La Spezia-Rimini Line

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Historically, the La Spezia-Rimini Line marked a series of isoglosses that distinguished Northern Italian speech from that of Tuscany, home of the standard Italian language.

The La Spezia-Rimini Line (sometimes also referred to as the Massa-Senigallia Line), in the linguistics of the Romance languages, is a line that demarcates a number of important isoglosses that distinguish Romance languages east and south of the line from Romance languages north and west of it. Romance languages on the eastern half of it include standard Italian and the Eastern Romance languages (Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian), while Spanish, French, Portuguese as well as Northern Italian languages are representatives of the western group.

The line is also simply the frontier between Italian proper (Eastern Romance, to the south) and Northern Italian (Western Romance, to the north).

The line runs through northern Italy, from the cities of La Spezia to Rimini (some say^{[citation needed]} that the line actually runs through Massa and Senigallia about 40 kilometers further to the south, and would more accurately be called the Massa-Senigallia Line).

North and west of the line (excluding some Northern Italian varieties, such as Ligurian, which probably once had the characteristic but lost it under influence from standard Italian), the plural of nouns was drawn from the Latin accusative case, and usually ends in -s regardless of grammatical gender or declension. South and east of the line, the plurals of nouns were usually taken from the Latin nominative case, and change the vowels to form the plurals. Compare the plurals of cognate nouns in Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Latin:

Romanian	Italian	Spanish/Portuguese	French	Latin nom. pl.	Latin acc. pl.	meaning

viaţă, vieţi	vita, vite	vida, vidas	vie, vies	vitae	vitās	life, lives
lup, lupi	lupo, lupi	lobo, lobos	loup, loups	lupī	lupōs	wolf, wolves

Generally speaking the western Romance languages show common innovations that the eastern Romance languages tend to lack. Another isogloss that falls on the La Spezia-Rimini line deals with the voicing of certain consonants that occur between vowels. Thus, Latin focus/focum (meaning "fire") becomes fuoco in Italian and foc in Romanian, but fogo in Northern Italian dialects (Venetian) and fuego in Spanish. Voicing, softening, or loss of these consonants is characteristic of the western branch of Romance; their retention is characteristic of eastern Romance. There are, however, exceptions which undermine this isogloss: Gascon dialects in south-west France and Aragonese in northern Aragon (Spain) - i.e. theoretically Western Romance - also retain the original Latin voiceless stop between vowels. Indeed, the significance of the La Spezia-Rimini line is often challenged by specialists in within both Italian dialectology and Romance dialectology. One reason for this is that while it demarcates preservation (and expansion) of phonemic geminate consonants (Central and Southern Italy) from their simplification (in Northern Italy, Gaul, and Iberia), the areas affected do not correspond consistently with those defined by voicing criteria. Romanian, which on the basis of lack of voicing is classified with Central and Southern Italian, has undergone simplification of geminates, a defining characteristic of Western Romance.

[edit] References

Note that the word Lombard once upon a time (up to 1600) meant Cisalpine, but now it has narrowed in its meaning, referring only to the administrative region of Lombardy .

Cravens, Thomas D. (2002) Comparative Romance Dialectology: Italo-Romance clues to Ibero-Romance sound change. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Hull, Dr Geoffrey (1989) Polyglot Italy:Languages, Dialects, Peoples, CIS Educational, Melbourne
Hull, Dr Geoffrey (1982) The linguistic unity of Northern Italy and Rhaetia, PhD thesis, University of Western Sydney.
Maiden, Martin (1995) A linguistic history of Italian. London: Longman.
Maiden, Martin & Mair Parry (eds.) (1997) The Dialects of Italy. London: Routledge.
Bernard Comrie, Stephen Matthews, Maria Polinsky (eds.), The Atlas of languages : the origin and development of languages throughout the world. New York 2003, Facts On File. p. 40.
Stephen A. Wurm, Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing. Paris 2001, UNESCO Publishing, p. 29.
Glauco Sanga: La lingua Lombarda, in Koiné in Italia, dalle origini al 500 (Koinés in Italy, from the origin to 1500), Lubrina publisher, Bèrghem
Studi di lingua e letteratura lombarda offerti a Maurizio Vitale, (Studies in Lombard language and literature) Pisa : Giardini, 1983
Brevini, Franco - Lo stile lombardo : la tradizione letteraria da Bonvesin da la Riva a Franco Loi / Franco Brevini - Pantarei, Lugan - 1984 (Lombard style: literary tradition from Bonvesin da la Riva to Franco Loi )
Mussafia Adolfo, Beitrag zur Kunde der norditalienischen Mundarten im XV. Jahrhunderte (Wien, 1873)
Canzoniere Lombardo - a cura di Pierluigi Beltrami, Bruno Ferrari, Luciano Tibiletti, Giorgio D'Ilario - Varesina Grafica Editrice, 1970.