Venetian language Totally Explained

Everything about Venetian Language totally explained

Venetian or Venetan is a Romance language spoken by over two million people,.
According to Ethnologue, Venetian and Italian belong to different sub-branches of the Italo-Western branch: Venetian is a member of the Gallo-Iberian group, which also includes Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese and French, among others; whereas Italian is a member of the Italo-Dalmatian group. More precisely, Venetian belongs to the Gallo-Romance sub-branch of Gallo-Iberian, which includes French but not Catalan and Spanish. In that classification, therefore, Venetian is more closely related to French, Catalan and Spanish than to Italian.
On the other hand, although French and Venetian are now mutually intelligible only to a small degree (mostly due to major changes in French pronunciation over the last few centuries), Spanish and Venetian are mutually comprehensible to some extent.

Regional variants

The main regional variants and sub-variants of Venetian are

Central (Padua, Vicenza, Polesine), with about 1,500,000 speakers.

Eastern/Coastal (Venice, Trieste, Grado, Istria, Rijeka).

Western (Verona, Trento).

North-Central (Treviso, parts of Pordenonese).

Northern (Belluno, comprising Feltre, Agordo, Cadore, Zoldo Alto). All these variants are mutually intelligible, with a minimum 92% between the most diverging ones (Central and Western). Modern speakers reportedly can still understand to some extent Venetian texts from the 1300s.
Other noteworthy variants are spoken in

Chioggia,

Pontine Marshes,

Dalmatia, Croatia,

Rio Grande do Sul (Antônio Prado) and Santa Catarina, Brazil ("Talian"),

Chipilo, Mexico,

Tulcea, Romania,

Peripheral creole languages along the southern border (nearly extinct).

Language features

Familial attributes

Like most Romance languages, Venetian has mostly abandoned the Latin case system, in favor of prepositions and a more rigid subject-verb-object sentence structure. It has thus become more analytic, if not quite as much as English. Venetian also has the Romance articles, both definite (derived from the Latin demonstrative ille) and indefinite (derived from the numeral unus).
Venetian also retained the Latin concepts of gender (masculine and feminine) and number (singular and plural). Nouns and adjectives can be modified by suffixes that indicate several qualities such as size, endearment, deprecation, etc. Adjectives (usually postfixed) and articles are inflected to agree with the noun in gender and number:

el gato graso, the fat (male) cat.

ła gata grasa, the fat (female) cat.

i gati grasi, the fat (male) cats.

łe gate grase, the fat (female) cats.

el gatòn graso, the fat big (male) cat.

ła gatòna grasa, the fat big (female) cat.

un bel gateło, a nice small (male) cat.

na beła gateła, a nice small (female) cat. Some pronouns retain a neuter form reserved for abstract nouns (par questo "for this reason", de queło "about that fact" n.) different from the masculin (par 'sto qua "for this boy/dog", de queło là "about that man/book" m.) while in Italian masculine forms also work for the neuter (per questo="for this boy/reason"; di quello="about that man/fact").

Specific attributes

Sound system

Venetian has some sounds not present in Italian, an interdental voiceless fricative [θ] spelled ç or z(h) and similar to English th in thing and thought, to Castilian (not Latin-American) Spanish c(e, i)/z (as in cero, cien, zapato), Modern Greek θ (theta), and Icelandic Thorn þ/Þ and Eth Ð/ð; it occurs, for example, in çena/zhena (supper), which sounds the same as Castilian Spanish cena (same meaning). However this sound, which is present only in some variants of the language (Bellunese, north-Trevisan, some Central Venetian rural areas around Padua, Vicenza and the mouth of the river Po), is considered provincial with most variants using other sounds instead such as [s], [z], and [ʃ]. Some variants also present an interdental voiced fricative written "z" (el pianze=he cries) but this often turns into voiced-S, for example [z] (written x: el pianxe) or into dental D (el piande).
In some varieties the intervocalic L turns into a soft "evanescent" L (this alternation is often represented with one spelling ł). The pronunciation of this phoneme varies from an almost e in the region of Venice, to a partially vocalised l further inland, to void in some mountainous areas. Thus, for example, góndoła may sound like góndoea, góndola or góndoa. In the latter variants, the "ł" spelling prevents possible confusion between pairs like scóła/skóła ("school") and scóa/skóła ("broom"). Standard Italian had this type of L in more limited conditions, but changed the spelling to i (bianco, chiamare from earlier blancus, clamare).
Venetian doesn't have the doubled consonant sounds characteristic of Tuscan and many other Italian dialects: thus Italian fette, palla, penna ("slices", "ball", and "pen") are fete, bała, and pena in Venetian. The masculine singular ending, which is usually -o / -e in Italian, is often voided in Venetian, particularly in the countryside varieties: Italian pieno ("full") is pien, and altare is altar. Also, the masculine article el is often shortened to 'l.

Lexicon

The Venetian lexicon has a large number of original word forms derived from Latin, Greek, and German, such as tosàt ("lad", in Italian ragazzo), técia ("pan", pentola), còtoła ("skirt", sottana), bixo ("grey," bigio), bìsi ("peas", piselli), sgorlàr ("to shake", scuotere), and many more.

Venetian	English	Italian	Venetian word Origin
bèver, trincàr	to drink	bere	bibere (Latin), trinken (German)
bèca	spicy hot	piccante	?
bisato	eel	anguilla	?
butàr	to throw	gettare	bautan (Gothic)
cantón	corner	angolo	?
caréga, trón	chair	sedia	cathedraticum, thronus (Latin) from (Greek)
cascàr, croar xò	to fall	cadere	from casus of cadere (Latin) made into a verb
co	when (in non-interrogative clauses)	quando	cum (Latin)
copàr	to kill	uccidere	occupare? (Latin)
doxe (doge)	Doge	duce	dux (Latin)
fiól	son	figlio	filius, filiolus (Latin)
gòto	drinking glass	bicchiere	?
insìa	exit	uscita	in + exita (Latin)
magnàr	to eat	mangiare	manducare (Latin)
mare	mother	madre	mater (Latin)
mi	I	io	me (Latin)
morsegàr	to bite	mordere	from morsus of mordere (Latin) made into a verb
mustaci	mustaches	baffi	?
munìn	cat	gatto	perhaps from "meow" sound
mus	donkey	asino	?
nòtoła, barbastrìo, signàpoła	bat	pipistrello	?
òcio	eye, watch out!	occhio	occulus (Latin)
oxèło	bird	uccello	avicellus (Latin)
pantegàna	rat	ratto	?
pirón	fork	forchetta	piro? (Greek)
plàstega	plastic	plastica	plastikos (Greek)
pomo/pón	apple	mela	pomus (Latin)
récia	ear	orecchio	auriculum (Latin)
sghiràt	squirrel	scoiattolo	?
sgnape	schnapps	liquore	schnapps (German)
supiar, fis-ciar	to whistle	fischiare	sub + flare (Latin)
tòr su, ciapar	to pick up	prendere, chiappare	tollere, captulare? (Latin)
ancuò, 'ncò	today	oggi	hunc + hodie (Latin)
vaca	cow	mucca	vaca (Latin)
vardar	to look	guardare	warten (Gothic)

Redundant subject pronouns

A peculiarity of Venetian grammar is a "semi-analytical" verbal flexion, with a compulsory "clitic subject pronoun" before the verb in many sentences, "echoing" the subject as an ending or a weak pronoun. Independent/emphatic pronouns (for example ti), on the contrary, are optional.

Italian: (Tu) eri sporco ("You were dirty").

Venetian: (Ti) te jèra sporc or even Ti te jèri/xeri sporco (lit. "(You) you were dirty").

Italian: Il cane era sporco ("The dog was dirty").

Venetian: El can 'l jèra sporc[o] (lit. "The dog he was dirty").

Italian: (Tu) ti sei domandato ("You have asked yourself").

Venetian: (Ti) te te à/gà/ghè domandà (lit. "(You) you yourself have asked"). The clitic subject pronoun (te, el/ła, i/łe) is used with the 2nd and 3rd person singular, and with the 3rd person plural. This feature may have arisen as a compensation for the fact that the 2nd- and 3rd-person inflections for most verbs, which are still distinct in Italian and many other Romance languages, are identical in Venetian. (The Piedmontese language also has clitic subject pronouns, but the rules are somewhat different.)
The function of clitics is particularly visible in long sentences, which don't always have clear intonational breaks to easily tell apart vocative and imperative in sharp commands from exclamations with "shouted indicative". In Venetian the clitic el marks the indicative verb and its masculine subject, otherwise there's an imperative preceded by a vocative:

Venetian: Marco el canta ben, dai! ("Mark (subj.) sings well, you've to admit it!" - exclamation: subject + indicative)

Venetian: Marco canta ben, dai! ("Mark (voc.) sing well, come on!" - command: vocative+imperative)

Ven.Ital.: Marco canta ben, dai! (both exclamative and imperative)

Std.Ital.: Marco canta bene, dai! (both exclamative and imperative) Indeed, the verbal forms requiring subject clitics can often change or even drop their endings without problems of confusion because the clitic itself provide the necessary information (in Piedmontese and Milanese the clitic isn't sufficient to mark the verb and often requires the cooccurence of a specific ending).
The clitics are the same in whole Veneto with two exceptions: te becomes ti in Venice (but is different from emphatic TI!) and becomes tu in some bellunese areas. El becomes Al in bellunese.

2nd singular person present indicative of "magnar"

Venetian in Venice: (TI) ti magni (lit." (You) you eat")

Venetian in Padua-Vicenza-Rovigo-Verona: (TI) te magni (=lit. "(You) you eat")

Venetian in Treviso-Belluno: (TI) te magna (=lit. "(You) you eat")

2nd singular person imperf. indicative of "magnar"

Venetian in Venice: (TI) ti magnavi (lit. "(You) you used to eat")

Venetian in Pad-Vic-Rov-Ver: (TI) te magnavi (lit. "(You) you used to eat")

Venetian in Treviso-Belluno: (TI) te/tu magnava/magnéa(lit. "(You) you used to eat")
2nd singular person present indicative of "sentir"

Venetian in Venice-Verona: (TI) te/ti senti (lit. "(You) you hear/you feel")

Venetian in Vic-Pad-Rov: (TI) te sinti (lit. "(You) you hear/you feel")

Venetian in Treviso: (TI) te sente (lit. "(You) you hear/you feel")

Venetian in Belluno: (TI) te/tu sent (lit. "(You) you hear/you feel")
3rd singular person present indicative of "sentir"

Venetian Ven-Ver-Vic-Pad-Rov: (EL CAN) el sente (lit. "(The dog) he hears/he feels")

Venetian Trev-Bell: (EL CAN) el/al sent (lit. "(The dog) he hears/he feels") Such variations in last and internal vowels don't block reciprocal comprehension between people in Veneto because what is felt as important to mark the verb is the clitic ("te, el").
Also general Venetian forms exist with no endings:

Venetian (in whole Veneto): te vien / ti vien ("you come")

Venetian (in whole Veneto): el vien (lit. "he come" as there was no -s)

Venetian (in whole Veneto): i vien ("they come") Note that when the subject is postverbal (motion verbs, unaccusative verbs) the clitic is banned and the past participle of compound forms (if any) is invariably masc.singular, yielding a semi-impersonal form which doesn't exist in Italian:

Normal form

Italian: Mie sorelle sono arrivate ("[asfor] My sisters have arrived-f.pl.")

Venetian: Mé sorełe łe xe/è rivàe (lit."[asfor] My sisters they-cl.f.pl. have arrived-f.pl.")
Impersonal form (only in Venetian)

Italian: Sono arrivate le mie sorelle (hey, the news! "my sisters have arrived")

Venetian: Xe/Gh'è rivà mé sorełe (lit. "(there) has arrived-m.sg. my sisters") --- no clitic and an invariable m.sg. past participle In Italian the past participle is always inflected while in the Venetian in the impersonal form it's invariable and the verb has no plural (fem.) clitic, differently from the normal flection.
Interrogative inflection
Venetian also has a special interrogative verbal flexion used for direct questions, which also incorporates a redundant pronoun:

Italian: (Tu) eri sporco? ("Were you dirty?").

Venetian: (Ti) jèritu sporc? or even (Ti) xèrito sporco? (lit. "You were-you dirty?")

Italian: Il cane era sporco? ("Was the dog dirty?").

Venetian: El can jèreło sporc[o]? (lit. "The dog was-he dirty?")

or even: Jèreło sporc[o] el can ? (lit. "Was-he dirty the dog ?")

Italian: (Tu) ti sei domandato? ("Have you asked yourself?").

Venetian: (Ti) te àtu/gatu/ghètu/ghèto domandà? (lit. "You to-yourself have-you asked?")
Auxiliary verbs
Reflexive tenses use the auxiliary verb aver ("to have"), as in English, German, and Spanish; instead of essar ("to be"), which would be normal in Italian. The past participle is invariable, unlike Italian:

Italian: (Tu) ti sei lavato (lit. "(You) yourself are washed").

Venetian: (Ti) te te à/ga/ghè lavà (lit. "(You) you yourself have washed").

Italian: (Loro) si sono svegliati (lit. "(They) themselves are awakened").

Venetian: (Luri) i se ga/à svejà (lit. "(They) they themselves have awakened").
Continuing action
Another peculiarity of the language is the use of the phrase drìo (a) (literally, "behind to") to indicate continuing action:

Italian: Mio padre sta parlando ("My father is speaking").

Venetian: Mé pare 'l e drìo parlàr (lit. "My father he's busy speaking"). Indeed the word drio=busy/engaged also appears in other sentences:

Venetian: So' drio i mistieri lit. means "I am busy doing the housework" (=I'm doing it)

Venetian: Vo drio i mistieri lit. means "I go busy with the housework" (=I'm going to do it)

Venetian: Mé pare l'è in leto drio dormir lit. means "My father is in bed, busy sleeping" (=My father is sleeping in bed) Another progressive form uses the construction "essar là che" (lit. "to be there that"):

Venetian: Me pàre 'l è là che 'l parla (lit. "My father he's there that he speaks"). The use of progressive tenses is more pervasive than in Italian; E.g.

English: "He wouldn't possibly have been speaking to you".

Venetian: No 'l sarìa mìa stat/stà drìo parlarte (lit. "Not-he would possibly have been behind to speak-to-you"). That construction doesn't occur in Italian: *Non sarebbe mica stato parlandoti isn't syntactically valid.
Subordinate clauses
Subordinate clauses have double introduction ("whom that", "when that", "which that", "how that"), as in Old English:

Italian: So di chi parli ("(I) know about whom (you) speak").

Venetian: So de chi che te parla (lit. "(I) know about whom that you-speak").
Spelling systems

Traditional system
Venetian doesn't have an official writing system, but it's traditionally written using the Latin alphabet — sometimes with the addition of a couple of letters and/or diacritics for the sounds that don't exist in Italian, such as ç/zh for /θ/ or (recently) ł for the "soft" l. Otherwise, the traditional spelling rules are mostly those of Italian, except that x represents /z/, as in English "zero".
   As in Italian, the letter s between vowels usually represents [z], so one must write ss in those contexts to represent a voiceless /s/: basa for /'baza/ ("he/she kisses"), bassa for /'basa/ ("low"). Also, because of the numerous differences in pronunciation relative to Italian, the grave and acute accents are liberally used to mark both stress and vowel quality: � à /a/, á /ɐ/, è /ɛ/, é /e/, ò /ɔ/, ó /o/, ù /u/

Venetian allows the consonant cluster /stʃ/ (not present in Italian), which is usually written s-c or s'c before i or e, and s-ci or s'ci before other vowels. Examples include s-ciarir (Italian schiarire, "to clear up"), s-cèt (schietto, "plain clear"), and s-ciòp (schioppo, "gun"). The hyphen or apostrophe is used because the combination sc(i) is conventionally used for /ʃ/ sound, as in Italian spelling; for example scèmo (scemo, "stupid"); whereas sc before a, o and u represents /sk/: scàtoa (scatola, "box"), scóndar (nascondere, "to hide"), scusàr (scusare, "to forgive").
   However, the traditional spelling is subject to many historical, regional, and even personal variations. In particular, the letter z has been used to represent different sounds in different written traditions. In Venice and Vicenza, for example, the phonemes /θ/ and /z/ are written z and x, respectively (el pianze = "he cries", el xe = "he is"); whereas other traditions have used ç and z (el piançe and el ze).
Proposed systems
Recently there have been attempts to standardize and simplify the script, for example by using x for [z] and a single s for [s]; then one would write baxa for ['baza] ("she kisses") and basa for ['basa] ("low"). However, in spite of their theoretical advantages, these proposals have not been very successful outside of academic circles, because of regional variations in pronunciation and incompatibility with existing literature.
   The Venetian speakers of Chipilo use a system based on Spanish orthography, even though it doesn't contain letters for [j] and [θ]. The American linguist Carolyn McKay proposed a writing system for that variant, based entirely on the Italian alphabet. However, the system wasn't very popular.
Sample texts

Ruzante returning from war
The following sample, in the old dialect of Padua, comes from a play by Ruzante (Angelo Beolco), titled Parlamento de Ruzante che iera vegnú de campo ("Dialogue of Ruzante who came from the battlefield", 1529). The character, a peasant returning home from the war, is expressing to his friend Menato his relief at being still alive:

     Orbéntena, el no serae mal
star in campo per sto robare,
se 'l no foesse che el se ha pur
de gran paure. Càncaro ala roba!
A' son chialò mi, ala segura,
e squase che no a' no cherzo
esserghe gnan. [...]
Se mi mo' no foesse mi?
E che a foesse stò amazò in campo?
E che a foesse el me spirito?
Lo sarae ben bela.
No, càncaro, spiriti no magna.      "Really, it wouldn't be that bad
to be in the battlefield looting,
were it not that one gets also
big scares. Damn the loot!
I am right here, in safety,
and almost can't believe
I am. [...]
And if I were not me?
And if I'd been killed in battle?
And if I were my ghost?
That would be just great.
No, damn, ghosts don't eat."

Discorso de Perasto
The following sample is taken from the Perasto Speech (Discorso de Perasto), given on August 23, 1797 at Perasto, by Venetian Captain Giuseppe Viscovich, at the last lowering of the flag of the Venetian Republic (nicknamed the "Republic of Saint Mark).

     Par trezentosetantasete ani
le nostre sostanse, el nostro sangue,
le nostre vite le xè sempre stàe
par Ti, S.Marco; e fedelisimi
senpre se gavemo reputà,
Ti co nu, nu co Ti,
e senpre co Ti sul mar
semo stài lustri e virtuosi.
Nisun co Ti ne gà visto scanpar,
nisun co Ti ne gà visto vinti e spaurosi!''      "For three hundred and seventy seven years
our bodies, our blood
our lives have always been
for You, St. Mark; and very faithful
we have always thought ourselves,
You with us, we with You,
And always with You on the sea
we have been illustrious and virtuous.
No one has seen us with You flee,
No one has seen us with You defeated and fearful!"

Francesco Artico
The following is a contemporary text by Francesco Artico. The elderly narrator is recalling the church choir singers of his youth, who, needless to say, sang much better than those of today:

     Sti cantori vèci da na volta,
co i cioéa su le profezie,
in mezo al coro, davanti al restèl,
co'a ose i 'ndéa a cior volta
no so 'ndove e ghe voéa un bèl tóc
prima che i tornésse in qua
e che i rivésse in cao,
màssima se i jèra pareciàdi onti
co mezo litro de quel bon
tant par farse coràjo.      "These old singers of the past,
when they picked up the Prophecies,
in the middle of the choir, in front of the gate,
with their voice they went off
who knows where, and it was a long time
before they came back
and landed on the ground,
especially if they'd been previously "oiled"
with half a liter of the good one [wine]
just to make courage."

English words of Venetian origin

Arsenal, ciao, gazette, ghetto, gondola, lagoon, lido, lazareth, pantaloon, zero (from Arabic)

Montenegro means "black mountain", as does the Montenegrin name for it (Crna Gora).

Negroponte means "black bridge".

Regatta from the Venetian word "regata" means a fight/contest.Further Information
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