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A sign in Venetian Italian reading "Here we also speak Venetian"
Venetian or Venetan is a Romance language spoken as a native language by over two million people,[10] mostly in the Veneto region of Italy, where of five million inhabitants almost all can understand it. It is sometimes spoken and often well understood outside Veneto, in Trentino, Friuli, Venezia Giulia, Istria, and some towns of Dalmatia, totalling 6-7 million speakers. 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 (Ven diałeto, It dialetto) even by its speakers, it is in fact a separate language, not a variety or derivative of Italian. Instead, Venetian differs both in grammar, phonetics, and vocabulary. Typologically, Venetian has little in common with the Gallo-Italic languages of northwestern Italy, but shows some affinity to nearby Istriot.
Venetian is not related to Venetic, an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken in the Veneto region around the 6th century BC.
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 Italy in the 5th century.[citation needed] 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 (fork), inpiràr (to fork), carega (chair) fanela (t-shirt).
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 as 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 of Cecco da Ronchiti of Bruzene about 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.
Even before the demise of the Republic, Venetian gradually ceased to be used for administrative purposes in favor of the Tuscan-derived Italian language that had been proposed and used as a vehicle for a common Italian culture strongly supported by eminent Venetian humanists and poets, from Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), a crucial figure in the development of the Italian language itself, to Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827).
At present, virtually all its speakers are diglossic, and use Venetian only in informal contexts. The present situation raises questions about the language's medium term survival. Despite recent steps to recognize it, Venetian 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), 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)[citation needed]. 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 grando) to advertise new flights from Marco Polo Airport[citation needed].
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.
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).[citation needed] Smaller communities are found in Lombardy, Trentino, Emilia Romagna (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 São Paulo, Brazil 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. Moreover Venetian had been adopted by a large proportion of the population of Cefalonia, another Ionian Island, as it was part of the Domini da Màr for almost three centuries.[11]
Venetian is a Romance language and therefore descends from Vulgar Latin. Specifically, it belongs to the Italo-Romance group, most closely related to Istriot on the one hand and Tuscan-Italian on the other.[12]
Venetian, despite the fact it is surrounded by Gallo-Italic languages, does not share traits with that group. Scholars stress Venetian's characteristic lack of Gallo-Italic traits (agallicità)[13] or traits found further afield in Gallo-Romance (e.g., Occitan, French, Franco-Provençal)[14] or Rhaeto-Romance (e.g., Friulian, Romansch). For example, Venetian did not undergo vowel rounding or nasalization, palatalize /kt/ and /ks/, or develop rising diphthongs /ei/ and /ou/, and it preserved final syllables, whereas, like in Italian, Venetian diphthongization occurs in historically open syllables.
The main regional variants and sub-variants of Venetian are
- Central (Padua, Vicenza, Polesine), with about 1,500,000 speakers.
- Eastern/Coastal (Venice, Trieste, Grado, Istria, Fiume).
- Western (Verona, Trentino).
- North-Central (Treviso, most of Pordenonese).
- Northern (Belluno, comprising Feltre, Agordo, Cadore, Zoldo Alto).
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
- Chioggia,
- Pontine Marshes,
- Dalmatia, Croatia,
- Rio Grande do Sul (Antônio Prado), Santa Catarina, Paraná e São Paulo, Brazil ("Talian"),
- Chipilo, Mexico,
- Peripheral creole languages along the southern border (nearly extinct).
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 the 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 :
- el gato graso, the fat (male) cat.
- ła gata grasa, the fat (female) cat.
- i gati grasi, the fat (male) cats.
- łe gate grase, the fat (female) cats.
In conservative Venetian, the article alone may convey the gender:
- i gat gras, the fat (all males or males and females) cats.
- łe gat gras, the fat (female) cats.
- el gatòn graso, the fat big (male) cat.
- ła gatòna grasa, the fat big (female) cat.
- un bel gateło, a nice small (male) cat.
- na beła gateła, a nice small (female) cat.
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:
- Venetian: Mi go fazesto ('I have done')
- Venetian Italian: Mi go fato
- Standard Italian: Io ho fatto
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.
Venetian also has a special interrogative verbal flexion used for direct questions, which also incorporates a redundant pronoun:
- Italian: (Tu) eri sporco? ("Were you dirty?").
- Venetian: (Ti) jèristu onto? or even (Ti) xèrito spazo? (lit. "You were-you dirty?")
- Italian: Il cane era sporco? ("Was the dog dirty?").
- Venetian: El can jèreło onto? (lit. "The dog was-he dirty?")
- or even: Jèreło onto el can ? (lit. "Was-he dirty the dog ?")
- Italian: (Tu) ti sei domandato? ("Have you asked yourself?").
- Venetian: (Ti) teto domandà? (lit. "You to-yourself have-you asked?")
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:
- Italian: (Tu) ti sei lavato (lit. "(You) yourself are washed").
- Venetian: (Ti) te te à/ga/ghè lavà (lit. "(You) you yourself have washed").
- Italian: (Loro) si sono svegliati (lit. "(They) themselves are awakened").
- Venetian: (Luri) i se ga/à svejà (lit. "(They) they themselves have awakened").
Another peculiarity of the language is the use of the phrase eser drìo (literally, "to be behind") to indicate continuing action:
- Italian: Mio padre sta parlando ("My father is speaking").
- Venetian: Mé pare 'l xe drìo(invià) parlàr (lit. "My father he is busy speaking").
Indeed the word drio=busy/engaged also appears in other sentences:
- Venetian: So' drio i mistieri lit. means "I am busy doing the housework" (=I'm doing it)
- Venetian: Vo drio i mistieri lit. means "I go busy with the housework" (=I'm going to do it)
- Venetian: Mé pare l'è in leto drio (invià) dormir lit. means "My father is in bed, busy sleeping" (=My father is sleeping in bed)
Another progressive form uses the construction "essar là che" (lit. "to be there that"):
- Venetian: Me pàre 'l è là che 'l parla (lit. "My father he is there that he speaks").
The use of progressive tenses is more pervasive than in Italian; E.g.
- English: "He wouldn't possibly have been speaking to you".
- Venetian: No 'l sarìa mìa stat/stà drìo parlarte (lit. "Not-he would possibly have been behind to speak-to-you").
That construction does not occur in Italian: *Non sarebbe mica stato parlandoti is not syntactically valid.
Subordinate clauses have double introduction ("whom that", "when that", "which that", "how that"), as in Old English:
- Italian: So di chi parli ("(I) know about whom (you) speak").
- Venetian: So de chi che te parla (lit. "(I) know about whom that you-speak").
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.
- Std.Italian: Credevo che fosse... ("I thought that he were...")
- Coll. Ital.: Credevo che era... ("I thought that he was...")
- Venetian: Credéa/évo che 'l fuse... ("I thought that he were...")
- Venetian: Credéa/évo che 'l *xera...
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.
- Std.Italian: E' meglio che vada ("I'd better go", lit. "it is better that I go" subj.)
- Std.Italian: E' meglio che vado ("I'd better go", lit. "it is better that I go" indic.)
- Venetian: Xe mejo che vaga/vae ("I'd better go"-subj.)
- Venetian: Xe mejo che *vo
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 '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 not 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 display 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.
Velar N ([ŋ]) is also very often encountered in Venetian. It is the ng-sound of English "song". Unlike in Italian and English, every final -n is velar in Venetian. This is clearly heard in the pronunciation of local Venetian surnames, which often end in N as Marin [maˈriŋ] and Manin [maˈniŋ], as well as in common Venetian words such as man [ˈmaŋ] "hand", piron [piˈroŋ] "fork". (Italian speakers usually change this velar into a (geminate) dental -nn: [maˈniŋ] → [maˈninː] and [maˈriŋ] → [maˈrinː]).
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 incoi |
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" |
| armelin |
apricot |
albicocca |
from Armenia |
| bisato, bisata |
eel |
anguilla |
Latin bestia ("beast"); cfr. biscia (a kind of snake) |
| bisa, biso |
snake |
serpente |
Latin bestia ("beast"); cfr. 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 Italian tirare via |
| calìgo |
fog |
nebbia foschia |
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) |
| copàr |
to kill |
uccidere |
accoppare (old Italian, literally "to behead") |
| carpeta |
miniskirt |
gonna mini |
like carpet |
| còtoła, còtola |
skirt |
sottana |
cotta (Latin, coat or dress) |
| fanela |
t-shirt |
maglietta |
Greek word |
| gòto, bicer |
drinking glass |
bicchiere |
gut(t)us (Latin for "cruet") |
| insìa |
exit |
uscita |
in + exita (Latin) |
| mi |
I |
io |
me (Latin accusative form); Italian derives from Latin nominative form (ego) |
| morsegàr, smorsegàr |
to bite |
mordere |
morsus (Latin "bitten") made into a verb (cf. Italian morsicare) |
| mustaci |
moustaches |
baffi |
moustaki (Greek) |
| munìn, gato, gatin |
cat |
gatto |
perhaps from "meow" sound |
| meda |
big sheaf |
grosso covone |
from messe mietere sounds like meadow oe moed harvest |
| musso |
donkey |
asino |
? |
| nòtoła,notol, barbastrìo, signàpoła |
bat |
pipistrello |
from not notte night |
| pantegàna |
rat |
ratto |
podgana (slovene) ponticanus from ponto black see |
| pinciar |
beat, cheat, sexual intercourse |
imbrogliare, superare in gara, amplesso |
pinch from fr pincer put in st |
| pirón |
fork |
forchetta |
from Greek pirouni |
| pisalet |
dandelion |
tarassaco |
pissinbed diuretic |
| plao far |
truant |
marinare scuola |
from german blauen |
| pomo/pón |
apple |
mela |
pomus (Latin) |
| schei |
money |
denaro soldi |
from german scheidemünze |
| saltapaiusk |
grasshopper |
cavalletta |
salta hop paiusk paglia grass |
| sghiràt schirata skirata |
squirrel |
scoiattolo |
Related to Italian word. More probably from the Greek "skiouros" |
| sgnapa |
spirit from grapes, brandy |
grappa acquavite |
Schnaps (German) |
| sgorlàr, scorlàr |
to shake |
scuotere |
ex + crollare (Latin) |
| strica |
line, streak, stroke, strip |
linea, striscia |
root: *strik (proto Germanic). Related to English "streak", "stroke (of pen"). Example: Tirar na strica "to draw a line". |
| strucar |
to strike/press |
premere, schiacciare |
root: *strik (proto Germanic). Related to English "strike" (=hit), "stroke" (=pass the hand over sth) and German "streichen". Example: Struca un tasto / boton "Strike any key/Press any button". |
| 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") |
| vaca |
cow |
mucca, vacca |
vacca (Latin) |
| Sc-iop,sc-iopar, sc-iopòn |
gun |
fucile-scoppiare |
from lat scloppum onomat |
| troi |
track path |
sentiero |
fr lat trahere Same engl track |
Venetian does not have an official writing system, but it is traditionally written using the Latin script — 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).
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.
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."
|
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 sempre 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!"
|
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.
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"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 litre of the good one [wine]
just to make courage."
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| Venetian source |
English loanword |
Notes |
| arsenàl |
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 |
| sc'iao |
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) |
| negroponte |
Negroponte |
Greek Island called Eubea or Evia in the Aegean Sea |
| montenegro |
Montenegro |
'black mountain' Country on the Eastern side of the Adriatic Sea |
| Pantalon |
pantaloon |
a character in the Commedia dell'arte |
| pestacio/pistacio |
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' |
- ^ United Nations (1991). Fifth United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names: Vol.2. Montreal.
- ^ Holmes, Douglas R. (1989). Cultural disenchantments: worker peasantries in northeast Italy. Princeton University Press.
- ^ Minahan, James (1998). Miniature empires: a historical dictionary of the newly independent states. Westport.
- ^ Kalsbeek, Janneke (1998). The Čakavian dialect of Orbanići near Žminj in Istria: Vol.25. Atlanta.
- ^ Rebecca Posner, John N. Green (1993). Trends in Romance Linguistics and Philology: Vol.5. Berlin.
- ^ La Sorta, Michael (1985). La Merica. Temple University Press.
- ^ Martin Maiden, M. Mair Parry (1997). The dialects of Italy. New York.
- ^ Frawley, William (2003). International encyclopedia of linguistics: Vol.1. Oxford University Press.
- ^ Haller, Hermann W. (1999). International The other Italy: the literary canon in dialect. Toronto.
- ^ Ethnologue.
- ^ Kendrick, Tertius T. C. (1822). The Ionian islands: Manners and customs. J. Haldane. p. 106. http://books.google.gr/books?id=v7sNAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Ionian+islands:+Manners+and+customs.#v=onepage&q&f=false. Retrieved 17 July 2011.
- ^ Carlo Tagliavini, Le Origini delle Lingue Neolatine.
- ^ Alberto Zamboni(1988:522)
- ^ Giovan Battista Pellegrini (1976:425)
- 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 978-88-222-5645-4.
- Gordon, Raymond G., Jr., ed. (2005). "Venetian". Ethnologue: Languages of the World (Fifteenth ed.). Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=vec.
- McKay, Carolyn Joyce. Il dialetto veneto di Segusino e Chipilo: fonologia, grammatica, lessico veneto, spagnolo, italiano, inglese.
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