by PolackTony » Mon Jul 06, 2020 12:49 pm
Chris Christie wrote: ↑Sun Jul 05, 2020 5:55 pm
Are there any other Italian speakers on the board? Maybe they can listen to the two youtube examples I provided and give their own opinion? All I can do is provide my own which I already did. I can understand everybody, and from my own research, members of organized crime from various provinces never had a problem either a century prior. If this is this much of a contention perhaps I need to focus more on it in the book.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_dw8I169go
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEEPyE-nR58
I'd be interested to see how you wind up dealing with the language question, as I think it's an important, interesting, and complex one. Lots of published scholarly work out there on the subject (of course mainly in Italian when dealing with the linguistic history and politics of language in southern Italy) as well as problems of linguistic diversity and language acquisition in the US Italian diaspora. Summaries I've read from historians on the subject of language in US Italian communities among the first generation settlers of the peak period of Italian migration to America (1890s-1920) was that as many as 70% of these settlers were illiterate and most had little to no facility in standard Italian, which serves to underscore the real challenges that linguistic diversity had for the formation of Italian American communities. While there may be examples of mafiosi who were likely somewhat better traveled or cosmopolitan than typical contadini immigrants (and this is not at all to say that all migrants had been isolated in villages prior to migration, though it certainly was the case that many were), this is an interesting question in and of itself and (of course) these guys were likely not representative of the overall population that formed the first generation of Italian American communities.
Another issue is what we mean by "dialetto", which today is often conflated I think with "vernacolo", as a set of local phonological idiosyncracies and
idiomatic usages that color regional variants of standard Italian (so much more like the example above of Southern vs NYC American English) vs. what some refer to as "dialetto stretto", the old-style "pure" regional languages that in many provinces are rapidly dying off. Since the period of the World Wars standard Italian has increasingly displaced local languages of course, which are often strongly marked or stigmatized as archaic, lower class and "peasant". Not only that, but local languages have also absorbed a significant amount of influence (in syntax and lexicon) from standard Italian over the decades, so what people speak as Sicilian today can't be taken at face value as representative of what Sicilian sounded like 120 years ago (to say the least). It has clearly changed a lot.
And one can easily find many, many accounts from people attesting that even today standard Italian speakers from northern and central Italy have very significant problems understand actual Sicilianu. For example, I've read and have been told by standard Italian speakers from the north that they have a much easier time understanding spoken Spanish than spoken Sicilianu (again, not the local Sicilian standard Italian). And we have plenty of reason to assume that mutual intelligibility would've been even lower 120 years ago. Plenty of evidence that even people speaking different dialects of the same regional language had a lot of difficulty communicating with each other (e.g. people In Basilicata or Campania not understanding the local dialect of a village 30km away). And this is not taking into account people from the actual north (though of course, they figure little in the history of the American Mafia). While standard Italian, Toscano, etc are all at least part of the same Italo-Dalmatian language family as Napuletano and Siclianu, the languages of the north are classified in separate language families (Gallo-Italic, Veneto, and Rhaeto-Romance in the case of Friulia). Even today without recourse to standard Italian as a mediator, my understanding is that there would be extremely low mutual intelligibility between someone speaking one of these languages and another regional language. American English does not provide anything like a useful model for analogy to compare to linguistic diversity in Italy. Again, the better parallel is the case of the languages of the Iberian peninsula, but even then that is most apt for the differences between central and Southern Italian languages (all at least part of the same family), not those of the north.
[quote="Chris Christie" post_id=158931 time=1593996905 user_id=69]
Are there any other Italian speakers on the board? Maybe they can listen to the two youtube examples I provided and give their own opinion? All I can do is provide my own which I already did. I can understand everybody, and from my own research, members of organized crime from various provinces never had a problem either a century prior. If this is this much of a contention perhaps I need to focus more on it in the book.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_dw8I169go
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEEPyE-nR58
[/quote]
I'd be interested to see how you wind up dealing with the language question, as I think it's an important, interesting, and complex one. Lots of published scholarly work out there on the subject (of course mainly in Italian when dealing with the linguistic history and politics of language in southern Italy) as well as problems of linguistic diversity and language acquisition in the US Italian diaspora. Summaries I've read from historians on the subject of language in US Italian communities among the first generation settlers of the peak period of Italian migration to America (1890s-1920) was that as many as 70% of these settlers were illiterate and most had little to no facility in standard Italian, which serves to underscore the real challenges that linguistic diversity had for the formation of Italian American communities. While there may be examples of mafiosi who were likely somewhat better traveled or cosmopolitan than typical contadini immigrants (and this is not at all to say that all migrants had been isolated in villages prior to migration, though it certainly was the case that many were), this is an interesting question in and of itself and (of course) these guys were likely not representative of the overall population that formed the first generation of Italian American communities.
Another issue is what we mean by "dialetto", which today is often conflated I think with "vernacolo", as a set of local phonological idiosyncracies and
idiomatic usages that color regional variants of standard Italian (so much more like the example above of Southern vs NYC American English) vs. what some refer to as "dialetto stretto", the old-style "pure" regional languages that in many provinces are rapidly dying off. Since the period of the World Wars standard Italian has increasingly displaced local languages of course, which are often strongly marked or stigmatized as archaic, lower class and "peasant". Not only that, but local languages have also absorbed a significant amount of influence (in syntax and lexicon) from standard Italian over the decades, so what people speak as Sicilian today can't be taken at face value as representative of what Sicilian sounded like 120 years ago (to say the least). It has clearly changed a lot.
And one can easily find many, many accounts from people attesting that even today standard Italian speakers from northern and central Italy have very significant problems understand actual Sicilianu. For example, I've read and have been told by standard Italian speakers from the north that they have a much easier time understanding spoken Spanish than spoken Sicilianu (again, not the local Sicilian standard Italian). And we have plenty of reason to assume that mutual intelligibility would've been even lower 120 years ago. Plenty of evidence that even people speaking different dialects of the same regional language had a lot of difficulty communicating with each other (e.g. people In Basilicata or Campania not understanding the local dialect of a village 30km away). And this is not taking into account people from the actual north (though of course, they figure little in the history of the American Mafia). While standard Italian, Toscano, etc are all at least part of the same Italo-Dalmatian language family as Napuletano and Siclianu, the languages of the north are classified in separate language families (Gallo-Italic, Veneto, and Rhaeto-Romance in the case of Friulia). Even today without recourse to standard Italian as a mediator, my understanding is that there would be extremely low mutual intelligibility between someone speaking one of these languages and another regional language. American English does not provide anything like a useful model for analogy to compare to linguistic diversity in Italy. Again, the better parallel is the case of the languages of the Iberian peninsula, but even then that is most apt for the differences between central and Southern Italian languages (all at least part of the same family), not those of the north.