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#103814 10/06/03 09:54 AM
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Pooh-Bah
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Yeah, but I was thinking more which of your whanau should also be your kai tangata ...


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Carpal Tunnel
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I'm bringing this back up because of a fascinating link on Uncle jazzbeau's page - http://www.dialettando.com/dizionario - a dictionary of Italian dialects. Perusing the word list for the dialect of Emilia Romagna, the region of Italy surroudning San Marino, I found many more examples of this French influence, some that were strikingly obvious, such as "pomm-da-téra" for "patata". Below are are a few more Romagnola words that caught my eye for their similarities to various languages, including, in the case of the first two, English.

bütér : burro
dé : giorno
muiér : moglie
narans: arancia


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The dialects of northern Italy, especially Piedmontese, Ligurian, Lombardian, Emilian, and Venetian belong to a group of Italian dialects called Gallo-Italian, and share features with French (especially Provencal) as well as other Italian dialects. (My grandmother spoke Genoese, one of the Ligurian dialects. Its inventory of vowels is closer to French than to standard Italian, including front and mid rounded vowels.) Standard Italian (developed in the main from Tuscan) is outside of this northern group of dialects.


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I know that one ought not make too much of isolated examples, but I wonder, zio, if you know how emilian ended up with "dé" for "day" and "buter" for "butter"? There are one or two words I could add to that list of emilian words. A friend from Rimini says that his mother always says "madosca" for "madonna", and sammarinese uses "arlog" (sp?) for "orologio".


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how emilian ended up with "dé" for "day"

Well, the Latin word for day is dies. And Italian does have from this word. But it's not the regular word for day, which is giorno from Latin diurnum. The thing to remember about dialects is that they are just as old as standard languages. In this case that means that emiliano has been around as long as tuscano, but just that it lost out in the political contest that that establishes standard languages.

"buter" for "butter"?

Well, Italian burro, like emiliano büter and buter are both from Greek boutyron 'butter', the two words just developed differently. Italian also has butirro which is a more learned word.

The famous French linguist Gillieron said that "each word has its own hisotry."

A friend from Rimini says that his mother always says "madosca" for "madonna"

This seems strange, but I wouldn't say it's impossible.

sammarinese uses "arlog" (sp?) for "orologio".

That doesn't seem too different. Remember, as Max Weinreich once said: "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."




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