La Spezia Rimini Line

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La Spezia Rimini Line

The La Spezia Rimini line (sometimes also called the Massa Senigallia line ) describes a line of isoglosses in Romance linguistics that distinguishes the Romance languages in the south and east of the Romance-speaking area from those in the north and west.

The languages ​​in the south include Standard Italian and Romanian (including Aromanian , Megleno- Romanian and Istrian- Romanian ), while those in the west include Spanish , Catalan , Portuguese , French , Occitan , the Romansh and the northern Italian languages. The line thus also represents a border between the actual Italian dialects (Eastern Romansh, in the south) and the different northern Italian language forms (Western Romansh, in the north). The Sardinian language cannot be classified into either East or West.

The line runs through northern Italy, mainly through the regions of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna , and connects the cities of La Spezia , Pistoia and Rimini . Most linguists today are of the opinion that the line actually runs about 40 kilometers further south through the cities of Massa (or Carrara ) and Senigallia and should therefore actually be called the Massa-Senigallia line .

Morphological differences

North and west of the line (with the exception of some northern Italian varieties, such as the Ligurian language , which probably had these characteristics once, but lost again under the influence of standard Italian ), the plural of nouns is formed after the Latin accusative and usually ends independently of gender and declension to -s. South and east of the line, the plural forms were usually formed from the Latin nominative , and nouns change the final vowels to form the plural.

Compare the plural forms of originally related nouns in the daughter languages ​​of Latin with the Latin pre-forms:

Form inventory of the Romance languages: plural forms
Latin Eastern Romania Western Romania
Italian Romanian Sardinian Spanish Portuguese Catalan French
1. Declination
("goat")
Nom.Sg. capra capra capră craba cabra cabra cabra chèvre
Nom.Pl. caprae capre capre
Battery pack caprās crabas cabras cabras cabres chèvres
2. Declination
("Wolf")
Nom.Sg. lupus lupo lup lupu lobo lobo llop loup
Nom.Pl. lupī lupi lupi
Battery pack lupos lupos lobos lobos llops loups
3. Declination
("Mensch")
Nom.Sg. homo uomo om òmine hombre homem home homme
Nom.Pl. homines † (→ uomini ) † (→ oameni ) òmines hombres homens homes hommes
Battery pack

In this overview it becomes clear that for the 1st and 2nd declension classes the Latin nominative plural with its vowel endings -ae and only persists in the Eastern Romance languages, the Latin accusative pluralis with its s -containing endings -ās and -ōs on the other hand only in the Western Romance languages. No daughter language of Latin, on the other hand, preserves both forms at the same time.

In the 3rd declension, however, the nominative and accusative plural have the same form in Latin on -es ; these forms are continued in the Western Roman s -plural. However, you can see that the Eastern Romance languages ​​Italian and Romanian have developed new plural forms in this declension according to the pattern of the 2nd declension (i.e. with the suffix -i ).

Phonological differences

In general, the Western Romance languages ​​show common innovations that the Eastern Romance languages tend to lack. An isogloss of the Rimini-La-Spezia line deals with the pronunciation of some consonants that appear between vowels. So was the vulgar Latin focus / focum ( "Fire") (in classical Latin ignis ) in Italian to Fuoco and the Romanian to foc , but fogo in Portuguese and in the northern Italian Veneto and the Spanish to fuego . The soft pronunciation or the omission (cf. French feu ) of these consonants is characteristic of the western branch of the Romance languages, their preservation characteristic of the eastern branch.

Exceptions to this isogloss are the Gascognic dialects in southwest France and Aragonese in northern Aragón ( Spain ), theoretically Western Romansh, which also retain the original Latin unvoiced consonant between vowels.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Johannes Kabatek, Claus D. Pusch: Spanish Linguistics: An Introduction. Gunter Narr Verlag, 2009, ISBN 978-3-8233-6404-7 , p. 11 f.
  2. ^ Arthur Beyrer , Klaus Bochmann , Siegfried Bronsert : Grammar of the Romanian language of the present. VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie, Leipzig 1987, pp. 15-17 with reference to Walther von Wartburg.