Boutique Language Geek Thread of Imperial Grandeur

[RDCanecutter 26377]

Do you know how to cuss in Nahuatl? Do you refuse to use Mandarin because it's too main-stream so you learn Cantonese from kung-fu movies instead? Have you ever used Catalan just to piss off a Spanish cop? If you have done these, done similar, or just cry out in silent shame-rage wishing you had, then you have a home. This thread is for you.

About two months ago @956 Worldwide mentioned that learning the boutique language of Slovak would give us the magic key to unlock all the Slavic languages. Being one to accomplish odd goals with minimum effort, I thought "well maybe Duolingo has Slovak." I checked. They didn't. But hey down at the end of the bar sat Scottish Gaelic, drinkin whisky shots and battin her big green eyes at me.

Me and Scottish Gaelic have been havin a flang now for more than a month. I'll go into nerd detail in a later post. But for now I want to hear from other doomed souls who have also poured time into something like Danish Rap or Mayan slang. Go.

Edited August 25, 2023 by RDCanecutter

[SimonBolivar 10957]

You know even with 8 years of my wife yelling at me, I'm still nowhere close to fluent in Spanish. But sometimes I look at Danish and see that speaking that gets you an in with Norwegian and Swedish and think about jumping on board. 

 

Now SimonBolivar don't most of these people already speak English?

 

 

[ztejas 43411]

I speak American and passable Mexican.

I think Italian would be fun and fairly easy to learn though. 

[RDCanecutter 26377]

Yeah the go-to when traveling is to just yell very loudly in American, just to let them know who's in charge.

Spanish is still too practical to be boutique, unless you learn some medieval version of it so you can hang out with El Cid:

https://miocid.wlu.edu/folios/01r.html

[ztejas 43411]

1 minute ago, RDCanecutter said:

Spanish is still too practical to be boutique

Well yeah that's why I can get around. I wasn't going to take French in high school like some loser.

Italian would serve zero purpose. Other than I find the crossover with Spanish interesting and would like to learn the differences. 

[RDCanecutter 26377]

4 minutes ago, ztejas said:

I speak American and passable Mexican.

I think Italian would be fun and fairly easy to learn though. 

I found Italian easy to pick up but easy to forget. Same with Portuguese. Some of the Sicilian dialects seem closer to Spanish than to "proper" Italian.

[Braff Zacklin 13551]

1 hour ago, RDCanecutter said:

About two months ago @956 Worldwide mentioned that learning the boutique language of Slovak would give us the magic key to unlock all the Slavic languages. Being one to accomplish odd goals with minimum effort, I thought "well maybe Duolingo has Slovak." I checked. They didn't.

Just tell him to go spend a year in Ennis. He'll come back fluent. Jak se mas?!

Edited August 26, 2023 by Braff Zacklin

[956 Worldwide 34692]

I speak really good Slovak, passable Czech, both of which have crowded out Polish when I try to speak.  But my reading remains solid. 
 

Slovak will get you good on Slavic grammar and the vocabulary has the most overlap with every other Slavic language if you’re Venn diagraming. 

[Exposition 93]

I only speak English. Have been 'on the verge' of trying to learn another for years now. This includes Mandarin when I lived in Singapore and Japanese when I lived in Japan. But it was too easy getting away with English and I never pursued either seriously.

I want to learn a language that I have some sort of passionate connection with. Spanish? Thai? Arabic? I'm dying to put in the effort and immerse myself into Duolingo or whatever to learn but I'm too finicky to commit.

Yet at the end of the day I keep coming back to Cantonese because Hong Kong is far and way my 1,000% favorite city in the world. I have nothing else to contribute to this thread except the shoutout to Cantonese. I felt that. 

[RDCanecutter 26377]

A'ight Imo get my nerd on.

Scottish Gaelic split off from NE Ireland way back and brought that whole culture to the NW of what is now Scotland. The rest of Scotland had other languages; the accent Scotty speaks is an imitation of "Scots" which isn't Gaelic, it's a Germanic language from the Angles of Anglo-Saxon Inc.

Anyway, Scottish Gaelic is close to Irish roughly how Portuguese is to Spanish, or maybe how Cuban is to Spain-Spanish.

It's obviously an Indo-European language so if you speak English or a Latin or Slavic language, familiar things will jump out at you.

It's got all the Wh-question words (mostly showing up as C-) and a Tu/Vous distinction like French where the you plural can be a polite singular. Irish doesn't do this anymore. On verbs Scottish Gaelic has mostly stopped conjugating them (Irish still does) instead, verb phrases look like this:

"Is me a-eating, Is you a-eating" etc Tha mi ag ithe where the pronoun does the work. In Scottish there is no longer the sense that this is in progress, it's just how you talk. As you will notice, sentence order is kinda backwards from most languages.

Spelling is a beast, utterly alien to English. But like French, once you know how a couple dozen words sound, you've cracked the code.

Scottish Gaelic phonetically sounds like a Brazilian speaking Klingon. Almost Slavic chopping up of final -t's and -d's into ch sounds.

 

[RDCanecutter 26377]

Oh, almost forgot: The first week of studying it, I would practice my pronunciation by speaking it to my little black dog, who would stop what she was doing and listen.

Then, my scary-fast language-learner wife who had been listening to me, just freakin *figured it out*, and started speaking Gaelic back to me. This is life at our house. Now we speak this pseudo-Gaelic where we sub in the massive amounts of English for not-yet-known Gaelic vocabulary into basic sentence structures.

"Hey a chaileag, tha mi a-takin a whiz agus tha mi a-gettin muga cofaidh. Tha thu ag-iarraigh another cup too?"

(Dear girl, I plan to relieve my bladder then get more coffee. Do you desire another cup as well?)

Edited August 26, 2023 by RDCanecutter

[956 Worldwide 34692]

If anyone wants to learn the “easy” Slavic languages, Bulgarian and Macedonian do not force you into the case system that causes English speakers fits. 
 

Russian was my first Slavic language and it is the usual entry into that language group. Russian has the case system but has also undergone some standardization and some of the more difficult aspects, like reflexive verbs, are somewhat easier because the reflexive stays with the verb and doesn’t float around in the sentence. Oddly enough, Russian has adopted far more latinized words that are just written in Cyrillic and declined.  
 

The downside of Russian is that now most other Slavic speakers will look at you like you are holding a turd in your hands if you try to speak to them. And there are enough vocabulary differences that you will really struggle to keep up with what’s happening with West Slavs.

Czech is the most fiendishly difficult thing I’ve taken on, and I tend to just lapse into country bumpkin Slovak when not concentrating. Pronunciation is tongue-tangling, the grammar is not as standardized and has lots of exceptions. Czechs bite off the end of their words and fire them away bullet fast. It’s a bear. 
 

Slovak, beyond having a pretty standardized grammar because it was not written down really until linguists codified it in the 17th and 18th centuries, has a lot in common with Old Slavonic. All of a sudden you’ll get a lot more of the Orthodox liturgy. The grammar is all explicit and on the surface of the language and you see WTF is happening in the other Slavic languages.  And it is, in my opinion, a very pretty language that other Slavs hear as having a sing-song cadence, lots of soft sounds. And Slovaks speak slower.

Out in the East, from Kosice on, there is a dialect simply called “easterner” (vychodniarsky) that bleeds into Ruthenian and Ukrainian. It’s recognizably Slovak but different enough to make other native speakers stumble. 

[Rudiger 1160]

Learn Basque, the mother of all boutique languages.

[RDCanecutter 26377]

There was one year where I had a night job teaching English to non-native speakers. It'd be half Afghanis and Somalis at a basic level, and various Eastern European au-pairs who were 95% English fluent, I'd try to get them the last 5% and they'd argue because that's not how they said it in that hit song on the radio.

During lulls in the class I'd take some bizarre English sentence and have them translate it into their own language that the others would try to say. When it was the Czechs' and Poles' turn it'd sound like two accents of the same language.

Obviously if we'd gone deeper that would've fallen apart, but I enjoyed getting all those 20-year-old women to fight.

[RDCanecutter 26377]

5 minutes ago, Rudiger said:

Learn Basque, the mother of all boutique languages.

I have a friend who has done that off and on. Bought a guitar from her that has some Basque sticker on it from the French side. Always pick T's and K's when you play Basque Wheel of Fortune.

[RDCanecutter 26377]

If you want to have fun with Spanish in a way that a native speaker can read, but will break an auto-translator, here's a trick I saw in a Mexican comic strip:

qu turns to>k. u>w. i>y and vice versa. Switch all z's and s's. Ch > X. Drop silent H. LL>y. Swap out b's and v's.

 

io ze vyen keztoi afwera pero el dya ke io me mwera ze ke tendraz ke yorar

[956 Worldwide 34692]

19 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

There was one year where I had a night job teaching English to non-native speakers. It'd be half Afghanis and Somalis at a basic level, and various Eastern European au-pairs who were 95% English fluent, I'd try to get them the last 5% and they'd argue because that's not how they said it in that hit song on the radio.

During lulls in the class I'd take some bizarre English sentence and have them translate it into their own language that the others would try to say. When it was the Czechs' and Poles' turn it'd sound like two accents of the same language.

Obviously if we'd gone deeper that would've fallen apart, but I enjoyed getting all those 20-year-old women to fight.

I guess that’s one thing to do with 20 year old Czech and Polish women. You do you. 

[RDCanecutter 26377]

Dig this. Remember Spanish 101 and kids making cheat-sheets to remember when to use Ser and Estar?

Gaelic has the same idea with two similar verbs "Is" and "Tha." Pronounced "Ta" in Ireland and coincidentally sounding and meaning the same at the colloquial Spanish "'ta bien." Or maybe not so coincidentally-- these words have roots older than Latin.

 

Edited August 26, 2023 by RDCanecutter

[TwiceHorn 31431]

1 hour ago, RDCanecutter said:

If you want to have fun with Spanish in a way that a native speaker can read, but will break an auto-translator, here's a trick I saw in a Mexican comic strip:

qu turns to>k. u>w. i>y and vice versa. Switch all z's and s's. Ch > X. Drop silent H. LL>y. Swap out b's and v's.

 

io ze vyen keztoi afwera pero el dya ke io me mwera ze ke tendraz ke yorar

Spanish bombs over Andalusia?

I admire your language talents.  I took Spanish from 5th grade to 10th.  I was reasonably good at the school part and I had good pronunciation, because I am a good mimic, but I have zero talent for languages, and, as a result am non-conversational, although I can read and write a bit still.'

Rather obviously, too, your facility with languages goes beyond just learning to speak them.  Your understanding extends to linguistic aspects, as well.

6 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

Dig this. Remember Spanish 101 and kids making cheat-sheets to remember when to use Ser and Estar?

Gaelic has the same idea with tow similar verbs "Is" and "Tha." Pronounced "Ta" in Ireland and coincidentally sounding and meaning the same at the colloquial Spanish "'ta bien." Or maybe not so coincidentally-- these words have roots older than Latin.

 

A lot of Irish people are ethnically French and Iberian, no?

Edited August 26, 2023 by TwiceHorn

[RDCanecutter 26377]

2 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

A lot of Irish people are ethnically French and Iberian, no?

They are the standard mix of Western Hunters, Middle-Eastern farmers, and Maniac Horsepeople who brought what turned into most of the languages. There is some sort of connection up and down the Atlantic coast. The Irish are a little heavier on Horsefolk, South Italians on Farmers, Scandinavians on Hunters, but most have some mix.

Thing is grammar can do all kinds of stuff regardless of relations. Take any grammar point, like say how to form a plural. As time passes, that thing will either stay about the same, or change. You could have one big group in the middle where it changed, while little isolated groups around the periphery still use the old method just because it didn't change. They may not even be genetically related, or they may, who knows.

[RDCanecutter 26377]

10 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Spanish bombs over Andalusia?

 

[SimonBolivar 10957]

Wikipedia says there are still 1,300 speakers of Scottish Gaelic in Nova Scotia. I bet you could clean up in a nursing home in some small enclave.

[52-80 19140]

18 hours ago, SimonBolivar said:

But sometimes I look at Danish and see that speaking that gets you an in with Norwegian and Swedish and think about jumping on board. 

 

Norwegians understand Swedish. Swedes understand Norwegian. Danes understand both.

But nobody understands Danish. 
 

Sorry, i dont make the rules. 

[RDCanecutter 26377]

7 hours ago, SimonBolivar said:

Wikipedia says there are still 1,300 speakers of Scottish Gaelic in Nova Scotia. I bet you could clean up in a nursing home in some small enclave.

There is a Gaelic school in Scotland where in the past one professor was an American who'd learned it in Nova Scotia, or Alba Nuadh as we cool kids say. I found a Gaelic College there in NS but 3/4 of the classes were dancing and playing instruments with some language.

Bizarrely there are Scottish Gaelic speakers, or at least learners, everywhere walking undetected amongst us. When I first started I slapped some common phrases like "100 thousand welcomes" and "I like Whisky" in shaky calligraphy on cardboard and tossed them in with my art at some shows. First show, in Birmingham, a guy starts reading them out loud with good pronunciation, which you'd never do without training. I jabbered him up with what little I knew, and we were both beginners but we were loud and it sounded Gaelic.

Another time this dude who looked like a fuzzy clone of me was giving my booth the eyeball, and it turned out he competed in Highland Games for Clan [My Mom's Maiden Name.] He was more about throwing heavy objects than speaking foreign languages, but he pretty much understood some basics and said he knew guys on the circuit who were fluent.

Not that it matters for a Boutique Language, the fun is doing it for yourself. But the Internet has exploded lots of old limits. I remember trying to learn a little bit years ago from a book. "Is toil leam" means "I like." I was going around saying "Is TOIL lee-am." I finally hear some native speakers online, that's "ISta lum."

Dork-ass fuckin mispronunciation.

Edited August 26, 2023 by RDCanecutter

[RDCanecutter 26377]

1 hour ago, 52-80 said:

Norwegians understand Swedish. Swedes understand Norwegian. Danes understand both.

But nobody understands Danish. 
 

Sorry, i dont make the rules. 

Can confirm, had Danish mother-in-law until she went to Valhalla.

My wife says the secret to speaking Danish is to numb your mouth and then mumble with an air of darkness and depression.

[RDCanecutter 26377]

Scot. Gaelic: Aggy bhochd (Ag-gy vohKH) means Pooor Aggy. Maybe stretch out that vooooohhhhKH.

No wait. I told it wrong. The above is a female Aggy.

For a male, go with Aggy bochd. B sound instead of V.

In related news, Caora (kuhra) is a sheep.

Edited August 26, 2023 by RDCanecutter

[Incredulity 11643]

On 8/25/2023 at 7:18 PM, RDCanecutter said:

There was one year where I had a night job teaching English to non-native speakers. It'd be half Afghanis and Somalis at a basic level, and various Eastern European au-pairs who were 95% English fluent, I'd try to get them the last 5% and they'd argue because that's not how they said it in that hit song on the radio.

During lulls in the class I'd take some bizarre English sentence and have them translate it into their own language that the others would try to say. When it was the Czechs' and Poles' turn it'd sound like two accents of the same language.

Obviously if we'd gone deeper that would've fallen apart, but I enjoyed getting all those 20-year-old women to fight.

I've seen this movie

 

 

[RDCanecutter 26377]

39 minutes ago, Incredulity said:

I've seen this movie

 

 

Yeah, that whole starting in silence writing on the board with back turned is a rookie move, which he admits to being. It's the teaching equivalent of waiting until you go on stage to tune your guitar.

A friend who went to more countries than I did said that if you can ask "and what did you do today?" and fake interest in the reply, you can travel the world doing whatever else you want, and still get paid.

[SimonBolivar 10957]

This isn't the Spanish thread, but I was reading El Mundo today when I came across the translation of Saint Petersburg and it's now my favorite, San Petersburgo. My grandfather was a general contractor before he passed and that's the exact type of word he would make up when not knowing the official Spanish word for something.

[Not that Bob 735]

I had to have 12 hrs of French to graduate. Through some miracle I passed 9 and only had to pass the last 3 the first half of my senior year. I took it with a friend who was much more language savvy than I. I did homework with him every night and essentially just wrote down the same thing he did. Not exactly copying, I tried to add what I could...who am I kidding? I copied all his work. He and I went to the prof to get our final grades. He made a B or something. Prof looks at me and says, "You made a C-. I hope you are not too disappointed." "Disappointed"? I say. "Ma'am (she was a cute female prof), I am ecstatic!"  The part of my brain that learns language is dead. Same part of my brain that learns to read music. Dead.  You guys speaking several languages amaze me. You might as well tell me to flap my arms and fly to Dallas as tell me to conjugate a verb...in any language. Well, maybe amo, amas, amat. Amare, amawe, amatus. Is that right?

[RDCanecutter 26377]

2 hours ago, Not that Bob said:

 Well, maybe amo, amas, amat. Amare, amawe, amatus. Is that right?

I'd give it a Gentleman's C if you showed up to class and didn't spit in my coffee. (Just joking-- I never leave my coffee alone with students.)

You've definitely got some Latin there. The first three are the singular conjugation, I you, he/she/it.

Amare is the infinitive "to love, and Amatus means "loved" as a past participle.

I freaked when I saw "Amawe" then I realized you did a phonetic spelling of Amavi "I loved," back when the v meant a w sound.

The main thing I want to know is how you took all that French yet what pops out is Latin?

 

[956 Worldwide 34692]

Speaking of languages with no utility, I once foolishly engaged in an airplane conversation and languages came up and my interlocutor launched into a spiel  on Esperanto. Complete with naked assertions about how if I leaned it I would be able to communicate all over the world. (Spoiler: no).
 

I do find the Utopianism of the created language fascinating and I later found the grave of its inventor (a Polish Jewish opthamalogist) in Warsaw’s Jewish Cemetery. Getting the pitch for studying it was something between an Amway and essential oil hard sell. 
 

One reason speaking boutique languages is much more fun is that the native appreciation level for futzing about with their language goes way up.  A gringo speaking Spanish barely registers, you can turn a great phrase in French and the Parisian will find some fault in your pronunciation. Russians will grunt a few words of appreciation and then mark you as potentially a spy.
 

But delivering some string of words that’s recognizable as a sentence in Slovak or Czech? That’s quite literally a party trick and will get you applause. In Prague I used to tell people “Yes, I’m working really hard on my Czech but I have to confess my Slovak is much better,” at which point someone at the party would wave over the inevitable Slovak guest (usually a woman, usually beautiful) and the follow up in Slovak would be “Prague is beautiful but don’t you miss the mountains and bryndza cheese?” And you’re off to the races. 
 

Something I saw online and can’t take credit for— tourists and guests get seized with a desire to say something in the host language, and if you learn the usual pleasantries you’ll get marked as an outsider. But learn to say, perfectly “I like to eat glass, it doesn’t hurt me,” and they’ll mark you as an insane native and extend you a bit of respect. 

[Not that Bob 735]

2 hours ago, RDCanecutter said:

I'd give it a Gentleman's C if you showed up to class and didn't spit in my coffee. (Just joking-- I never leave my coffee alone with students.)

You've definitely got some Latin there. The first three are the singular conjugation, I you, he/she/it.

Amare is the infinitive "to love, and Amatus means "loved" as a past participle.

I freaked when I saw "Amawe" then I realized you did a phonetic spelling of Amavi "I loved," back when the v meant a w sound.

The main thing I want to know is how you took all that French yet what pops out is Latin?

 

I can only postulate that Latin stuck with me, although misspelled, because that I studied with my girlfriend. I suppose I did what I could to impress her hoping for a handy on the weekend. I also remember quid ficit muse which I think means "What'd the mouse do."

[RDCanecutter 26377]

3 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Something I saw online and can’t take credit for— tourists and guests get seized with a desire to say something in the host language, and if you learn the usual pleasantries you’ll get marked as an outsider. But learn to say, perfectly “I like to eat glass, it doesn’t hurt me,” and they’ll mark you as an insane native and extend you a bit of respect. 

Still available via non-secure link:

http://www.immediategratification.org/i-can-eat-glass

[RDCanecutter 26377]

I have to say that classroom instruction is to language learning what climbing the rope in PE is to love of sports.

It will help somebody who is already on fire to learn the language, but for a normal human, it must be tedious.

I don't write it off-- two semesters of classroom instruction followed by a summer of small group teaching in a place where they speak it is pretty much awesome for making it stick. But since it's not 1923, it's either part of a bigger combo, or else we are intentionally acquiring a vague school memory.

[Chad Fuck 17658]

I'm here for the lulz and Duolingo tips.

[gsoda3 3245]

On 8/25/2023 at 8:16 PM, Exposition said:

I only speak English. Have been 'on the verge' of trying to learn another for years now. This includes Mandarin when I lived in Singapore and Japanese when I lived in Japan. But it was too easy getting away with English and I never pursued either seriously.

I want to learn a language that I have some sort of passionate connection with. Spanish? Thai? Arabic? I'm dying to put in the effort and immerse myself into Duolingo or whatever to learn but I'm too finicky to commit.

Yet at the end of the day I keep coming back to Cantonese because Hong Kong is far and way my 1,000% favorite city in the world. I have nothing else to contribute to this thread except the shoutout to Cantonese. I felt that. 

are you asian? how are you learning cantonese?  

[956 Worldwide 34692]

So, going back into boutique languages as unlocking other more useful languages— time for the false cognate hilarity. 
 

While learning Slovak I had a base in Polish and foolishly began to believe that by simply discarding excess sibilants I could communicate effectively. 
 

This is where I point out that the very useful Polish verb szukać (to look for, search for) does have a very similar sounding word in Czech and Slovak- šukat’. But in those languages it means “to fuck.”  
 

So, enter peals of laughter after I came in the classroom one day and asked if anyone had seen my friend and classmate because I’d been fucking him over the lunch hour. 
 

And then of course there is the famous examples— in Poland you innocently searched  for grandma in the store. “Szukałem babci w sklepie.”
 

Where a Czech would believe you had been fucking grandma in the cellar: “Šukál jsem babičku v sklepě.” 
 

Or in Polish you are looking for a place to live/apartment: „Szukam mieszkanie”

But in Czech or Slovak you’re late to your fucking: “Meškám šukanie.” 

 

[RDCanecutter 26377]

Yeah, French has "baiser" that means "to kiss" (in the dictionary.) Everywhere else it means "to fuck."

I learned this by completing a French composition assignment on what you'd do on a first date. If things were going great you'd probably baiser her several times wherever you were. If not, you'd still probably baiser her on the steps outside her door when you took her home, but it might be without passion like when you baiser your grandmother.

I didn't know a red pen contained that much ink.

[RDCanecutter 26377]

You could enjoy years of geekery on this site:

https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol

[RDCanecutter 26377]

09 SEP 23-- first verified personal use of Scottish Gaelic with a True Scotsman. A Glaswegian rolled up on me at my art booth talking excitedly about "The flag! The flag!" Took me a sec to realize he was talking about a bright red and yellow medieval Scottish design I use as a tablecloth to counteract post-modernity's slide into gloom.

Before he left I wished him welcome with a "Fàilte," odds are he doesn't speak Gaelic but most Irish don't either, and they all seem to understand the identical Irish word.

Hey, it's not much, but Sputnik was just a beeping metal kickball, and now we can get porn off thousands or satellites. 

[RDCanecutter 26377]

In the one-step-forward-two-steps-back department, online Gaelic speakers inform me that I Peggy Hill-ed a Gaelic caption I wrote on a cartoon.

[RDCanecutter 26377]

Scottish Gaelic Cussin:

Bod means dick. Pronounced sorta like "boat" but shorter sound. Maybe halfway between boat and butt.

"Bod ort" "A dick on you."

"Ithe bod" (EE-ha boat) "Eat dick."

[texasdago 7562]

On 8/25/2023 at 7:45 PM, RDCanecutter said:

I found Italian easy to pick up but easy to forget. Same with Portuguese. Some of the Sicilian dialects seem closer to Spanish than to "proper" Italian.

Funny, as an Italian speaker, I found Spanish easy to pick up and hard to forget.  I can read a reasonable amount of Portuguese and French just by the nature of the Latin relation but listening to and interpreting Portuguese is a bitch.

As for the various dialects in Italy, you see how various languages have influenced them.  An example if a poem written in Bolognese dialect followed by the Italian translation.  You can see the French influence on the language (ex: suitcase is valis in Bolognese, valigia in Italian... valise in French...)

Una valis d’arcurd (Poesia in dialetto bolognese) di Novella Gamberini  

Srè danter al mi paltò d’inveran, una matènna,  con la spensiratazza ad fangènna, da par mè andè in piazà.  Al feva un gran fradd e l’aria là pareva brusèrum la fazà,  ma sanza penser a seguitè a caminèr;  parchè dal nonno a vleva ander.  Lò in zanter a Bulaggna al lavureva,  al bar d’la piazà granda, al camarir al feva;  e intant ca steva d’asptèr,  in luntananza al vdè ariver.  L’andeva pian, e una valisatta l’aveva in man;  un salutè un regal am dè ma la valis vuda la vanzè.  E mè maraviè lè a steva a guardèr,  alaura al nonno a mod so, am vlè tranquilizer.  E suridant am dess; vaddet la valis vuda la per,  ma durant la mi vetta,  con onestè, d’arcurd a l’ho rimpè.  

Una valigia di ricordi (Poesia tradotta in italiano) di Novella Gamberini  

Chiusa nel mio cappotto d’inverno, una mattina,  sola con la spensieratezza di bambina, in centro andai.  Faceva molto freddo e là l’aria sembrava bruciarmi il volto,  ma senza indugiare continuai a camminare;  perché dal nonno volevo andare.  Lui in centro a Bologna lavorava,  al bar della piazza grande, il cameriere faceva;  ed io lì lo stavo ad aspettare,  quando in lontananza lo vidi arrivare.  Avanzava piano, e una valigetta aveva in mano;  nel salutarmi un dono mi lasciò ma nella valigia nulla restò.  E mentre con stupore restavo ad osservare,  il nonno a modo suo, mi volle rassicurare.  Sorridendomi disse: vedi la valigia vuota appare,  ma nel corso della vita,  con onestà, di ricordi l’ho riempita.  

 

...and then here's something in Romagnolo dialect...

 

Mo Roma alora l’era spupuleda,
al strè deserti senza muviment,
e la class d’ j’uratur, la piò sgrazieda,
la tneva al cunfarenz senza la zent.
Romolo ch ’us l’avdeva mel pareda
e mandè un band par tott i cuntinent,
imprumitend la libartè e l’intreda
a i prit, i vagabond, i delinquent.
E currè d’ogni pert d’i farisei,
d’isansël, d’ j’imbruion dla zent buleda,
d’i rufian e d’i ledar e dal spei.
J’era tott sprë, zintazza cundaneda,
ch’i s’impiantè carscend com’i cunèi,
e cla razza la’n s’è mai piò stirpeda.

[RDCanecutter 26377]

9 minutes ago, texasdago said:

 

Mo Roma alora l’era spupuleda,
al strè deserti senza muviment,
e la class d’ j’uratur, la piò sgrazieda,
la tneva al cunfarenz senza la zent.
Romolo ch ’us l’avdeva mel pareda
e mandè un band par tott i cuntinent,
imprumitend la libartè e l’intreda
a i prit, i vagabond, i delinquent.
E currè d’ogni pert d’i farisei,
d’isansël, d’ j’imbruion dla zent buleda,
d’i rufian e d’i ledar e dal spei.
J’era tott sprë, zintazza cundaneda,
ch’i s’impiantè carscend com’i cunèi,
e cla razza la’n s’è mai piò stirpeda.

My guesswork on that:

But Rome then was depopulated

The deserted streets without movement

and the something class, the disgraced something

the [wut] conference without the people

[then I got tired.]

[RDCanecutter 26377]

At UT I had the coolest class [and I will kick myself if I lost the notes] where we took about 30 sequential sound changes that happened on the path of Classical Latin changing into modern French. The first couple of steps took it to Vulgar Latin, which is what the Romance languages really came from, then you'd zip on through lots of changes most of the Romance languages had in common, then end up with a few that applied only to French. So far.*

Overall, Standard Italian had the fewest sound changes from Latin, but as you point out there are lots of Italian varieties and some went further, maybe in the same direction as French.

Spanish and Portuguese went off on their own path with both later getting their own groove on. But Old Spanish like El Cid had sounds in common with French or Portuguese, talking about the z, j, x, maybe not all the nasals.

We didn't do Romanian so I will never know.

The thing to remember is that the "standard" languages started as one dialect among many, and the situation in Italy or Germany where you still might find two dialects in different villages was also the norm in France and Spain. France stomped out their dialects in the 1950s. In Spain, Franco tried to with opposite results.

*Southern Spain does things similar to French such as dropping s or reducing -d- to zero. Large parts of Latin America picked up on this too. Not to say that they were influenced by French (Spaniards would be mortified) or that they'll start sounding like French, just saying there are the same processes in play. OK maybe they sound like a Frenchman from the year 800. Maybe.

To hell with this strike-through jazz

Edited September 19, 2023 by RDCanecutter

[RDCanecutter 26377]

For the nerds, (and we are all nerds if we are on this thread) here is an example of a few of the sound changes:

Take the Latin past participle -atus eg amatus "(somebody/something was) loved"

1. Classical Latin -ATUS lost endings to make

2. Vulgar Latin -ATU (I believe Sardinian stopped about here)

3. -ATU gets opened to -ATO (Standard Italian stops here if I'm not mistaken)

At this point I am waving my arms around to cover up that my memory is shot, but I THINK what happens next in French is that

4(french) -ATO gets clipped to -AT (Does this sound Catalan to you? Sounds Catalan to me.)

5(french) vowel shit happens, -AT > -ET, then further changes where the T falls away and they write it É like they do now, eg aimé, the A > AI for other secret French reasons.

But lets back up to Step 3 when I was waving my arms. If you were in some non-Catalan area south of the Pyrennees, instead of clipping the -ATO to -AT, you did this:

4(iberia) -ATO voices to -ADO. Where it stays, in writing. Portuguese sort of says it like this. But for Castilian?

5(castilian) -ADO fricativizes (that's a word bc just made it up) to -A∂O with that weird ass greek letter being the same sound as English "the."

Then Spanish gets a couple of beers in it and in lots of places you get

6(chelas) -A∂O elides to -AO ChinGAO Weyyyy.

For nerds who are still here, a feminine ending like ATA would have had very early French doing the same things as later Spanish.

 

These sound changes aren't deep and don't imply connections between different groups. They're just mechanical results of tiny movements in the lips, tongue, jaw.

[texasdago 7562]

1 hour ago, RDCanecutter said:

My guesswork on that:

But Rome then was depopulated

The deserted streets without movement

and the something class, the disgraced something

the [wut] conference without the people

[then I got tired.]

Pretty close... yeah, its effort.  Some of the FB groups I frequent for certain parts of Italy, you'll see some people jump into dialect... 

The one I can't stand is the bastardized version of Italian/dialect spoken by NE Italian-Americans.  They think they're speaking Italian but sometimes its just garbage to some of us who speak more "standard" Italian.  

Also Italian then takes some words that are maybe more regional but not dialect.

Case in point.

Watermelon is cocomero.  This is the word I use.   Watermelon is also anguria.  I know what someone means when they say anguria.  It's watermelon.  BUT both are pretty much accepted.  BTW after decades, I will fumble things in my head and ask my family if the want cucumber while holding a watermelon in my hand.  Some things are hard-wired.  

Sarde, sardine, sardoncini... all words for sardines.  In Romagna you will hear sardoncini.  I used that with my mom recently (Roman) and she said she had not heard that before but our trips now are more to Romagna than Lazio.  

[RDCanecutter 26377]

On 9/19/2023 at 1:44 PM, texasdago said:

Pretty close... yeah, its effort.  Some of the FB groups I frequent for certain parts of Italy, you'll see some people jump into dialect... 

How about Neapolitan? This Paul fellow digs into the weeds on many dialects and his most recent is here.

 

[gsoda3 3245]

@RDCanecutter I want to improve my conversational french. I took it for 3 years in HS but that was 25 years ago. Any suggestions on TV shows, books, or podcasts that are basic enough to understand and interesting enough to hold my attention?