Venetian language

Venetian
Vèneto
Spoken in
Region The Adriatic
Total speakers 2,280,387 (as of 2000)[1] (some estimate goes up to 5,000,000 people in Triveneto and Istria only)
Language family Indo-European
  • Italic
    • Romance
      • Italo-Western
        • Western
          • Gallo-Iberian
            • Gallo-Romance
              • Gallo-Italic
                • Venetian
Language codes
ISO 639-1 None
ISO 639-2 roa
ISO 639-3 vec
Linguasphere
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
A sign in Venetian Italian reading "Here we also speak Venetian"

Venetian or Venetan is a Romance language spoken as native language by over two million people,[1] mostly in the Veneto region of Italy, where of five million inhabitants almost all can understand it. It is sometime spoken and often well understood outside Veneto, in Trentino, Friuli, Venezia Giulia, Istria and some towns of Dalmatia, an area of six to seven million people. The language is called vèneto or vènet in Venetian, veneto in Italian; the variant spoken in Venice is called venexiàn/venesiàn or veneziano, respectively. Although referred to as an Italian dialect (diałeto dialetto) even by its speakers, like other Italian dialects it is a sister language of the national language, not a variety or derivative of it. Venetan (and Venetian proper, the language of Venice), display notable structural and lexical differences from Italian. Typologically, Venetan belongs only partly to the Northern Italian group within Romance languages.

Neither Venetan nor Venetian should be confused with Venetic, an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken in the Veneto region around the 6th century BC.

Contents

History

A street sign in Venice using the Venetian calle, as opposed to the Italian via.

Venetian descends from Vulgar Latin, influenced by the Celts and possibly the Venetic substratum and by the languages of the Germanic tribes (Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Lombards) who invaded northern Italy in the 5th century. Venetian, as a known written language, is attested in the 13th century. We also find influences and parallelism with Greek and Albanian in words such as : "piròn" (forket), "inpiràr" (to fork), "cadrega" (chair).

The language enjoyed substantial prestige in the days of the Venetian Republic, when it attained the status of a lingua franca in the Mediterranean. Notable Venetian-language authors are the playwrights Ruzante (1502–1542) and Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793). Both Ruzante and Goldoni, following the old Italian theater tradition (Commedia dell'Arte), used Venetian in their comedies the speech of the common folk. They are ranked among the foremost Italian theatrical authors of all time, and Goldoni's plays are still performed today. Other notable works in Venetian are the translations of the Iliad by Casanova (1725–1798) and Francesco Boaretti, and the poems of Biagio Marin (1891–1985). Notable also is a manuscript titled "Dialogue ... on the New star" attributed to Galileo (1564–1642).

However, as a literary language Venetian was overshadowed by the Dante's Tuscan "dialect" and the French languages like Provençal and the Oïl languages. After the demise of the Republic, Venetian gradually ceased to be used for administrative purposes; and when the newly-formed Italian Kingdom (founded in 1861) invaded Venetia in 1866, annexing it after a controversial plebiscite, the language was eclipsed by Tuscan, which was combined with elements of Sardinian to become the national language of Italy. Since then, deprived of any official status, the Venetian language has steadily lost ground to standard Italian. At present, virtually all its speakers are diglossic, and use Venetian only in informal contexts. The policy of deploying law enforcement forces from other regions, especially southern Italy, has meant that people have to use standard Italian with the foremost representatives of the state. The present situation raises questions about the language's medium term survival. Despite recent steps to recognize it, the language remains far below the threshold of inter-generational transfer with younger generations preferring standard Italian in many situations. The dilemma is further complicated by the ongoing large-scale arrival of immigrants who only speak or learn standard Italian. In the past however, Venetian was able to spread to other continents as a result of mass migration from the Veneto region between 1870 and 1905 and 1945 and 1960. This is itself a by-product of the 1866 annexation because the latter subjected the poorest sectors of the population to the vagaries of a newly integrated, developing industrial economy so-called national economy centered on north-western Italy. Tens of thousands of peasants and craftsmen were thrown off the land or out of their workshop, forced to seek better fortune overseas.

Venetian migrants created large Venetian-speaking communities in Argentina, Brazil (see Talian), Mexico (see Chipilo Venetian dialect), and Romania, where the language is still spoken today. Internal migrations under the Fascist regime also sent many Venetian speakers to other regions of Italy like southern Lazio.

Presently, some firms have chosen to use the Venetian language in advertising as a famous beer did some years ago (Xe foresto solo el nome - only the name is foreign). In other cases Italian advertisements are given a "Venetian flavour" by adding a Venetian word: for instance an airline used the verb "xe" (Xe sempre più grande - It is always bigger) into an Italian sentence (the correct Venetian being el xe senpre pi grande) to advertise new flights from Marco Polo Airport.

On March 28, 2007 the Regional Council of Vèneto officially recognized the existence of the Venetian Language (Łéngua Vèneta) by passing with an almost unanimous vote a law on the "tutela e valorizzazione della lingua e della cultura veneta" (Law on the Protection and Valorisation of the Venetian Language and Culture) with the vote of both governing and opposition parties.

Geographic distribution

Venetian is spoken mainly in the Italian regions of Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia and in both Slovenia and Croatia (Istria, Dalmatia and the Kvarner Gulf). Smaller communities are found in the provinces of Lombardy, Trento, Emilia (in Mantova, Rimini, and Forlì), Lazio (Pontine Marshes), and formerly in Romania (Tulcea). It is also spoken in North and South America by the descendants of Italian immigrants. Notable examples of this are the city of Chipilo, Mexico or the Talian dialect spoken in Brazilian states of Espírito Santo, São Paulo, Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina. Until the middle 20th Century, Venetian was spoken on the Greek Island of Corfu, which had been long under the rule of the Republic of Venice.

Classification

Venetian descends partly from Vulgar Latin — like all other Romance languages, including Italian and the other Italian dialects. However, in the traditional classification of Romance languages it is considered part of the Italo-Romance group[2].

According to Ethnologue, Venetian and Italian belong to different sub-branches of the Italo-Western branch: Venetian is a member of the Gallo-Iberian group, which also includes Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese and French, among others; whereas Italian is a member of the Italo-Dalmatian group. More precisely, Venetian belongs to the Gallo-Romance sub-branch of Gallo-Iberian, which includes French but not Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese. In that classification, therefore, Venetian is more closely related to French, Catalan and Spanish than to Italian.

Venetian proper can be distinguished from Venetian Italian, the variety of Italian influenced by local Venetian features that is also spoken in the region. Compare:

Regional variants

The main regional variants and sub-variants of Venetian are

All these variants are mutually intelligible, with a minimum 92% between the most diverging ones (Central and Western). Modern speakers reportedly can still understand to some extent Venetian texts from the 14th century.

Other noteworthy variants are spoken in

Grammar

Like most Romance languages, Venetian has mostly abandoned the Latin case system, in favor of prepositions and a more rigid subject-verb-object sentence structure. It has thus become more analytic, if not quite as much as English. Venetian also has the Romance articles, both definite (derived from the Latin demonstrative ille) and indefinite (derived from the numeral unus).

Venetian also retained the Latin concepts of gender (masculine and feminine) and number (singular and plural). Unlike other Gallo-Iberian languages, which form plurals by adding -s, Venetian forms plurals in a manner similar to standard Italian. Nouns and adjectives can be modified by suffixes that indicate several qualities such as size, endearment, deprecation, etc. Adjectives (usually postfixed) and articles are inflected to agree with the noun in gender and number, but it is important to mention that the suffix might be deleted because the article is the part that suggests the number. However, Italian is influencing the Venetian Language :

In conservative Venetian, the article alone may convey the gender:

No native Venetic words seem to have survived in present Venetian, but there may be some traces left in the morphology , such as the morpheme -esto/asto/isto for the past participle, which can be found in Venetic inscriptions from about 500 BC:

Redundant subject pronouns

A peculiarity of Venetian grammar is a "semi-analytical" verbal flexion, with a compulsory "clitic subject pronoun" before the verb in many sentences, "echoing" the subject as an ending or a weak pronoun. Independent/emphatic pronouns (e.g. ti), on the contrary, are optional. The clitic subject pronoun (te, el/ła, i/łe) is used with the 2nd and 3rd person singular, and with the 3rd person plural. This feature may have arisen as a compensation for the fact that the 2nd- and 3rd-person inflections for most verbs, which are still distinct in Italian and many other Romance languages, are identical in Venetian. (The Piedmontese language also has clitic subject pronouns, but the rules are somewhat different.) The function of clitics is particularly visible in long sentences, which do not always have clear intonational breaks to easily tell apart vocative and imperative in sharp commands from exclamations with "shouted indicative". In Venetian the clitic el marks the indicative verb and its masculine subject, otherwise there is an imperative preceded by a vocative.

Interrogative inflection

Venetian also has a special interrogative verbal flexion used for direct questions, which also incorporates a redundant pronoun:

Auxiliary verbs

Reflexive tenses use the auxiliary verb aver ("to have"), as in English, German, and Spanish; instead of essar ("to be"), which would be normal in Italian. The past participle is invariable, unlike Italian:

Continuing action

Another peculiarity of the language is the use of the phrase eser drìo (a) (literally, "behind to") to indicate continuing action:

Indeed the word drio=busy/engaged also appears in other sentences:

Another progressive form uses the construction "essar là che" (lit. "to be there that"):

The use of progressive tenses is more pervasive than in Italian; E.g.

That construction does not occur in Italian: *Non sarebbe mica stato parlandoti is not syntactically valid.

Subordinate clauses

Subordinate clauses have double introduction ("whom that", "when that", "which that", "how that"), as in Old English:

As in other Romance languages, the subjunctive mood is widely used in subordinate clauses (although not always). Remarkably, while the use of subjunctive is weakening in many colloquial varieties of Italian, Venetian subjunctive seems to be more resisting. For example, many Italian speakers often hesitate between subjunctive che fosse 'that...were' and indicative che era 'that...was' (though this phenomenon is generally sanctioned in the standard form), while almost no Venetian speaker would use the indicative in the following examples. Notice that it is hardly possible to distinguish a colloquial and a standard form, Venetian being used especially in the spoken form.

For the same reasons, while Italian speakers may accept both vada and vado 'I go-subj/indic.' in the colloquial style, nearly everybody would reject the Venetian indicative *vo in the following context.

Sound system

Venetian has some sounds not present in Italian, an interdental voiceless fricative [θ] spelled ç or z(h) and similar to English th in thing and thought, to Castilian Spanish c(e, i)/z (as in cero, cien, zapato), Modern Greek θ (theta), and Icelandic Thorn þ/Þ; it occurs, for example, in çena/zhena (supper), which sounds the same as Castilian Spanish cena (same meaning). However this sound, which is present only in some varieties of the language (Bellunese, north-Trevisan, some Central Venetian rural areas around Padua, Vicenza and the mouth of the river Po), is sociolinguistically marked as provincial, with most variants using other sounds instead such as [s], [z], and [ʃ]. Some variants also present an interdental voiced fricative written "z" (el pianze 's/he cries') but this is often substituted by "voiced-S", i.e. [z] (written x: el pianxe) or [d] (el piande).

In some varieties intervocalic L is realized as a soft "evanescent" L (the alternation between evanescent and non-evanescent pronunciation is often represented with one spelling ł). The evanescent pronunciation of this phoneme varies from an almost e in the region of Venice, to a partially vocalised l further inland, to null realization in some mountainous areas. Otherwise, in more conservative areas where evanescence does no apply, the pronunciation of ł collapses with that of a simple L. Thus, for example, góndoła may sound like góndoea, góndola or góndoa. In the latter variant, the "ł" spelling also provides orthographic distinction for pairs such as scóła/skóła 'school' and scóa/skóa 'broom'.

Venetian, like Spanish, does not have the geminate consonants characteristic of Italian, Tuscan and many other Italian dialects: thus Italian fette, palla, penna ("slices", "ball", and "pen") are fete, bała, and pena in Venetian. The masculine singular ending, which is usually -o / -e in Italian, is often voided in Venetian, particularly in the regional countryside varieties: Italian pieno ("full") is pien, and altare is altar. Also, the masculine article el is often shortened to 'l. However, the extent of vowel dropping depends on the variety. The central-southern varieties diplay the most reduced dropping (only after -n), the northern variety shows the largest extent of dropping (even after dentals and velars), while eastern and western varieties are in the middle.

Sample Etymological Lexicon

As a direct descent of regional spoken Latin, the Venetian lexicon derives its vocabulary substantially from Latin and (in more recent times) from Tuscan, so that most of its words are cognate with the corresponding words of Italian. Venetian includes however many words derived from other sources (such as Greek, Gothic, and German) that are not cognate with their equivalent words in Italian, such as:

Venetian English Italian Venetian word Origin
uncò, 'ncò, incò, anco, ancuo today oggi hunc + hodie (Latin)
apoteca pharmacy farmacia Apotheke (German)
trincàr to drink bere trinken (German)
becàr to be spicy hot essere piccante from the verb beccare (Italian), literally "to peck"
bisato eel anguilla Latin bestia ("beast"); cf. biscia (a kind of snake)
bisa, biso snake serpente Latin bestia ("beast"); cf. biscia (a kind of snake)
bìsi peas piselli Related to Italian word.
isarda, risardola lizard lucertola same etymon as lizard
trar via to throw tirare local cognate of It. tirare via
calìgo fog nebbia from caligo (Latin)
cantón corner/side angolo/parte from cantus (Latin)
catàr find+take trovare+prendere from adcaptare (Latin)
caréga, trón chair sedia cathedra, thronus (Latin) from (Greek)
petar sò to fall cascare from casus of cadere (Latin) made into a verb
ciao hello, goodbye ciao s-ciao (Venetian for slave); sclavus (vulgar Latin)
ciapàr to catch, to take prendere capere (Latin)
co when (non-interr.) quando cum (Latin) or possibly ko (slovene), the etymon being ked,kad from old slovene
copàr to kill uccidere accoppare (old Italian, literally "to behead")
còtoła, còtola skirt sottana cotta (Latin, coat or dress)
gòto, bicer drinking glass bicchiere gut(t)us (Latin for "cruet")
insìa exit uscita in + exita (Latin)
mi I io me (Latin)
morsegàr, smorsegàr to bite mordere morsus (Latin "bitten") made into a verb (cf. Italian morsicare)
mustaci mustaches baffi moustaki (Greek)
munìn, gato , gatin cat gatto perhaps from "meow" sound
muso donkey asino ?
nòtoła, barbastrìo, signàpoła bat pipistrello
pantegàna rat ratto podgana (slovene)
pirón fork forchetta from Greek pirouni
pomo/pón apple mela pomus (Latin)
sghiràt squirrel scoiattolo Related to Italian word. More probably from the Greek "skiouros"
sgnape liquor liquore Schnaps (German)
sgorlàr, scorlàr to shake scuotere ex + crollare (Latin)
supiàr, subiàr, sficiàr to whistle fischiare sub + flare (Latin)
tòr su to pick up raccogliere tollere (Latin)
técia, tegia pan pentola tecula (Latin)
tosàto, tosàt, buteleto , fio lad, boy ragazzo from tosare (Italian, "to cut someone's hair")
puto, putèło, putełeto , putèo lad, boy ragazzo puer, putus (Latin)
matelot lad, boy ragazzo perhaps from matelot (French, "sailor")
vacaà cow mucca, vacca vacca (Latin)
sc-iopa, sc-iopòn gun fucile-scopiare

Spelling systems

Traditional system

Venetian does not have an official writing system, but it is traditionally written using the Latin alphabet — sometimes with the addition of a couple of letters and/or diacritics for the sounds that do not exist in Italian, such as ç/zh for /θ/. Otherwise, the traditional spelling rules are mostly those of Italian, except that x represents /z/, as in English "zero".

As in Italian, the letter s between vowels usually represents [z], so one must write ss in those contexts to represent a voiceless /s/: basa for /ˈbaza/ ("he/she kisses"), bassa for /ˈbasa/ ("low"). Also, because of the numerous differences in pronunciation relative to Italian, the grave and acute accents are liberally used to mark both stress and vowel quality:

à /a/, á /ɐ/, è /ɛ/, é /e/, ò /ɔ/, ó /o/, ù /u/

Venetian allows the consonant cluster /stʃ/ (not present in Italian), which is usually written s-c or s'c before i or e, and s-ci or s'ci before other vowels. Examples include s-ciarir (Italian schiarire, "to clear up"), s-cèt (schietto, "plain clear"), and s-ciòp (schioppo, "gun"). The hyphen or apostrophe is used because the combination sc(i) is conventionally used for /ʃ/ sound, as in Italian spelling; e.g. scèmo (scemo, "stupid"); whereas sc before a, o and u represents /sk/: scàtoa (scatola, "box"), scóndar (nascondere, "to hide"), scusàr (scusare, "to forgive").

However, the traditional spelling is subject to many historical, regional, and even personal variations. In particular, the letter z has been used to represent different sounds in different written traditions. In Venice and Vicenza, for example, the phonemes /θ/ and /z/ are written z and x, respectively (el pianze = "he cries", el xe = "he is"); whereas other traditions have used ç and z (el piançe and el ze).

Proposed systems

Recently there have been attempts to standardize and simplify the script, e.g. by using x for [z] and a single s for [s]; then one would write baxa for [ˈbaza] ("she kisses") and basa for [ˈbasa] ("low"). Another recent convention is to use ł for the "soft" l, to allow a more unified orthography for all variants of the language. However, in spite of their theoretical advantages, these proposals have not been very successful outside of academic circles, because of regional variations in pronunciation and incompatibility with existing literature.

The Venetian speakers of Chipilo use a system based on Spanish orthography, even though it does not contain letters for [j] and [θ]. The American linguist Carolyn McKay proposed a writing system for that variant, based entirely on the Italian alphabet. However, the system was not very popular.

Sample texts

Ruzante returning from war

The following sample, in the old dialect of Padua, comes from a play by Ruzante (Angelo Beolco), titled Parlamento de Ruzante che iera vegnù de campo ("Dialogue of Ruzante who came from the battlefield", 1529). The character, a peasant returning home from the war, is expressing to his friend Menato his relief at being still alive:

    

Orbéntena, el no serae mal
star in campo per sto robare,
se 'l no foesse che el se ha pur
de gran paure. Càncaro ala roba!
A' son chialò mi, ala segura,
e squase che no a' no cherzo
esserghe gnan. [...]
Se mi mo' no foesse mi?
E che a foesse stò amazò in campo?
E che a foesse el me spirito?
Lo sarae ben bela.
No, càncaro, spiriti no magna.

     

"Really, it would not be that bad
to be in the battlefield looting,
were it not that one gets also
big scares. Damn the loot!
I am right here, in safety,
and almost can't believe
I am. [...]
And if I were not me?
And if I had been killed in battle?
And if I were my ghost?
That would be just great.
No, damn, ghosts don't eat."

Discorso de Perasto

The following sample is taken from the Perasto Speech (Discorso de Perasto), given on August 23, 1797 at Perasto, by Venetian Captain Giuseppe Viscovich, at the last lowering of the flag of the Venetian Republic (nicknamed the "Republic of Saint Mark").

    

Par trezentosetantasete ani
le nostre sostanse, el nostro sangue,
le nostre vite le xè sempre stàe
par Ti, S.Marco; e fedelisimi
senpre se gavemo reputà,
Ti co nu, nu co Ti,
e senpre co Ti sul mar
semo stài lustri e virtuosi.
Nisun co Ti ne gà visto scanpar,
nisun co Ti ne gà visto vinti e spaurosi!''

     

"For three hundred and seventy seven years
our bodies, our blood
our lives have always been
for You, St. Mark; and very faithful
we have always thought ourselves,
You with us, we with You,
And always with You on the sea
we have been illustrious and virtuous.
No one has seen us with You flee,
No one has seen us with You defeated and fearful!"

Francesco Artico

The following is a contemporary text by Francesco Artico. The elderly narrator is recalling the church choir singers of his youth, who, needless to say, sang much better than those of today:

    

Sti cantori vèci da na volta,
co i cioéa su le profezie,
in mezo al coro, davanti al restèl,
co'a ose i 'ndéa a cior volta
no so 'ndove e ghe voéa un bèl tóc
prima che i tornésse in qua
e che i rivésse in cao,
màssima se i jèra pareciàdi onti
co mezo litro de quel bon
tant par farse coràjo.

     

"These old singers of the past,
when they picked up the Prophecies,
in the middle of the choir, in front of the gate,
with their voice they went off
who knows where, and it was a long time
before they came back
and landed on the ground,
especially if they had been previously "oiled"
with half a liter of the good one [wine]
just to make courage."

English words of Venetian origin

Venetian source English loanword Notes
arsenà arsenal via Italian; from Arabic dār aṣ-ṣināʿah 'house of work/skills, factory'
artichioco artichoke from Arabic al-haršūf
balota ballot 'ball' used in Venetian elections
casin casino borrowed in Italianized form
schiao ciao used originally in Venetian to mean 'your servant', 'at your service'
contrabando contraband
gazeta gazette 'small Venetian coin'; from the phrase gazeta de la novità 'a penny worth of news'
g(h)eto ghetto
ziro giro 'circle, turn, spin'; borrowed in Italianized form; from the name of the bank Banco del Ziro
gnoco, -chi gnocchi 'lump, bump, gnocchi'; from Germanic *knokk- 'knuckle, joint'
gondola gondola
laguna lagoon
lazareto Lazaretto, lazaret
Lido lido
lo(t)to lotto from Germanic *lot- 'destiny, fate'
malvasia malmsey
marzapan marzipan from Arabic martabān, the name for the porcelain container in which marzipan was transported, from Mataban in the Bay of Bengal where these were made (this is one of several proposed etymologies for the English word)
negro ponte Negroponte 'black bridge'
monte negro Montenegro 'black mountain'
Pantalon pantaloon a character in the Commedia dell'arte
pestachio pistachio ultimately from Middle Persian *pistak
quarantena quarantine
regata regatta originally 'fight, contest'
scampo, -i scampi from Greek κάμπη 'caterpillar', lit. 'curved (animal)'
zechin sequin 'Venetian gold ducat'; from Arabic sikkah 'coin, minting die'
Zanni zany a character in the Commedia dell'arte
zero zero via French zéro; ultimately from Arabic ṣifr 'zero, nothing'

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Ethnologue.
  2. ↑ Carlo Tagliavini, Le Origini delle Lingue Neolatine
  • Artico, Francesco (1976). Tornén un pas indrìo‪: raccolta di conversazioni in dialetto‬. Brescia: Paideia Editrice. 
  • Ferguson, Ronnie (2007). A Linguistic History Of Venice. Leo S. Olschki. ISBN 9788822256454. 
  • Gordon, Raymond G., Jr., ed (2005). "Venetian". Ethnologue: Languages of the World (Fifteenth ed.). Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. 
  • McKay, Carolyn Joyce. ‪Il dialetto veneto di Segusino e Chipilo: fonologia, grammatica, lessico veneto, spagnolo, italiano, inglese‬. 
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