Talk:Veronese Riddle

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This article says the riddle is in some sort of transitional dialect between Latin and Italian, but the Venetian language article claims it's in Venetian. I suspect that the former is the truth, but I'd like someone who knows better than me to reconcile the two. Binabik80 16:04, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

That's a good point. The transitional phase between Latin Language and Italian Language is actually foggy, and no one can say for sure when Italian was born. Many scholars prefers to see a continuum between Classical Latin and modern Italian, thought it might seem a little excessive. But the divide is not clear. Schiapparelli claimed to have found it in the Riddle, only to be objected by later studies. One could say that in the early middle ages there already were different kinds of Latin in different areas of the empire and that the same was inside Italy. These differences were inherited by dialects. But though early Italian has strong regional differences, the presence of dialects can only happen when a standard is established (in Italy's case, in the 1500s). So one can only speak of non-standard Italian before that. --Wikipedius 22:57, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

But according to its article, Venetian isn't actually a dialect of Italian, though it's generally thought of (even by it's speakers) as such; it's a separate romance language more closely related to French and Spanish than it is Italian. Or is the Riddle still so close to Latin in it's language that it could just as easily be considered French or Spanish as it could Italian? Binabik80 23:41, 20 December 2005

(UTC)

Yes, at that time Venetian Language was too undifferentiated, as were French and Spanish. What makes Venetian an Italian language is not so much a statistical count, but its contribution to what will become the Italian language. Diachronically, it is not just the quantity that counts: Venetian was one of the tassels that made up Italian. Piedmontese is even closer to French, or is it French that is closer to Piedmontese? Dialects are (unfairly) considered sub-languages, in that political circumstances did not allow them to become national languages. But it is hard to say where to put the divide. The Po Valley has (like France) a Celtic substratum, then the Venetians adopted Occitan as their literary language during the late middle ages (a most widespread surname in Verona is Montresor), and in the Venetian Republic, which considered itself an Italian state, educated people spoke a dialect strongly tinged with Florentine (for eg. in the Senate). Maybe we could use a detailed linguistic atlas of Italy on Wikipedia like the one on UTET if that weren't copyrighted --[[User:Wikipedius|Mauro]] 11:39, 22 December 2005 (UTC)