The Evolution of Italian in 22 Words
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- Опубликовано: 4 сен 2024
- 6000 years ago, the first known ancestor of modern Italian was spoken somewhere in south-western Russia. This video traces the language's development by looking at 22 words which have survived from that time.
This video is a kind of sequel to one of my first videos, looking at German. You can find that here: • The Evolution of Germa...
I also make other content about Italian. Check out my growing playlist: • Italian Vocab - Alphab...
Hope you enjoy this Italian video! Sorry it's a little late. This is the same concept as one of my first ever videos. You can find it linked in the description. I hope I've improved since that first one - what do you think? :D
E per gli italiani che guardano: mi dispiace che la mia pronuncia non sia buono, sto imparando ancora. Ma spero che vi sia piaciuto! :)
As an italian, FINALLY SOMEONE UNDERSTANDS THAT ITS NOT JUST FROM LATIN, OUR DIALECTS ARE NOT offsprings of base italian, but italian is based on the dialects (or vulgars) (mainly tuscan)
Absolutely. And in fact, many of the dialects are actually languages in their own rights. I've obviously simplified the situation a bit for the video, but thought it was worth mentioning. Hope you enjoyed the video! :)
As a Spanish-speaker, I understood 40% of the Proto Indo-European words, 70% of the Proto-Italic words, 90% of the Latin words, 100% of the Proto-Romance and Italian.
Dwenos = bonus = bono = bueno ('good')
Newos = nowos = novus = novo = nuevo ('new')
Interesting that Spanish regain the diphthong that Indo-European had originally for the word good. And the Indo-European word for "new" sounds far closer to Spanish "nuevo". And the Italian equivalents (buono and nuovo) sound closer to the proto-romance.
Very interesting! You certainly seem to understand more of the older languages than I, although I guess that makes sense, since Grimm's law kind of messed up comprehensibility quite a bit for the Germanic languages I'mbetter versed in.
It always does surprise me how some things do revert - like the /we/ in "dwenos" or like the nominative -os to -us and back to -o. Very interesting stuff! :D
What's weird is the Spanish word "Joder" is descended from the Prtoto-Iberic "Foder" which descends from the Latin "Futuere" which descends from the P.I.E word "b²hew"..
Linguistic video about PIE without problematic comments, congrats!!
Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed. Although I am curious what kind of "problematic comments" you've encountered before.. :)
@@LexisLang mainly just stuff calling PIE European propaganda
@@kajvanveendev Ah, right. I've encountered some of that recently. A shame there's so much politicised ignorance around it, but hopefully I can help educate people a little. :D
One small correction: Tuscan and, hence, Florentine Italian isn’t a northern Italian language, but rather a central Italian language, more akin to the Median Italian language, also a central Italian language. The difference is more significant since Northern Italian (Gallo-Italic) belongs to its own group, while Central Italian is closer to the Southern Italian languages, as they all belong to the Italo-Dalmatian group.
Thanks for that correction! The phylogeny of Romance languages confuses me a little, particularly in Italy, where so many languages are lumped in as "dialects" of Italian, even though the groupings differ. Thanks for watching though! :)
@@LexisLang yeah, I agree: it can be pretty confusing, especially considering Friulian, and particularly Sardinian, are their own thing. Great video btw!
Thank you! I'm so happy to hear you enjoyed! :D
In Late Latin (proto-Romance), "c" before "e" and "i" already sounded like "ch", a trait inherited by all Romance Languages except Sardinian.
That sounds like it should be right. I think I read somewhere that it wasn't, but it may just be that I got some dates off. I guess it could be argued that it isn't really *Proto*-Romance if it isn't ancestral to them all, but dialect chains, idk. :)
French???
@@xenonmob yes french too, but it later deaffricated, _and_ it also happened before /a/
Fr chat /ʃa/ - OFr chat /tʃat/ - Lat - cattus
I have no idea why the orthographic change happened in french >
714 subs? That’s it??? This is very underrated!
Also is there a video like this for French?
Thank you so much! I'm glad to hear you like what I'm doing! At the minute, I only have this format for Italian and German, but I do like it, so I want to do more in future and French is definitely up there. :D
@@LexisLang maybe if you do the Celtic branch you could do Gaulish? Or Scottish Gaelic?
Idk... I read this book called Asterix et Obelix, and they're gaulish and I think it's cool (:
I'd do a modern one for these videos, but I'd love to look at something with Gaulish one day. Of the Celtic languages, I'd probably mainly do Welsh first, as that's what I speak some of. :)
@@LexisLang Cool! I would like to see the relations in between English or French and Welsh!
That wasn't 22 words! Hahaha now give me my award for funniest man on earth for my full 5 seconds before the next funny guy comes around I don't have all day
I'm going to be honest, if I could sum up the entire history of Italian in like two sentences, this video would not be 10 minutes long. I have also posted your award to you, but it has been redirected, as your self-imposed 5 seconds have elapsed.
Thanks for watching! :D
hey i said that but its different but its the same meaning
Wonderful video. Also, the quality of your vowels in Italian has no hint of an English accent. If I had listened only the list of words, I would've thought you were Italian 😯
Thank you! I did try to nail the vowels, particularly the /ɛ-e/ and /ɔ-o/ distinctions. I'm certainly not perfect yet, especially in regular conversation, but I'm glad I did okay here. You're very kind! :)
And also a great job with italian's special feature: the double consonants (consonanti doPPie)
I came across your channel because I fell down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, landed at Big Nambas and then found your video while looking for more info.
It's crazy that your channel (and this video, by extension) isn't more popular!
Aw, thank you so much! I'm just enjoying doing my thing, so just the fact that anyone follows along is marvellous. I really appreciate you watching and I hope you enjoy! I know my videos can sometimes be a little dense and opaque to non-experts.
Btw, I know the feeling of falling down the rabbit hole. That article's what inspired my video. It's just such a fascinating language! :D
As an Italian i find this video fantastic!
Grazie mille! I'm happy you enjoyed, it was a fun one to make. Hopefully my pronunciation wasn't too bad. ;)
@@LexisLang The pronunciation was very good. Bravo!
Quite intriguing to think so many different languages came from one.
It's very cool to see how many languages are linked, just as it's cool to see all those that aren't. :)
i love these videos. it's very helpful for my conlanging.
I'm so happy to hear that! I've used them myself for conlanging a few times. Nice to know I'm not the only one! I've always had conlangers in the back of my mind when making these videos (or of course the front for my conlanging videos!), so I'm glad there are some using my stuff to aid their work, beyond just general linguistic education and interest. :D
Great video, loved all of it, even if I don't quite understand all of the symbols used to describe sound shifts, thankfully you provide some examples to explain. The tiniest of notes: when pronouncing the italian words at the end, for padre and pesce it seems to me you pronounce the p sound closer to a [pʰ], as opposed to the correct pronunciation on piede
That's my native Englishiness coming over. I can do unaspirated stops, as you've seen, but it's a conscious effort and I don't always nail it. Anyway, I'm so so glad you enjoyed the video! I will do one at some point on sound change notation, but I'm glad the examples were of help! :D
Could you make a video about phonetic evolution of Hungarian please? It’s maybe a lil harder cause of the lack of sources and studies, but if you wanna try^^
I'd love to! The one I'm working on at the moment suffers a little from lack of sources, but it's all good fun. Hungarian is a lovely language - I had actually considered it for this series before. :)
Just a correction, in the latin spreadsheet you listed aurum as meaning "new" when it should be "gold"
Oh, good spot! Not even sure how that happened; it should have been copy-pasted throughout. Thanks for noticing though! :)
you definitely deserve more subscribers!
Thank you! Glad you like what I'm doing! :)
A really interesting video. One question though - wasn't the PIE word for 'son' something like 'sunus'?
Ooh, good spot! The word for "son" was indeed "suHnús". "Dʰeh₁ilyos" meant "suckler", so that's what I should have glossed it as. It is the ancestor of Latin "filius", though.
Glad you enjoyed! :)
@@LexisLang Very interesting. Thank you.
No problem, thank you for asking! :)
The Latin-> proto-romance section includes recipes for turning a j into a single palatal stop ɟ (#_) or double palatal stop ɟɟ (V_V). Is that double consonant the same thing as a geminated one (ɟː)?
Anyways, I was following along, trying to see how the names of the Roman gods might have continued 'naturally' evolving into modern Italian. Jupiter would be either dʒopetre or dʒopetɛr, not sure if I interpreted the vowels right. Side note, I couldn't find the sound change that caused the d in PIE Dyews Ph2ter/Proto-Italic djous pater. Was that an irregular change?
A doubled consonant and a geminate are indeed the same thing. It's just a difference of notation - I should have stayed consistent.
As for dy > y, I'm not sure. It's a very rare cluster, so I'm not sure if it's systematic or just a one-off. Hence why it isn't in the video.
If you're interested, the Latin Iuppiter was only in the singular nominative and vocative. In all other cases, it only used the Iov- stem, without the -piter. Italian did inherit the word, but through the accusative, giving modern Giove, as in giovedì. Compare also the English Jove, as in "by Jove". :)
@@LexisLang Good to know. And yeah I know the Iov stem survived to the modern day, but I wondered what the more famous name would turn into.
I can mostly follow along now, butthere's a few changes in the vid in the early PIE>PI>Latin stages that I didn't get from applying the sound changes that you don't mention as irregular changes: Why dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s (tongue) loses the final S in Proto-Italic, why the syllabic m in gʷm̥yéti (comes) becomes ən instead of əm, and at what point PI gʷənjet's second syllable (semi)vowels go from "je" to "i". What am I missing?
On the flipside, I keep applying the 9th PI-> Latin change in places I shouldn't. I interpret the _C(C)(C)# conditional as "O becomes U whenever it is 1, 2, or 3 consonants away from the end of a word". How come Kord and Flos are not impacted?
Man, I feel like a freshman crawling to the professor for help. If you're getting tired of answering questions like these or thing there is a better place for me to ask, please tell me so I don't take up too much of your time. Also I spend way too much time wondering where the j in feiljos went to get filius before I remembered that Latin uses "I" for both the vowel AND the palatal approximant. But that's my (and the Romans') bad :)
Pls do Evolution of Italian dialects. ❤
Any dialects you want to see in particular? :)
@@LexisLang Neapolitan, Sicilian, Tuscan, Venetian, Genoese, Romanesco, Sardinian, Piedmontese, Apulian, Emilian, Romagnolo and Lombardo.
@@LexisLang And Corscican if possible.
Languages, not dialects
Latin "aurum" is gold, not new. You've planted a bit of lexical confusion in your transition from PIE to Italian.
It was a typo! ;)
Yo hablo castellano chileno y entiendo lo que estaba escrito en latín y también el italiano sin haberlos estudiado.
(Disculpame, no hablo mucho español :/ )
The three languages are quite similar. There were a few Spanish speakers in my Italian class at uni and they understood a decent amount automatically. It's perhaps heightened here because these words are all basic vocabulary items, so have stayed fairly static in their daughters. Perhaps you'd struggle more in context with all the grammatical wigglies. :)
@@LexisLang Sí, es más complicada la gramática del latín En cambio la gramática del italiano es muy similar.
Dentro de las lenguas similares están también el portugues, catalán, incluso el occitano...El francés se entiende sólo un poco si está escrito, y el rumano se hace muy difícil entenderlo a pesar de la gran cantidad de léxico similar.
Salut. 🙂
Fantastic video! As a small note: you didn't say 'chiama' in the final set of readings.
Oh nooo! How did that happen!? Good spot there, I've never noticed that before! ;)
Sorry @@LexisLang , is that sarcastic?
Not at all! Just thanking you for noticing a mistake! :D
Ok, cool :)
how do you know how proto-indo-european sounded like?
I mean that could be a whole video of its own! Long story short, we compare the words of modern languages to help figure out what the original may have looked like. In terms of the pronunciation in this video specifically, I'm using my knowledge of this and of modern and ancient languages and the work of experts in the field to create an approximation here. Hope that's an okay explanation. :D
does the third proto-indo-european word (the one for "shouts") have to do with proto-semitic *kalam ("to tell", "to call")?
Possibly, but possibly not. Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Semitic are known to have had contact early on - there are a number of loans, such as *tawros "bull", so it could be a loan.
It could also be done ancient genetic relationship, though this has little evidence, so probably not.
It could also just be coincidence. Coincidences happen all the time, so it may just be a fluke. I'm not aware of any relationship here, but who knows? :)
Why not use IPA symbols? I don't understand some of the meanings.
What is h1, h2?
Thnx.
The laryngeals are sounds we know exist, but we don't know what they were exactly. Some linguists use other symbols, but usually when they think they know what the sounds were. Otherwise, we use the Hs so that we don't favour any one interpretation. Hope that helps explain it! :)
@@LexisLang thnx =)
No problem! :)
I think palatalization had happened in late Latin by 450, as evidenced by an inscription from Ostia in CIL 14, "intcitamento" (for "incitamento'").
Quite possibly. I'm not sure on the dating, but I think 450 sounds about right for the Proto-Romance changes. :)
@@LexisLang And this palatalization was inherited by all Romance languages. If it happened later, some Romance languages would have kept the original sound.
You forgot Chiama
Yeah, my mistake! :)
Mamma mia, come se dice "voglio piú pizza" in indoeuropeo.
Purtroppo non credo che gli indoeuropei avevano la pizza! :P
Great video. your /e/ vowel is too open it sounds like /ɛ/ and your long vowels are too long
Glad you enjoyed and thank you for the feedback! /e/ is a very hard vowel for me and I know I don't always hit it. Length is also hard for me for some reason, even though my own dialect of English has it. My native long vowels are *very* long though. Hopefully you'll see some sort of improvement in future videos! Thank you for watching!
I could understand most of the proto italic words.
That's cool. What language do you speak to allow that? :)
@@LexisLang Romanian (eastern romance) and Spanish (western romance). I'm slowly getting into latin too.
Thing is, in Spanish and Romanian there are dialects that showcase some of the same sound shifts as in the video, making it easier to catch the meaning.
Interesting! Romanian is such a fascinating language - I should like to do a profile on it at some point. The Latin will certainly help your understanding there too. :)
@@LexisLang Latin definitely helped. I wish I had a time machine and was able to learn it from the natives!
I want Owom back, Uovo is terrible
I think uovo sounds quite cool. The Proto-Indo-European is also very nice sounding. :)
Sniks -> zniks ->
Yes, the s > z > Ø shift in Latin is very interesting! :D
LIES
I COUNTED 23 WORDS WHEN YOU SPOKE
There are only 22 on screen and that's all I say, so please do let me know where there's a 23rd. I've never noticed any mistakes, but there could well be one... :)
“Radice” in proto-romance makes no sense. Take a look at what it is in other romance languages, like my own Portuguese for example. “Raiz” is much closer to the latin version than to the proto-romance version. You’re biased towards Italian in almost all words, not just this one.
Of course I'm biased towards the Italian, as that's what the video focuses on. Fragmentation into dialects likely began very early. Proto-Romance is a single language in the same way English is. There are many different dialects, but it's still one language. For instance, the vowel shifts shown are the ones used in most Romance languages, but Sardinian merged Latin /i/ and /u/ with /i:/ and /u:/, instead of /e/ and /o/ as in most other languages. I'm explaining how PIE became Italian, so naturally I'm focusing on the varieties which became Italian.
Your example of Portuguese "raiz" does actually come from *radice. The /d/ got elided and the /k/ () regularly palatalised to /d͡z/, then simplified to /z/. I assume the /e/ merged with the /k/ in palatalisation - we see the same development as Latin decem > PRom *dɛce > Prt dez. Had "raiz" descended from the Latin nominative radix (and thus PRom *radis), we would not see a /z/ word-finally, but rather an /s/, as is the case in other instances of Latin final /ks/ which didn't shift, such as in the number 6: Latin sex > Prt seis (not *seiz) and the late phrase dē ex, which became Prt dês (not *dêz).
Hope I've answered your concerns, but if you have anything else, let me know! :)
@@LexisLang Seis sounds like "seiz", but is written "seis" because of orthographic rules, not because it didn't follow the same evolution from Latin (/ks/ to /z/).
@@madjames1134 Ah, good to know; thanks for that! Hopefully my point still stands - I forget the details I researched for my above response. :)
I’ll try to put these in German,following the steps
h2ékweh2
ákwā
ahwā
ahwa
aha
acha
Ache
dwenós
dwenós
twenaz
twen
zwen
zwen
zwen
kḷh1meh2yéti
kulmāyéti
hulmāiþ
hulmāiþ
hulmāid
holmād
Holmod
pénkwe
pénkwe
fimf
fimf
fünf
fünf
ḱēr
kēr
hēr
hēr
hēr
hier
hier
Hier
h1ésti
ésti
isti
ist
ist
ist
ist
dhéh1ilyos
déilyos
dīljaz
dīli
tieli
tieli
Tiel
bhleh3s
bhlōs
blāz
blār
blā
blā
Blo
eǵóh2
egó
ik
ik
ih
ich
ich
dṇǵhweh2s
dunghwās
tungāz
tung
zung
zung
Zung
méh2tēr
mātēr
mōðer
mōder
muoter
muoter
Mutter
sneygwhs
sneygwhs
sniks
sniks
snihs
snichs
Snichs
néwos
néwos
newaz
new
new
new
neu
Interestingly, "aqua" does actually have a German cognate - Ache, the name of some rivers and streams, particularly in place names. You missed the ā > ō and vowel reduction changes in your attempt, the same as in your "clāmat" cognate. By these rules PIE *-ehyéti > PG *-ōþi > Gm -(e)t, so we'd actually expect *holmt or something similar for that word. :)
@@LexisLangI only had the ä because it was before an I, Also in Middle High German, the x>h change was common so I did it But I’ll edit it, thanks for the cognate Also, I’m not sure but “chiama” might be the cognate with “hum” But I’m not 100% sure
Possibly, but there is a missing "l" if that's the case. I suspect false cognates, with "hum" just being onomatopoeic.
And there's no need to erase your mistakes! Leave them so other people can learn from them! :)