" sound in some Venetian dialect?
In any place where regional origin is associated with lower social status (basically, where internal migration in search of jobs and wages is/was important, or where a central political authority was ...
- 1,763
4
votes
Accepted
Historical morphology of Italian nouns from Latin 3rd declension
First off:
Italian is commonly analysed as inheriting the nominative forms of nouns from Vulgar Latin, instead of the accusative ones.
I don't think I'd quite agree with that. In the plural, the ...
- 64k
4
votes
Is there a General European English Accent?
Those people just happen to have accents that sound similar to your ears. Features common to several European languages but not your native English stand out to your ears.
It'd make sense to ...
- 41
4
votes
Phonological rule for realizations of Italian /s/
While the link in ukemi's comment gives a good description of the rules governing S-voicing, the main question here has a simple answer.
/s/ and /z/ are separate phonemes in (standard/Tuscan) Italian....
- 64k
4
votes
Accepted
Is it a coincidence that both Italian and German use third person feminine pronouns for formal second-person address?
Italian uses the third person feminine by following Spanish usage of usted. It simply never developed a special pronoun, which is reasonable as Italian very rarely uses the pronoun at all (e.g. Cosa ...
- 557
4
votes
Orthography changes in Italian
For starters, there's a nice overview on the Treccani on the Ottocento and on the history of Italian orthography, with good references to the increasing rates of literacy among the middle classes and ...
- 7,281
3
votes
Why do some linguists say vowel length isn't contrastive in Italian?
"Stress in Italian is mostly length, isn't it?"
I'm not sure what you mean by this. If you mean "stress in Italian is mostly realized as phonetic length", it might or might not be true, but it isn't ...
- 17.8k
3
votes
Why do some linguists say vowel length isn't contrastive in Italian?
The main reason is that it is (given the definition of contrast) not contrastive. The exercise of phonemicization requires that you start with phonetically transcribed data, not removing phonetic ...
- 82k
3
votes
Why does Italian use definite articles before possessive adjectives, except when these are followed by a singular family noun?
Generally (in Central Italian), the definite article always accompanies a possessive pronoun - except when referring to a certain kinship names (singenionimi) in the singular. These are:
padre, madre,...
- 3,102
3
votes
Any other example of "socially stigmatized phoneme" like the "th" sound in some Venetian dialect?
In Hindi the usage of only /s/ in the place of /ʃ/ /ʂ/ and /s/ generally makes one sound less educated. Same with the realization of the monophthongs /ɛː/ and /ɔː/ as diphthongs /əɪ/ and /əʊ/. These ...
- 1,114
3
votes
Italian: is there an authoritative word frequency list?
Frequency lists extracted from the WaCky corpora. Lists of words and lemmas are provided, sorted by frequency.
itWaC (Italian)
itWaC: a 2 billion word corpus constructed from the Web limiting the ...
- 131
3
votes
Accepted
Auxilary verb alternation in analytic perfect for French/Italian and German languages
This is called auxiliary selection. It came about in the late Roman - early Medieval period in the major Romance and Germanic languages, before being progressively lost in many languages through the ...
- 7,281
2
votes
Expressions derived from Italian mafia
According to the following source, the expression "break/bust my balls" comes from the old practice of cattle castration:
Whether it’s busting or breaking, balls or stones, this expression ...
- 319
2
votes
Accepted
More or less - Widespread idiom?
Good question, I was making a list of languages that use the 'less-or-more' form, after first noticing it in Paul-Wexler's lecture, before his lecture, I assumed "less or more" is the more common form,...
- 247
2
votes
From Italian to Spanish, consonant + "i" goes to consonant + "l"?
Just for (a random) curiosity :D :
Latin pl, cl and fl bacame [ʃ] in portuguese (written ch).
Example:
planum > chão (doublet of "plano")
plattus > chato (doublet of "prato")
plenum > cheio (...
- 1,426
2
votes
From Italian to Spanish, consonant + "i" goes to consonant + "l"?
I would say, /l/ in specific Latin clusters was simply vocalized in Italian. That means the consonant became a vowel, which is not all that uncommon for a sound like this. Take for example r-...
2
votes
English "fruit" vs Italian "frutta" plural number
As a native Spanish speaker I might use fruta or frutas according to the occasion. The difference might be small enough that I might doubt which one is correct, though. I suspect that nouns shifting ...
- 1,225
2
votes
Any other example of "socially stigmatized phoneme" like the "th" sound in some Venetian dialect?
You'd be better off asking what languages don't have such a feature.
An example from New York City English is the curl-coil merger, which pronounces curl/coil, verse/voice, loin/learn as homophones. ...
- 627
2
votes
What languages reinforce imperatives with conjunctions?
The order is really arbitrary or a result of the syntactic constraints of the language.
(Generally SAE requires imperatives take the first position whereas even in neighbouring Eastern European IE ...
- 7,531
1
vote
Italian 'gn' vs Spanish 'ñ' - Why does their use differ intervocalically and word internally?
In The Phonology of Italian [2009, Martin Krämer], page 47, the author states that
Word-initially, all consonants can only be short ... The consonants [ts, dz, ʃ, ɲ, ʎ] are short (like all the other ...
- 17.7k
1
vote
Why are native English speakers convinced that English language is a Romance language?
That depends on how you define a Romance language.
Linguists consider what first makes a language is its grammar, its basic structure and rules. Under that point of view, English is definitely a ...
- 220
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