This post is a little bit different from the other presented so far. It is about linguistics, and in particular about my vernacular language, the Venetian (or at least, what still survives of it after more than 200 years from the fall of Venice).
Some years ago I published an Android App about history of this language and etymology of several interesting words. Now, also thanks to the reduction of development time due to AI, I’m restoring the App and I’m publishing also here the interesting history of the region (from ancient Veneti to modern Venetians).
Ancient Veneti
This history, as we read in [1], begins with Spartan warships led by Cleominus (yes, the same Spartans of Leonidas who in 300 held back for days the advance of tens of thousands of men of Xerxes), which in 302 BC were sailing up the Adriatic coast to raid villages along the shores.
At a certain point they began to sail up an opening that opened between low-lying coasts. Proceeding further, they found carefully cultivated fields and a few huts; the soldiers had to continue using skiffs, since the seabed was not suitable for warships.
Near a village they attacked, but the inhabitants, instead of fleeing in fear, counterattacked with such violence as to put the Spartans to flight. The inhabitants were the ancient Veneti. This story, perhaps legend, perhaps true, is told to us by Livy, a Roman historian of the court of Augustus, originally from Padua and extremely proud of his Venetian origins.
Beyond this legendary version, the Veneti were an Indo-European people; it is still not clear, based on what is known of their language and customs, whether they were Italic or Celtic, since they displayed aspects of both [2], while it now seems fairly certain that they were not an Illyrian population. Their history begins well before 300 BC, probably already in the middle of the second millennium BC. One of the most widely accepted hypotheses is that the Veneti share their protohistory with the Latins [3], emerging as an Indo-European population around the third millennium BC in Central Europe; when this population moved into Italy around the 15th century BC, the Venetian branch settled precisely in Veneto, while the rest of the Italic branch (including the Latins) continued its southward movement.
The Veneti integrated with and replaced the autochthonous populations, such as the Euganei; they were known to Greeks and Etruscans, with whom they maintained commercial relations (from the Etruscans they also learned the use of writing; in fact, inscriptions in Paleovenetic are written in the Etruscan alphabet).
They had a reputation for being skilled warriors, traders, and breeders (famous for their horses).
They developed a culture of their own, perhaps the one that has left the greatest amount of material and traces among those of Northern Italy, reaching its peak between the 8th and 3rd centuries BC; among the typical elements we recall the Venetian casoni (“big houses”), rectangular houses with thatched roofs, whose last examples remained inhabited until the early 20th century.
Roman period
Toward the beginning of their decline they began to be influenced by the Gauls to the west and by the Illyrians to the east.
In this period the Veneti maintained good relations with the Gallic population of the Cenomani, who followed them in their alliance with the Romans during the wars against the Gauls in 225 BC.
From the 2nd century BC they were confederated in the X Regio, Venetia et Istria, where between the 2nd century BC and the 2nd century AD Rome transferred colonies of veterans and other Italic populations in order to Latinize them [4]; in fact, gradually over the course of four centuries they abandoned their language in favor of Latin, partly also influencing it (for example basi, kisses, derive from the Venetic basum and not from the Latin osculum, arriving in Rome through the poems of the Veronese Catullus).
The traces left by Celtic are nevertheless not yet completely gone and can be found in baro, bush, obstacle in modern Venetian, branch in Celtic and also passed into Italian through the words barra and sbarra; braghe, in fact trousers were a typical garment of the Celts and not of the Romans, who instead wore the tunic; the already mentioned baso; impizar, to light, which we also find in Spanish empezar, to begin, from the Celtic pettia, piece, through the Latin in+pettia+are, which indicates breaking wood into pieces to light, to start, a fire; mona, fool, from the Celtic mones, monkey (even today in Spain mona means monkey); the use of pomo instead of mela to indicate the apple (in Latin pomo was the generic fruit, but evidently among non-Latin peoples such as the Veneti and Celts it came to be used to indicate the fruit par excellence, the apple).
Beyond a few vocabulary items that managed to survive, Latin erased
Venetic, and in fact modern Venetian is a Romance language.
Among the Latin words that have disappeared in Italian but that we still find in today’s Venetian (although adapted to Venetian phonetics), we recall: amia, from the Latin amita; armelino, from armeninus, a fruit “from Armenia”, whereas Italian albicocca derives from Arabic (even though the Arabs themselves borrowed the term from Latin, via Greek, from praecocum, “early-ripening”); cocumaro, from the ancient Latin cucumis, -eris, which in Italian came to indicate what we Venetians call anguria, a term that we will see later meant “cucumber” in Greek; stra, used to form the superlative of adjectives (from the Latin adverb extra); unquò (also ancò, inquò and similar forms, from the Latin hunc hodie, “this day”); sorare, to cool, from ex aurare, “to spread into the air” (which also existed in Old Italian in the form sciorare); carega; saresa (from ceresa); luganega from lucanica, because it was the typical meat-preservation method of the Lucanians; persego from persica prunus, since it was imported from Persia (in Italian as well pesca is a contraction of the obsolete form persica); muricia or muriciola, from mus, muris. Some terms even retain exactly the Latin form: butiro, caligo, sporta…
Fall of the Roman Empire and Germanic Invasions
During the Roman Empire, Latin spread across half of Europe, and we can assume that it was roughly uniform, with some differences in pronunciation and vocabulary due to the fact that it was spoken by different peoples who had previously spoken their own languages.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin began to fragment, and in each region it started to evolve in different ways, depending on the particular historical events of that place.
For example, in Italy between 500 and 800 AD there were the dominations of the Lombards and the Goths, Eastern Germanic peoples; in northern France the Franks established themselves, another Germanic population that later expanded throughout France and much of Italy (with the new empire of Charlemagne).
In Italy, these conquering peoples were absorbed by the dominated populations, which were more numerous, and their language and culture disappeared—though not before heavily influencing the pre-existing populations.
It is enough to think of all the military terms (for “war” we use the Frankish werra, not the Latin bellum; there are also elmo, guardia, bando, etc.) and of everyday life (guardare, fresco, ricco, fiasco, bucato, nastro, etc.). In this regard, it is very interesting to look at the Germanic loanwords present in the Italian language and in some dialects [5].
In particular, in Venetian we find: strucare (in modern Germanic languages we find it in German trucken, “to press”); sbregare (found in English break and in German brechen, “to break”); sparagnar (also present in the form sparen in German); vardare (present in German as warten, “to wait”; here we can see how a word can, over time, change meaning in two different languages—in this case the difference between vardar and warten is the same as that between Italian attendere and Venetian tendare); springare (German springen, “to splash”, and English spring, “source”); sbaruffare (German raufen, “to brawl”); butare (in the sense of “to sprout”, from Gothic bautan, “to throw, to sprout”); brosa (from Gothic frosa and also found in German and English frozen, frost, and similar forms); stracco (from Gothic strak).
An interesting aspect of these words is that they are the last living fragments of the Eastern Germanic languages, which became extinct without leaving descendants (unlike the Western and Northern Germanic languages).
Relations with Byzantines
Parallel to this phase of Germanic enrichment in the Venetian hinterland due first to the Lombard presence (as attested by the various Lombard Farre) and later to the Gothic one, Venetian was heavily influenced by Greek, since the territory that later saw the birth of Venice lay within the Byzantine sphere of influence.
Greek influence remained alive in the following centuries thanks to Venice’s trade with the eastern Mediterranean.
Of Greek origin are piron (the fork was unknown to the Romans, and the Venetians learned its use from the Greeks), anguria (even though in Greek it means “cucumber”; moreover, the Italian word cocomero also derives from a Latin word that meant “cucumber”, whereas in Venetian cocumaro retains the original meaning of the term), mona in the sense of the female sexual organ, mostaci, sproto, from protomaistor, “master builder” in Greek, a word whose meaning recalls the attitude, musigna, from elemosina, as well as many other terms that first entered the language through a Latin adaptation.
The millstone and car case
An interesting lemma is màsena, millstone, via the Latin machina, from Greek mechanè, “device, instrument for making”.
This word, which originally referred to machinery of various kinds, came to denote a specific apparatus—the millstone—and today we can hardly recognize its original form, as it has been distorted by Venetian pronunciation.
The same word was reintroduced centuries later through a loan from Italian machina, to denote a new type of machine, the automobile.
The same word therefore exists in two forms, ancient Venetian and modern Venetian, with very different meanings (though conceptually quite similar).
It should be noted that ancient Venetian phonetics (the characteristic sounds of its words) now survives only in the “old” Venetian words used in everyday life, but has changed over the last centuries, moving closer to Italian phonetics.
Thus, on the one hand we have masena, domeneghe, partidori, and on the other, more recent terms such as machine, plastica, tratori
(although there is also plastegon…), with no clear differentiation from Italian pronunciation, which in fact is gaining ground both in vocabulary and pronunciation (bicière is gradually replacing gòto
and is not even distorted into something like bisèr, as it probably would have been centuries ago).
Some phonetics
Before continuing with the historical account, let us take a closer look at phonetics; in this regard it is useful to introduce the International Phonetic Alphabet 9, a special alphabet, similar to the Latin one but extended, which assigns a specific sound to each symbol.
In fact, the Latin alphabet was created for the phonetic needs of Latin speakers, and over time it has had to represent an increasing number of sounds (as it is now used for the languages of many peoples), achieving this goal only through conventions that are generally not unambiguous. For example, in the IPA, ciao is written /’tʃao/, schiocco /’skiɔkko/, and sciocco /’ʃɔkko/.
With these further examples we can show some differences with respect to the Latin alphabet: /’ɲɔkko/ (gnocco), /ʎi/ (gli), /’dʒa/ (già),
/’dʒɛnte/ (gente), /’gjattʃo/ (ghiaccio), /’sale/ (sale), /ko’zi/ (così), /’dzendzero/ (zenzero), /’tsukkero/ (zucchero).
In Venetian the sounds /ʎ/ and /ʃ/ do not exist; in fact, elderly speakers often have some difficulty pronouncing them, having not been accustomed to using them from childhood with Italian, and they tend to render them as /l/ and /s/ (e.g. famiglia–familia, scienza–siensa).
In general, Latin phonetics took slightly different paths in Venetian and in Italian (they are nevertheless mutually intelligible; in fact, Venetian belongs to that linguistic continuum which, starting from Castilian and Catalan, passing through Occitan and the Gallo-Italian dialects of Northern Italy, reaches the other Italian dialects).
The sound /dʒ/ is handled differently depending on the Venetian variety: it may be realized as /d/, /z/, or /dz/; for example, gente may be pronounced /’dzente/, /’zente/, or /’dent/.
Occurrences of /ki/ke/gi/ are generally rendered as /tʃi/tʃe/dʒi, as in
chiesa–cèsa, chiave–ciàve, ghiaccio–giàsso (or even simply iàsso); moreover, Venetian has at least two phonemes unknown to Italian: /s’tʃ/, which in Italian is rendered only as /ʃ/ (a Venetian speaker would probably tend to mispronounce the Italian scervellarsi; however, Italian does have a similar phoneme /zdʒ/, as in sgelare), and /ð/, the same as in the English article the, although this sound tends to be replaced by z or others, as it is associated with ignorance.
Words containing these sounds include s-ciosso (it: chiocciola, en: slug) and sucato (it: zucchina, en: zuchini) (which, besides /’tsukato/ and /’sukato/, is also pronounced /’ðsukat/).
Finally, some typical features are the rendering of k as g and of t as d
(domenega, nevegada), the use of -aro or -èr where Italian uses -aio,
the past participle of second-conjugation verbs in -esto and of some third-conjugation verbs in -isto (this regularizing suffix spread around the 13th century and began to fall out of use in large cities
from the 17th century onward, but is still present in rural areas).
Conclusion
Here you can find the second part of this survey on Venetian history, with the reference to the Bibliography cited in the text and hopefully I’ll also republish soon the Venetian Vocabulary App.