Thank you, I have noticed that in names too but couldn’t get a definitive answer, e.g. /n/ in Anna is definitely pronounced as double.
“Germinated consonants”, if only I knew the correct technical tern & searched first, thank you.
In standard Italian double consonants are always pronounced as double. Also other consonants or consonant clusters are pronounced as double in good Italian, at least between vowels (including /j/): z /(t)ts, (d)dz/, gn(i) /(ɲ)ɲ/ sc(i) /(ʃ)ʃ/ gl(i) /(ʎ)ʎ/. Notably Northerners (especially Venetians) have some problems of pronouncing double consonants correctly.
A better approximation would be at-ten-TSYOH-neh [attenˈtsjoːne].
Yep, remember that z in Latin (in foreign words, i.e. Greek) always counted as two consonants, so pronounce it /zz/.
"Double(d) consonant" is not incorrect, but has two meanings. One is "gemination" which refers to pronunciation, and the other is "digraph" which refers to writing.
I'm quite certain that /j/ is never phonetically doubled in standard Italian, and is the only such consonant apart of course from /w/. This is easily seen in situations of raddoppiamento fonosintattico.
Even the sound value of the Greek <ζ> is impossible to definitely establish; word-initially it seems to behave like other Greek double graphemes <ψ, ξ> and like consonant clusters - sometimes the belong only to the following syllable, sometimes they're split across two syllables.
Right, but you should add also /z/, never geminated (although in Northern varieties it is not a true phoneme and in Southern Italian it doesn't exist, but in standard/Tuscan Italian is definitely a phoneme).
Nope, it is always simple. In past times you could find il juventino l'Juventus.
Not very rare, if you consider the whole Central Italy (with the exception of Tuscany). Romanesco is a very clear example of a dialect with internal /-jj-/.
Right, and those Latin words are represented in genuine Italian words with -gg(i)-.
Possibly /d͡z/ initially and /zz/ internally, but z (ζ) in metre counts always as a double consonant.
What is the "y" at the end of the Italian word supposed to represent?
Right, I know /s/ occurs in many native words and past participles, but /z/ in Latin, French, and other borrowings in Tuscan.
Please, if you don't understand what I write, ask me to explain, but don't assume I'm wrong and you're right, and don't contradict my words without adducing any reasoning or explanation.
Yes, I've heard that about Romanesco, but as far as I remember I couldn't find many recordings where it was a clear geminate. In any case, I guess a pre-condition for its occurrence is that these dialects must lack the shift of the original geminate /jj/ into /dd͡ʒ/, as happened in most varieties north of Lazio.
No, that was the other major point I wanted to correct, namely when I wrote:
That is, in the middle of a word it always counts as a double consonant (split across two syllables), but at the beginning of the word it can count as a single onset (belonging only to the following syllable). This is also the case in Latin, although generally the poets just avoided short vowels followed by word-initial <z>, evidently because the prescriptive rule was based on Greek and disagreed with the actual Latin pronunciation. Incidentally, the same happened with initial st-.
The y of “happy”. I don’t think standard English has a more similar word-final vowel, and in some parts of England the y of “happy” can sound more like [e] or [ɛ].
Right, that's known as the “happY-laxing” and also as “schwee” – the two linked articles are nice and have audio illustrations. This is a feature of traditional RP, but in Yorkshire and Manchester accents this vowel tends to be even lower than the vowel of kit and more like that of dress. This is why it's more appropriately transcribed as happeh. Incidentally, Italian also doesn't distinguish [e] from [ɛ] in unstressed syllables, with Tuscan and the standard only having [e] when unstressed.
Yes; weird case:/franˈt͡ʃeze/ vs. /inˈglese/ (I didn't transcribe [ŋ(g)] because it's not a phoneme in Italian).
Sorry if I was perceived as rude, it was not my intention.
Nowadays we say la iena /la ˈjɛna/ (borrowed word) but l'ieri, d'ieri /ˈljɛri, ˈdjɛri/; in past times elisions were more common; I'm sorry to contradict you but I don't think /j/ is "underlying geminate" in Tuscan-Standard Italian (unlike, for example, in Rome).
I admit I'm not an expert of Latin metre, you could be right in this very case.
Yes, the only exception being compound words such as bempensante (also written benpensante) /bɛmpenˈsante/, retaining the original sound even in unstressed part of a word.
Inghilterra is clearly older and fundamentally native - I'd like to know how it ended up in its present form.
The “native vs learned” explanation would work if all borrowed words in Italian took the article la, and all native words took l' with elision. This generalisation is incorrect: the correct generalisation is that all words starting in a vowel take l', and all other words take the full form. This feeds into the wider generalisation that in Italian, vowels are elided before other vowels, but not before consonants, though there's lexicalised apocope in words ending in /n, r, l/.
I remember reading there was variation in regards to this.
Inghilterra ~ inghilese /-ese/ was the native Tuscan solution, but the learned inglese (with /-ese/ for analogy with portoghese, olandese, and similar words) replaced it. Francese (with /-eze/) belongs to the Northern influenced, "courtesan lexicon" (lessico cortese) and so it has lenition.
Hmm, I've read it and I must admit it works, but nevertheless it has a pair of problems:
Probably yes, but in Tuscany this is the way we pronounce it.
Oh, heh, I hadn't even noticed the discrepancy with the medial /i/. What I was wondering was how the name itself got into Tuscan and by what route. Intuitively it looks like a calque (loan-translation) from Germanic Engelland that might go back to the Migration Period, only I'm wondering if and how the Lombards for example knew of England at all without reading about it in Latin. Maybe they didn't, but loan-translated La. Anglia [terra] as Engelland and then vernacular Romance loan-translated that as Engelterra. In any case, the raising of pre-stress /e/ means it's an old Tuscan word.
Theoretical symmetry and beauty is a natural human drive, but one should be careful with it and not let get that drive overshadow the real world data, which has no need to be symmetrical or beautiful. Already in Latin, the only onset (homosyllabic) clusters a /w/ appeared in were [kw] and [ŋ.gw], while /j/ couldn't appear in onset clusters at all, only heterosyllabically, as in ab-jectus. For this and other reasons, [kw] and [ŋ.gw] in Latin are often described as single labiovelar consonants /kʷ/ and /gʷ/, and this situation looks to be preserved in Italian, although in words like cuore it's difficult to decide whether we have /kʷɔre/ or /ku͡ɔre/. Most European languages have /j/ as a phoneme but not /w/, which is an allophone of /v/ – see my replies in this thread.
Every etymological dictionary I have read treat Inghilterra as a Tuscan adaption of Old French Engleterre, Middle and Modern French Angleterre.
If we consider /i̯ɛ, u̯ɔ/ as "rising (full) diphthongs" (two homosyllabic vowels: parallelism with /Vi̯, Vu̯/?) and then /kʷ, ɡʷ/ we may get rid of (marginal) phoneme /w/, while /j/ can be considered actually underlyingly geminate.
Oh, right, that explains it. It also occurs to me that the Tuscan /in-/ might simply be an adaptation by the regular correspondence en- :: in-, as in the prefix.
More precisely, most analyses seem to agree that there's a difference between the surface/phonetic [i̯V] and [Vi̯] – the rising [i̯V] is by most accounts a true phonological diphthong, whereas the falling [Vi̯] is simply a sequence of two vowels syllabified together (in fact I have a few questions about this, but they don't belong in this thread). Canalis 2018 serves as an example of such an analysis (see scihub); but van der Veer 2006 concludes that rising surface diphthongs are underlyingly in some cases sequences of two vowels (e.g. in vialetto), and in others glide+vowel sequences (muovente, siepe), the latter fitting the classical notion of the diphthong.
How often are these geminates simplified in normal speech? I've checked forvo and only hear true geminates, but in Russian for instance, which has plenty of morphologically motivated and even some lexical geminates (+ an always-geminate phoneme щ /ɕː/), unmotivated geminates tend to be simplified, especially in borrowings from French (where these are only graphic) and Latin. Besides, Catalan geminate voiced stops could be distinguished from singletons just by escaping lenition.
I think of geminate consonants to be more oral than written. Those double consonant groups you mention bb,gg, dd, nn, pp, tt do look rather foreign or learnèd. Would a Catalan really pronounce ab.bàsida and ad.dictiu?
The most obvious geminate for Catalans, the l·l (obvious because we even call it ela geminada), is simplified by almost everyone in normal speech, except perhaps for a few words. But as the rest of geminates in learned words, they are geminated in careful reading, specially in formal contexts.
Some are geminated. Suggerir is often pronounced as /dʤ/ (well not a gemination maybe, but different from /ʒ/). And tarannà ("character") is always pronounced geminated. But most other words are pronounced with a simple consonant. There isn't gemination in native (patrimonial) words unless as a result of t+consonant as you say. Besides in the Majorcan dialect, where consonantic assimilations are more common, <ct> becomes /tt/: arquitette, or <rl> becomes /ll/: pal·là instead of parlar. In fact al·lot, where the gemination is always done, comes from arlot.
These are pronounced /dʤ/
I never imagined all those would combine to become geminates. Some of those combinations become complicated to process. Hanfellamó, nossammentí, yameggén
Yes, I know it's commonly called schwa and for lack of a better word I'll leave it at that. For me schwa is the "e" in French "le" or English "the". I don't how you are pronouncing it personally but the neutral vowel to me sounds somewhere closer to "a" yet not quite that. But closer. Were it not for Western dialect I think they could have written "las platjas blancas" in lieu of "les platges blanques".
@Dymn So the t + consonant was originally pronounced and then after assimilated into the consonant to become a geminate? I always thought someone like Pompeu Fabra preferred reinstating a Latinate t from septimana rather than write semmana.
Bear in mind that not all speakers do them (you can also hear a -dl- combination there) and that it also depends on the speaker's speed.
It's a different thing, as that usually carries some trace of aspiration. (Except for "marrico", that would be close when done as in northern dialects, as when s drops in los relojes.)
Yep, I know, nevertheless, /i̯ɛ, u̯ɔ/ show a more vocalic behavior than, say, /jV/ (as in iena or juventino) in the selection of articles, elision and so on. I think (just an hypothesis, eh) they could be more similar to falling /Vi̯, Vu̯/ than to pure glide + vowel sequence /jV, wV/ (the latter a marginal phoneme). Time to open a new thread?
Well, vialetto in Tuscany is /vi.aˈletto/ with no diphthong/glide at all; *muovente is not good Italian: we say movente and it is used especially in compound words (semovente, commovente) for two reason: vicinity to Latin and the neglected rule of dittongo mobile: a stressed /i̯ɛ, u̯ɔ/ loses /i̯, u̯/ switching to unstressed position (piède ~ pedóne, muòvere ~ movènte).
Yes, I think in most cases, there was a true t, at least it was in Latin, so it had to be assimilated at some point (spatula > espatlla, cutina > cotna, septimana > setmana...). However the second sentence is true, by Fabra's time it was already geminated long ago and "week" was written semmana or senmana, he reinstated the Old Catalan spelling, which also makes visible the relationship with set "seven".
They can't be, the t's are inherited and appear in the same location in other Romance languages, see eg. Italian settimana. Even the t in vetlla is inherited, from Latin vetula, and the t in jutge, which is from the Latin d in iudex, still Present in eg. Italian giudice, and in metge which is from medicus, see eg. Italian medico.Sobakus said:
Oh, forgot to answer this.
Are you saying some people pronounce amel.la, rol.le, vel.la, bal.le, bil.let, mol.le, espal.la, ral.lar? Who should do that?
They certainly can be, but aren't. What you write is known as the etymological fallacy (though this term is usually applied to meaning, not pronunciation). That's like saying that the English <gh> in tough can't be merely a graphic convention for /f/ because in Middle English and some dialects and related languages it's pronounced as /x/ or the like.
Jutge is pronounced with /dʤ/, so with the t pronounced (and assimilated in voicedness to the next consonant).
In the Balearics, and parts of Valencia and the Ebro region of Catalonia. In spelling, these varieties use ametla, rotle, etc.
Well, why the surprise? It may even be the original or most conservative of the two pronunciations.Are you saying some people pronounce amel.la, rol.le, vel.la, bal.le, bil.let, mol.le, espal.la, ral.lar? Who should do that?
On Sardinia?
How could? We're talking about phenomena that probably took place centuries ago.
The English gh can't be a mere graphic convention for f, because it's not always pronounced f, see through, thorough, drought, and borough, for example. In fact, I believe the f pronunciation is a minority pronunciation, only seen in a few words, such as tough and laugh.
Clearly we're speaking two different languages here. You draw a false dichotomy – mere graphic conventions include rather than exclude etymologically motivated mere graphic conventions, and the English <gh> for /f/ is precisely this. The /f/ sound at the end of tough is no different in any way whatsoever from that in any other word. This is why it's a graphic convention with no implications for the underlying phonological representation, the segments (phonemes) that the word /tʌf/ is made up of, which are /t/, /ʌ/ and /f/.
