On the Languages of Italy

[Lys]

So after the last Monday Skype game we talked briefly about the subject. I spend some time looking into it afterwards, and wanted to follow up on it, but I found myself seized by a terrible headache and had to away to bed. Since then the subject matter has been bouncing around in my head so I figured I might as well make a thread about it.

Based on my reading on the subject it seems like me and Havoc were both right. Yes he is correct that Gallo-Italian speakers all read the Divine Comedy in Dante's native Tuscan, but at the same time I am correct that none of them could really understand spoken Tuscan. Written and oral intelligibility are different things, particularly in the case of Romance languages, which have considerably higher rates of intelligibility in the written form than the spoken. To wit, Castillian speakers can fairly easily read Portugese and vice-versa, but conversation is difficult at best. I would not be surprised to find the Portugese and Aragonese all read Cervantes in Castillian, yet few would say that speaking the one means speaking the others.

Written intelligibility is somewhat more pronounced in Italy, as back in the early Renaissance when writing in vernacular was a new thing and there were no standards, Florence's influence was such that it was often looked to as an example and thus became the standard. Even then, the literary Italian produced by the likes of Dante is slightly artificial, with certain peculiarities of Florentine deliberately removed to maximize intelligibility. This lead to it becoming a sort of second language all literate people were familiar with, allowing it to eventually form the basis of modern standard Italian. Thus Florentians could correspond with people all over Italy yet still could not converse with them, at least not at length. Indeed, Piedmontese, Lombard (Milanese), and Ligurian are all more similar to French than they are to Italian.

As it relates to the late 12th century, literary Italian simply does not exist yet, and will not for another century. A Greek is likely to have learned Venezian or Pisan (Tuscan), but calling both of those dialects of Italian is like calling Castillian and Portugese dialects of Iberian. Certainly knowing the one will make possible limited communication with speakers of the other, but they are nevertheless not the same tongue and should not be treated as such.

[Cynical Cat]

You are, however, continuing to miss the point. They are mutually intelligible. Yes, it's easier in literate form and yes modern Italian doesn't exist outside of Tuscany, but that's not the standard we use for the game. Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are all separate, mutually intelligible languages and to a limited extent so are Icelandic and Faroese. They're also five distinct languages. It's not the line between dialect and separate language group or family, its the line between comprehension and incomprehension that matters. That doesn't mean that the differences aren't there or don't matter. Each language is fairly broad, in the game. By the rules, what's spoken in the backwaters of Louisiana and the streets of Glasgow is technically the same language.

[rhoenix]

I swear, threads like these are why I consider this forum to be awesome.

[Lys]

You are, however, continuing to miss the point. They are mutually intelligible. Yes, it's easier in literate form and yes modern Italian doesn't exist outside of Tuscany, but that's not the standard we use for the game. Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are all separate, mutually intelligible languages and to a limited extent so are Icelandic and Faroese. They're also five distinct languages. It's not the line between dialect and separate language group or family, its the line between comprehension and incomprehension that matters. That doesn't mean that the differences aren't there or don't matter. Each language is fairly broad, in the game. By the rules, what's spoken in the backwaters of Louisiana and the streets of Glasgow is technically the same language.

The entire point I'm making is that the Italo-Gallic group isn't mutually intelligible with the Italo-Dalmatian group, that's part of the reason why they're in separate groups to begin with! Unfortunately I can't really point to a reliable academic source here, and I haven't talked to my friend who is actually a linguist in years. The best I can do here is that I've been able to find little mention online to the effect that they are intelligible, but plenty to the contrary. Some examples:

egg.auf.net/11/abstracts/handouts/passino-w1d1.pdf appears to be a university lesson plan stating, "Italian and the dialects of Italy are (generally) not mutually intelligible."

Here's a reddit thread on the subject.

Here's an internet anecdote noting that the Emilian spoken in Bologna is not intelligible with Italian.

I could post more but I think the point is made that this is the sort of thing I find. It would be really nice to have an actual academic source instead the above, but lacking one I'm willing to take the preponderance of available evidence. Now if you want to go with languages spanning broad groups for game purposes - such as by counting Iberian, Scandinavian, and Italian each as single tongues - then that's fine. The point I'm making is that by any standard in which the first two to are not unitary languages, the third isn't either.

[Cynical Cat]

The entire point I'm making is that the Italo-Gallic group isn't mutually intelligible with the Italo-Dalmatian group, that's part of the reason why they're in separate groups to begin with!

Here's your first problem: being categorized into different language groups doesn't mean you aren't mutually intelligible. Romanian, for example, does not share a language group with any Italian language and is highly mutually intelligible with Italian. Furthermore, intelligibility increases the more similar languages you speak. And Scottish is allegedly just a dialect of English and I'm not sure if its intelligible to any other English speaker at all.

So Italian, still being treated as a single language but not one's going to mistake you for a local if you're trying to get by with Tuscan in Venice.

[Lys]

I said part of the reason, not the whole reason. There is a positive correlation between linguistic closeness and intellibility; there are exceptions of course, but it is indicative nonetheless. Rumanian is in fact often categorized as Eastern Romance together with Italian for this reason. It's actually a fairly interesting language in that it is assymetrically intelligible, meaning that Rumanian speakers have a such easier time understanding other Romance speakers than being understood by them. It's true that it is most intelligible with Italian, but it is only really highly so in comparison to the usual level of intelligibility between Romance languages. The thing about intelligibility is that it exists on a spectrum, which makes judgements about it somewhat subjective and also dependent on circumstance.

You could get by speaking Tuscan in Venice, but getting by is not the same as speaking the same tongue or being able to carry a real conversation. You can get by as a Spanish speaker in a Portugese country too, but one is still not the other. Of course nowadays the Venetians might disdain a Tuscan speaker's rather heavy accent, since while the original basis of Italian is 14th century Florentine, it was even then modified from the actually spoken dialect. Since that time it has acquired a distinctly Roman cant thank to the Roman Church and the location of the nation's capital, such that Italian has been described as "lingua toscana in bocca romana." Then there was some deliberate relatinization in the 19th century plus linguistic drift in Tuscany, and the result is at while Tuscan is close enough to Italian that they don't have to learn it as a second language, the accent is reportedly very distinctive. Still the Tuscans are remarkably conservative in how little their tongue has changed in seven centuries.

Your bringing up Scots is apt because it is in fact classified as a separate language from English. Even though the majority of its speakers consider it a dialect, it's just too different from English for that to be the case, and that's after centuries of Anglization. The various Italian languages are a similar situation, distinct unintelligible languages that have been classified as dialects for political reasons.

And oh hey look, I found an actual linguist weigh in on the subject. Emelio Servidio of the University of Siena has this to say:

"The dialetti (Italian meaning of the word) are entirely a different story. Dialetti are sister languages of Italian, each of them stemming from Vulgar Latin along a different tradition. Most of them are unintelligible or barely intelligible to Italian speakers. There are a number of them, even though as every linguist knows counting languages is a tricky affair. At least four macro-areas have been distinguished (Northern, Median, Southern, Far Southern). Ethnologue, reasonably, opts for a finer grained classification. Dialetti used to be native tongues to 98% of Italian citizens in 1861 (according to T. De Mauro)."

[Cynical Cat]

I believe the important part of your post is "though as every linguist knows counting languages is a tricky affair." Again, the fact that most Italians could get by or pick up what they needed quickly is sufficient for me to classify it as one language when deciding language points to distribute in Vampire.

If you want to talk about linguistic change over time, well English is a nice poster child for that. Anyone up for reading Beowulf in the Old English? And French is far more conservative linguistically than Tuscon. I've read 11th Century port documents which are indistinguishable for modern French. I guess all that effort keeping "le weekend" out of the language has some positive effect. As for Scots, apparently its status as a separate language or dialect is a matter of dispute.

[Lys]

No, the key part of the statement is that the dialetti are generally not intelligible. You said that it was a matter of intelligibility, and so I bring evidence that they aren't intelligible, whereas thus all far all I have from you is your sayso. Moreover, I find it disingenous to take a statement about the difficulties of drawing lines between languages as licence to act as if there aren't any. Especially when the statement is followed by oulining a minumum set of subdivisions and a note that further subdivisions are reasonable.

On the note of bringing actual evidence to the table, here is another linguist discussing the subject:

"Gallo-Italian dialects and standard Italian, which is based on the dialects of Tuscany, are not mutually intelligible. There are sounds in Gallo-Italian that do not occur in Italian, among them the front-rounded vowels [ö] and [ü]. Front rounded vowels also occur in French and Provençal, which are sometimes called Gallo-Romance languages."

"In addition to phonological differences, there are grammatical innovations that took place in northern Italy that did not occur anywhere else in the Romance-speaking world.  In particular, there is the existence of pronominal iteration, or subject clitics, extra words that reinforce the subject pronouns."

"The subject clitics, in effect, the repetition of the subject pronouns, are a major grammatical innovation that sets Gallo-Italian apart from other Romance languages. Gallo-Italian is as different from Italian as Provençal is from French or Catalan is from Spanish."

If you want to treat languages as broad groups such that Iberian, Italian, French (langues d'oil et d'oc), and Scandinavian all count as unitary tongues then that's fine. What I'm objecting to is any standard that sees Castillian and Catalan as separate languages but does not Venetian and Tuscan.

That you can read Old French is not unusual at all for a Romance language, I can easily read Old Castillian myself, though I am suspicious of your calling them indistinguishable when all comparisons I can find have a number of apparent differences. I do believe, however, that spoken French has changed considerably more than the written form, as the original writing of the vernacular is presumed phonetic while the modern version is very much not. In fact, French is actually the most innovative of the Romance language, being about 44% distinct from Latin. This in comparison to 12% for Italian, 20% for Spanish, and 23% for Rumanian. The relative difference in innovativeness is readily evident in that Castillian only has Old and Modern iterations, while French is divided into Old, Middle, and Modern much like English, though the differences between them are obviously less dramatic for French.

[Cynical Cat]

That you can read Old French is not unusual at all for a Romance language, I can easily read Old Castillian myself, though I am suspicious of your calling them indistinguishable when all comparisons I can find have a number of apparent differences.

They're port documents. The writing is very bland and simple, grade school really. So much beef and so much wine. Simple and direct sentences with abbreviated words (interpreting the abbreviations was the hardest part and it wasn't hard) and very basic vocabulary. Lots of numbers and lists. No one was going to mistake it for Dumas. Also French, do to the existence of the Acadamie France, very strongly retains the older parts of its language.

No, the key part of the statement is that the dialetti are generally not intelligible. You said that it was a matter of intelligibility, and so I bring evidence that they aren't intelligible, whereas thus all far all I have from you is your sayso.

Not true. See below.

Moreover, I find it disingenous to take a statement about the difficulties of drawing lines between languages as licence to act as if there aren't any. Especially when the statement is followed by oulining a minumum set of subdivisions and a note that further subdivisions are reasonable.

I made statements showing that the lines between language and language groups, something you repeatedly harped on and made central to your arguments, were not indicative where the lines of comprehension fell and I gave multiple examples. Remember this diagram? You should, you brought it out.




Where does the Rumanian fall on it? Not in the same group as any Italian or Spanish language group and yet there is a very high level of mutual intelligibility between those as spoken languages and even more so as written. So, as I've been mentioning, presence or absence in a language group is not critical to intelligibility.

Then there's the existence of sabir, aka the Mediterranean Lingua Franca. Widely spoken up to the 19th Century, including in Genoese and Venetian trading colonies, its a mix of Northern Italian with Occitano-Romance thrown in and some Portuguese, Spanish as well as pieces of a few others. Its very easy to pick up, widely spoken, and kind of hard to fit into a language point system. How much does it cost a Genoese speaker to learn when he already speaks half of it? A Venetian? A Tuscan? And if one knows a little sabir or the person you're trying to speak to someone who knows a little sabir and you are both speaking different Italian dialects how the fuck does that work? Or some Latin? Or some other pieces of shared dialect? Or are closer rather than further removed dialects? And that's without touching on the fact on how much easier it is to learn, partially or fully, a closely related language. In real life it would come down to which languages and what shared/overlapping vocabulary and grammer. As for an rpg . .

The answer is that I don't worry about it and count them all as one language for simplicity. Italians, whether writers or condotieri, managed to make themselves understood all over the country. If you want to make an argument that Catalan should count as one language with Castillian, a position my "Fuck you, Franco and all your facist swine-kind" reflex objects to, go ahead. I'm prepared to listen.

You have several times accused me of dishonesty, rather than error in your arguments. I would ask that you do not use such incendiary language lightly.

[Lys]

The Academie Française was established in the 17th century, by which point they were already speaking modern French, or rather Classical French, which is the older variant of Modern French. While the Academie has no doubt had a retardant effect on the language's evolution, this must be taken in context. French changed a lot since its appearance in the 9th century and the institution of the Academie in the 17th. As I said, it is without question the most innovative of Romance languages. I consider it a poor example of linguistic conservationism except in the sole context of the post-Renaissance period.

Common language grouping is not critical to intelligibilty, but I didn't say it was, I said that it's indicative, a clue, a piece of evidence. Other pieces of evidence include consistent anectdotal information, and actual linguists weighing in on the subject, all of which point to the various dialletti not being mutually intelligible.

Sabir is a pidgin, a hybrid language with simplified grammar, phonology, and vocabulary. They appear when people with mutually unintelligible tongues have a lot of interaction, usually trade, and wind up meeting each other halfway. They are inherently easier to pick up by virtue of their deliberate simplicity and broad base of familiar features. Their formation has nothing to do with the inherent intelligibilty between the component languages, and in fact implies the opposite. Hell sometimes, as in the case of Russenorsk, the pidgin isn't really intelligible with its components. In a game, you deal with pidgins much the same way you would deal with any other closely related languages, as the problems are essentially the same.

The fact that Italians could make themselves understood all over the peninsula does not imply mutual intelligibility any more than the fact that they could do the same in the rest of the Mediterranean. I mean fuck, one of the most successful condotta in Italy was called The Great Company of English and Germans. Clearly they had no problem talking to their clients despite being, you know, English and Germans. People are willing and able to learn other languages when it suits them, and multilingualism was fairly common among merchants, politicians, and mercenaries alike.

I have not and would never argue that Castillian and Catalan are the same language. What I am arguing is that treating the Italian languages as the same is equivalent to treating the Iberian languages as the same, on the grounds that the distinctions within these groups are of similar magnitude. I'm fine with doing this, as I think the way the Multilingual merit works strongly encourages it, but you should be consistent about it. Otherwise, lumping the dialetti together should be triggering your "Fuck you, Mussolini and all your fascist swine-kind" reflex.

[Comrade Tortoise]

In game terms, there MUST be a degree of abstraction when it comes to languages, because knowing those languages is a binary condition, and it is expensive. This is not real life, where I, a person who speaks (bad) german, english, (worse) latin, and knows a smattering of old english, middle english and various scandinavian language bits... can brute-force my way through reading Dutch and Afrikaans.

Those smatterings dont get recorded. One either speaks German, or does not. You dont pay partial points for degrees of fluency, and picking up new languages is not feasible on the timescales these games run on. It can take a dozen or more sessions to get through a single week of game time.

So, languages that are closely related and have some degree of intelligibility get collapsed together. Which means Tuscan and Venetian, which ARE closely related and are to one extent or another reasonably intelligible, get collapsed together. Otherwise, an Italian merchant who spent their days travelling up and down from Milan to Palermo would have to be a fucking genius and spend all their language points just to be understood in one region. Which is clearly fucking insane, considering how trivially easy it would be for an actual person who speaks one of those dialects/languages to learn the differences in pronunciation and differences in vocabulary by simple exposure.

What I am arguing is that treating the Italian languages as the same is equivalent to treating the Iberian languages as the same, on the grounds that the distinctions within these groups are of similar magnitude. I'm fine with doing this, as I think the way the Multilingual merit works strongly encourages it

Then why are you going on and on about it?

but you should be consistent about it

He HAS BEEN. In this game's earlier incarnation, my character, who spoke Old English and whatever version of Frisian/Dutch was spoken back then was perfectly fine understanding Helgi's particular branch of Norse. I am rather pointedly treating my current character as having both German (whatever version of it was spoken at the time, I dont recall off the top of my head) and Yiddish as native languages, because they were barely distinguishable. Everyone speaks latin and greek, but both languages have shifted over time and Marcus has no problem communicating despite a thousand years of linguistic drift in both languages.

[General Havoc]

It is presumed in each of these cases that the character in question has some experience in attempting to work through the language in particular. Ben's old character spoke Frisian and Old English and it was presumed that he worked out Old Norse through mutual effort because Helgi was doing his best to be understood and because a degree of judgment is called for in this things. If Italian is subdivided into a thousand separate languages in the binary language system CT is speaking of, and that premise is applied globally to all the languages, then Marcus can't converse with anyone save a handful of Roman vampires as old as he is. His dialect of Latin does not exist anymore and has not for centuries, and is in any event a dead language in Constantinople, and his Greek is the rhetorical version of Attic Greek taught by ancient pedagogues to the sons of Roman nobility. Greek is not a particularly fast-evolving language, but there are nevertheless going to logically be major differences between the formal Greek of the early 1st century BC and the vulgar Greek of the end of the 12th century AD, particularly when you consider that the underlying religion changed in the meanwhile. He otherwise has a dialect of Celtiberian which is as dead as languages get, and Italian, which you are claiming doesn't exist and should be one of several mutually unintelligible languages. By these rules, Marcus can converse with nobody in the entire party.

But of course we do not use these rules, because characters are assumed to be reasonable people, and languages are understood to be something you can have greater or lesser faculty with. Marcus' Latin would sound highly formalized to anyone nowadays who spoke it, but they can understand it if they make the effort to do so and he makes the effort to be understood. His Greek is assumed to bear the marks of his antiquity, with turns of phrase and pronunciations that are long-since antiquated, such that mortals will assume he is a barbarian who speaks it strangely, and Vampires suspect he learned it in another age entirely. And when Marcus speaks in what I call "Italian", we are making a presumption that he has sufficient capability to make himself understood by anyone else familiar with Italian. Whatever you say about the linguistic histories of the various Italian sub-dialects in the 12th century, nobody is making the claim that they were as different from one another as Spanish is from Basque. There was common ground between them, a fact of both linguistics and elementary common sense, as a century from now, the entire peninsula will begin discussing a common cultural heritage in a common language without everyone re-learning how to speak. Adjustments must be made for regional dialects, of course, and the barrier between a language and a dialect is nebulous. But given the mechanics of the game, it is only reasonable to set those barriers between who can speak what with the expectation that people who wish to talk to one another, and who already speak multiple languages in any event, will find ways of making themselves understood even through thick accents or regional dialects.

To hold to an absolute fidelity of dialectical precision with these languages is to render the game utterly unplayable under any conceivable circumstances but the absolute narrowest. It is akin to saying that Vampires do not exist, and thus we are not allowed to accept the premise of the game that they do. It is a necessary conceit to engage in the game in the first place. And frankly, it's not as much of a conceit as you seem to think it is. After all, unless it's important or we're meeting new people, we don't even usually bother to specify which language we're speaking in with one another, and we don't tie ourselves in knots to try and figure out what idioms exist in Greek, Italian, or Norse, than would not exist in English, or vice versa.

Marcus speaks "Italian". If you wish to get specific, his version of Italian is probably Neapolitan. It is perfectly acceptable for you to derive information from the fact that he speaks like a southern Italian, or perhaps even to find a way to use Ligurian or Genoese dialect to obfuscate your meaning to him. But I don't see the virtue in deciding that the two of you are totally incapable of communicating in a language you both speak.

[Lys]

This in reply to Comrade Tortoise, posting on a phone is too much a pain in the ass to bother with quotes. Havoc will have to understand that I wrote most of this last night and am presently quite hungover.

I'm going on about it because as far back as us discussing this on Skype, the point was made that the languages of Iberia are more distinct than those of Italy, a notion repeated in this very thread. This is, as I have shown, false. Also, I like arguing historical minutia and as a direct result of this argument I now know far more about Romance languages than I did going in, which has made the effort as illuminating as it is invigorating. Far as the game goes, CynCat could tell me Latin and Mandarin were intelligible, and I'd both tell him he was full of shit and cancel Lucretia's Chinese lessons. Hell, I'm already planning to mock Matthias' accent should he ever deign to speak Italian in front of Lucretia.

While I agree, as I said, that the Multilingual merit demands a fair degree of abstraction, your example isn't great. It is reasonable for a merchant to have Intelligence 3, and that's all he needs to know one language from each of the four major groups in continental Italy with one purchase of Multilingual. With a second purchase he could pick Swiss German, French, and Arabic to expand his businees north and south. Though, frankly, while my argument has evolved since then, the original objection was more on the grounds of using the word Italian to describe a known language, because no such thing exists in the 12th century, and a character is bound to be most familiar with one of the regional languages. While putting down Venetian and treating it as intelligible with Sicilian amounts to the same thing as calling them all Italian, it's unlikely I would have objected to it. Then we would have all sadly missed this wonderful argument.

Still, this illustrates the superiority of the Linguistics skill over the Multilingual merit. Not only do you get more languages for your xp than with multiple purchases of Multilingual, but it also provides a neat solution to the question of intelligibility of closely related languages. You simply make a Linguistics roll at a difficulty determined by what languages both parties know and how closely related they are. This is especially effective with liberal use of the suggestion to grant automatic successes when the dice pool exceeds the difficulty of an unopposed roll. At least that's the case when you want to deal with those details, when you don't Multilingual is obviously superior.

The Latin everyone speaks is Medieval Latin, which I believe isn't that different from Classical Latin. I admit I haven't looked at the differences too closely, but I was under the impression it wasn't much different from the case of Old Castillian in comparison to modern. Once you get used to certain systematic changes you're essentially speaking the same language.

As for German, I don't know as much about it as I do Romance. What I've picked up over the last few days is that it consists of multiple largely unintelligible languages much like the Italian, Iberian, and Francian languages. There's Low German, which is subdivided into Low German/Saxon and Low Franconian (Dutch); and then there's High German which is subdivided into Central German, High Franconian, Upper German, and Yiddish. Standard German started out like standard Italian as a literary language, mostly based on Eastern Central German. It is not intelligible with Low German or most varieties of High Franconian and Upper German. In the 12th century everyone would be speaking the Middle version of all these tongues, such as Middle Low German, the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League.

Though, man, treating West Germanic (English, Frisian) and North Germanic (Norse) as intelligible may be a bit far even by the standard of game abstraction.