La Spezia-rimini Line Information
The La Spezia–Rimini Line (sometimes also referred to as the Massa–Senigallia Line), in the linguistics of the Romance languages, is a line that demarcates a number of important isoglosses that distinguish Romance languages south and east of the line from Romance languages north and west of it. Romance languages on the eastern half of it include Italian and the Vlach languages (Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian), while Spanish, French, Catalan, Portuguese as well as Northern Italian languages are representatives of the western group.
The line is also the frontier between Central Italian, (Tuscan dialects to the south, whence Standard Italian is derived) and Northern Italian (Western Romance, to the north).
The line runs through northern Italy, very roughly from the cities of La Spezia to Rimini (some linguists say[1] that the line actually runs through Massa and Senigallia about 40 kilometres further to the south, and would more accurately be called the Massa–Senigallia Line).
North and west of the line (excluding some[citation needed] Northern Italian varieties, such as Ligurian, which probably once had the characteristic but lost it under influence from standard Italian), the plural of nouns was drawn from the Latin accusative case, and once was marked with /s/ regardless of grammatical gender or declension. South and east of the line, the plurals of nouns were usually taken from the Latin nominative case, and mark plurals with vowels. Compare the plurals of cognate nouns in Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French and Latin:
| Romanian | Italian | Spanish | Portuguese | Catalan | French | Latin nom. pl. | Latin acc. pl. | meaning |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| viaţă, vieţi | vita, vite | vida, vidas | vida, vidas | vida, vides | vie, vies | vitae | vitās | life, lives |
| lup, lupi | lupo, lupi | lobo, lobos | lobo, lobos | llop, llops | loup, loups | lupī | lupōs | wolf, wolves |
| om, oameni | uomo, uomini | hombre, hombres | homem, homens | home, homes | homme, hommes | hominēs | hominēs | man, men |
Generally speaking the western Romance languages show common innovations that the eastern Romance languages tend to lack. Another isogloss that falls on the La Spezia–Rimini line deals with the restructured voicing of voiceless consonants that occur between vowels. Thus, Latin focus/focum (meaning "fire") becomes fuoco in Italian and foc in Romanian, but fogo in Portuguese and Northern Italian languages and fuego in Spanish. Voicing, or further weakening, even to loss of these consonants is characteristic of the western branch of Romance; their retention is characteristic of eastern Romance. There are, however, exceptions which undermine this isogloss: Gascon dialects in south-west France and Aragonese in northern Aragon (Spain) — i.e. geographically Western Romance — also retain the original Latin voiceless stop between vowels. Indeed, the significance of the La Spezia–Rimini line is often challenged by specialists within both Italian dialectology and Romance dialectology. One reason for this is that while it demarcates preservation (and expansion) of phonemic geminate consonants (Central and Southern Italy) from their simplification (in Northern Italy, Gaul, and Iberia), the areas affected do not correspond consistently with those defined by voicing criteria. Romanian, which on the basis of lack of voicing is classified with Central and Southern Italian, has undergone simplification of geminates, a defining characteristic of Western Romance.
Notes
- ^ Renzi, Lorenzo (1985). Nuova introduzione alla filologia romanza. Bologna: il Mulino. pp. 176. ISBN 88-15-04340-3.
References
Note that the word Lombard once upon a time (up to 1600) meant Cisalpine, but now it has narrowed in its meaning, referring only to the administrative region of Lombardy .
- Adolfo, Mussafia (1873) Beitrag zur Kunde der norditalienischen Mundarten im XV. Jahrhunderte. Wien.
- Beltrami, Pierluigi; Bruno Ferrari, Luciano Tibiletti, Giorgio D'Ilario (1970) Canzoniere Lombardo. Varesina Grafica Editrice.
- Brevini, Franco (1984) Lo stile lombardo : la tradizione letteraria da Bonvesin da la Riva a Franco Loi. (Lombard style: literary tradition from Bonvesin da la Riva to Franco Loi.) Pantarei, Lugan.
- Comrie, Bernard; Stephen Matthews, Maria Polinsky, eds. (2003) The Atlas of languages : the origin and development of languages throughout the world. New York: Facts On File. p. 40.
- Cravens, Thomas D. (2002) Comparative Romance Dialectology: Italo-Romance clues to Ibero-Romance sound change. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
- Hull, Dr Geoffrey (1982) The linguistic unity of Northern Italy and Rhaetia. PhD thesis, University of Western Sydney.
- Hull, Dr Geoffrey (1989) Polyglot Italy: Languages, Dialects, Peoples. Melbourne: CIS Educational.
- Maiden, Martin (1995) A linguistic history of Italian. London: Longman.
- Maiden, Martin & Mair Parry, eds. (1997) The Dialects of Italy. London: Routledge.
- Sanga, Glauco La lingua Lombarda, in Koiné in Italia, dalle origini al 1500. (Koinés in Italy, from the origin to 1500.) Bèrghem: Lubrina.
- Vitale, Maurizio (1983) Studi di lingua e letteratura lombarda. (Studies in Lombard language and literature.) Pisa : Giardini.
- Wurm, Stephen A. (2001) Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing. Paris: UNESCO Publishing, p. 29.
See also
- Classification of Romance languages
- Romance plurals
- Plural inflection in Eastern Lombard
- Gothic Line
Categories: Isoglosses | Romance languages | Italian language | Languages of Italy | Grammatical number
|