I don’t think so, actually. As far as I know/ can tell, there’s no continuum in regional languages. There are very real borders. If you go from your village to the next, yes, the dialect will be very slightly different, a little more so over the hill, even more so near the next town, etc…But eventually, you’ll run in a real “language border” and say, on the other side of the river, people will suddenly all speak a very different language.
For instance, take the Oc and Oil languages in France. Occitan didnn’t become more and more similar to the Oil dialects the farther north you went. If you were living on the northern border of the Limousin region, for instance, you could travel quite a long way to the west, south or east, and people you meet would speak quite similar dialects (Auvergnat, Languedocian, etc…). But if you walked 5 miles to the north, everybody would speak a completely different Oil dialect.
I don’t know how it came to be, but though they don’t follow the (current, at least) political borders (between France and Italy or France and Spain, for instance : Occitan is/was spoken in northern Italy, Catalan in southern france, etc…), there are real borders separating the various romance languages.
Let’s also not forget la Terre-Neuve, l’Île-du-Prince-Édouard, la Nouvelle-Écosse, le Nouveau-Brunswick, l’Ontario, le Manitoba, la Saskatchewan, l’Alberta, la Colombie-Britannique, le territoire du Yukon, les Territoires du Nord-Ouest, et le territoire du Nunavut.
[QUOTE=Excalibre]
Where in Italy is “crai” used? I’ve never heard of it in Standard Italian, and the /kr/ cluster at the beginning of the word seems unlikely for an Italian word. Crai is the modern word for “tomorrow” in Sardinian, but Sardinian is not Italian.
In Lucanian (Lucano) it is the word for tomorrow.
That makes absolutely no sense to say it is a Romance language, but not one of the romance language. I think any linguist who’s studied the romance languages would die laughing at that. That’s like saying “Hawaiian is an Austronesian language but not one of the Austronesian languages”.
I see it plausible that an Italian dialect might borrow from Sardinian or the reverse.
As for the last sentence, Excalibre was essaying a trope that you missed. The “Vulgar Latin” of the time of the fall of the Western Empire was sometimes called Romancia or some variant thereon, whence the modern word Romance (and the courtship story was first written in old Romance tongues, hence the transference to romantic love).
What Ex meant by “a Romance language, but not one of the romance languages” was that Sardinian was (relatively) isolated from the cluster of other dialects that became the other Romance languages substantially earlier than the time that Romancia began breaking up into Old French, Old Italian, etc. Ergo, it’s a “Romance language” in the sense that it derived from Latin like the others did, but an outlier to the “Romance languages” which derived from end-of-Empire Romancia.
I’ve studied the Romance languages. I’ve taken classes and read a number of books specifically on Romance linguistics.
I’m sorry if my point wasn’t clear. Sardinian is generally classed as a Romance language due to its Latin heritage. However, it is rather atypical among the Romance languages because it didn’t actually evolve from the language called “Romance”, sometimes classed as very late Vulgar Latin. There was a language spoken after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire throughout the region called “Romance”. Romance, even before it differentiated into mutually incomprehensible regional languages, had many features characteristic of the modern Romance languages but not of Latin: the loss of some cases (now complete in all of the Romance languages except for Romanian and to some extent for traces in the pronoun systems of other Romance languages), a shift to stress accent rather than pitch accent, a reorganization of the Latin vowel system into the Proto-Western-Romance and Proto-Dalmatian vowel systems, and so forth.
Many of those changes did not strike Sardinian in the same way, as the isolation of the island left it somewhat insulated from the changes that affected all the other Romance languages. The peculiar vowel system is a good example - while all Romance languages lost the phonemic vowel length characteristic of Latin, in Sardinian it took the form of a simple loss of length distinction (leaving five phonemic vowels) while in PWR, seven vowels were created (including open and close O and E, though that distinction is not phonemic in modern Spanish and Occitan, along with some regional dialects of French, and it’s rapidly losing ground in colloquial Catalan). Traces of these differing histories are clear, with words in Sardinian often having different vowels than cognates in the other Romance languages.
Sorry if I confused you; I think your tone was somewhat unwarranted, as I believe I know some small amount about Romance linguistics, and my word choice was deliberate - albeit obviously confusing. My humblest apologies.
It may be - there are certain regional similarities between Sardinian and nearby Italian dialects that are probably due to contact between them. Or perhaps cras may have been retained separately in both dialects; I don’t know much about the innumerable dialetti - it simply was not a word I’m familiar with from Tuscan.
I forgot a couple biggies: palatalization of /k/ and /g/ before front vowels - hence the soft C and soft G in most Romance languages but not in Sardinian - compare Italian cento and Sardinian kentu.
Another interesting feature is the development of definite articles from Latin demonstratives. While most other Romance languages have definite articles descending from ille, Sardinian’s come from ipse, giving the rather odd-looking (by Romance standards) su, sa, sos, ses (though those are similar to those in Balearic dialects of Catalan, which may reflect either similar origins or a borrowing from Balearic dialects, as Catalunya was in control over Sardinia for quite some time.)
But which Modern English? I’m American and it took me almost a year before I started fully understanding the English spoken in rural northern Jamaica, “A fi oonu de pickney dem?” And movies made in Ireland sometimes show subtitles when they are shown in the US. I even found that people in Kentucky had a hard time understanding me, being from the West.
Doesn’t matter. Any version of Moden English that you can come up will differ from Old English more than Italian differs from Latin. The example you gave is not different from Standard American Enlgish because it remains closer to Old Enlgish. It differs because it is a Creole and has drifted even further from Old English than Standard American English has.
[QUOTE=Polycarp]
[li]Catalan, the language of Catalonia and Aragon, as well as the Balearic Islands, Andorra, and enclaves on Corsica and Sardinia and near the French-Spanish border[/list][/li][/QUOTE]
Nitpick: although Catalan is spoken in some comarcas of Aragon that border Catalonia, it’s not really accurate to call it “the language of… Aragon.” Indeed, there’s a Castilian dialect/language unique to Aragon.
You could say “the language of… Valencia” instead, although there would be many a Valencian who would insist that she speaks valencià, not Catalan.
But Catalan has a pretty long history in Aragon, and during the height of Aragonese power, it was Catalan, and not Aragonese, that traveled with them to Sardinia.
They are wrong. Actually, they’re not - they’re engaging in a quite rational political game in order to gain EU money for second-language maintenance. I’ve been told that the EU constitution was translated into both Catalan and Valencian. And the two translations were identical.
Reminds me of some signs you see in Canada. The law requires that certain signs be posted in both languages, but often the words are identical in English and French and both “versions” are written anyway. I guess it saves one side from saying “but you only posted the English version” and the other side saying “but you only posted the French version”.
Well it does and doesn’t. Of the geographic region of Aragon, you’re quite correct it largely does not. Of the complicated, sprawling historical entity that was called ( in shorthand ) the kingdom of Aragon, it largely does.
Well, that’s so, but the kingdom would probably more accurately be called Aragon-Catalonia, anyway. Calling it “Aragon” makes it sound like it was being ruled out of Zaragoza or something when the most important part of the kingdom was what’s now Catalonia.
