ABSTRACT
The following discussion of Italian dialects aims both at presenting the main dialect subdivisions and at providing background information for the description of local varieties of Italian (chapter IV). By its very nature this chapter is more suitable for reference or for reading at a much slower pace than the rest of the first part of this book. The adoption of a diachronic point of view (connecting Latin to the present day stages of the dialects) seems appropriate, for it offers a net with a mesh much finer than the one provided by synchronic analysis (short of making the latter so elaborate that it would be unreadable for anyone not versed in linguistics) with which to extract such features as can help identify the dialect of a text. The word [siio] 'his' can be both Italian and Venetian; [siho] with the meaning T sweat' is Venetian but not Italian. This makes sense diachronically when one considers a series like Latin SUDO 'I sweat', N U D U M 'naked', CRUDUM 'raw', Italian sudo, nudo, crudo, Venetian [sik>], [ntio], [kriio], where D is preserved in Italian but falls in Venetian.1 If we compare the Italian words [filo] 'thread', [n&ve] 'snow', [v£ro] 'true' with the corresponding Sardinian ones [filu], [nlve], [v£ru], we find an apparently unsystematic situation: in the stressed syllable Italian [e] corresponds to either Sardinian [i] or [e], and Sardinian [i] corresponds to either Italian [i] or [e]; but in diachronic terms everything immediately falls into place: the three Latin vowels I, i, E (in FILUM, NIVEM, VERUM) are reduced to two both in Italian and in Sardinian, but those which lose their distinction are i and E in Italian (both becoming [e]), and i and I in Sardinian (both becoming [i]).
