La Spezia-Rimini Line
Encyclopedia
The La Spezia
–Rimini
Line (sometimes also referred to as the Massa
–Senigallia
Line), in the linguistics
of the Romance languages
, is a line that demarcates a number of important isogloss
es that distinguish Romance languages south and east of the line from Romance languages north and west of it. Romance languages on the eastern half of it include Italian
and the Eastern Romance languages
(Romanian
, Aromanian
, Megleno-Romanian
, Istro-Romanian
), while Spanish
, French
, Catalan
, Portuguese
as well as Gallo‒Italic languages are representatives of the western group. It has been suggested that the origin of these developments is to be found in the last decades of the Western Roman Empire
and the Ostrogothic Kingdom
(ca. 395-535 CE). During this period, the area of Italy north of the line was dominated by an increasingly Germanic
Roman Army of (Northern) Italy, followed by the Ostrogoths; while the Roman Senate
and Roman Catholic Church
became the dominant social elements south of the line. As for the provinces outside Italy, the social influences in Gaul and Iberia were broadly similar to those in Northern Italy, while the Balkans were dominated by the Byzantine Empire
at this time (and later, by Slavic peoples
).
The line runs through northern Italy
, very roughly from the cities of La Spezia
to Rimini (some linguists say that the line actually runs through Massa
and Senigallia
about 40 kilometres further to the south, and would more accurately be called the Massa–Senigallia Line).
North and west of the line (excluding some Northern Italian varieties, such as Ligurian
, which probably once had the characteristic but lost it under influence from standard Italian), the plural
of noun
s was drawn from the Latin
accusative case
, and is marked with /s/ regardless of grammatical gender
or declension
. South and east of the line, the plurals of nouns were usually taken from the Latin
nominative case
, and plurals are marked with vowel
s. Compare the plurals of cognate
nouns in Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French and Latin:
Generally speaking the western Romance languages show common innovations that the eastern Romance languages tend to lack. Another isogloss that falls on the La Spezia–Rimini line deals with the restructured voicing
of voiceless consonant
s that occur between vowels. Thus, Latin ('chain') becomes catena in Italian and catenă or cătină in Romanian, but cadeia in Portuguese, cadena in Catalan and Spanish and chaîne in French. Voicing, or further weakening, even to loss of these consonants is characteristic of the western branch of Romance; their retention is characteristic of eastern Romance. There are, however, exceptions which undermine this isogloss: Gascon
dialects in south-west France and Aragonese
in northern Aragon (Spain) — i.e. geographically Western Romance — also retain the original Latin voiceless stop between vowels. Indeed, the significance of the La Spezia–Rimini line is often challenged by specialists within both Italian dialectology and Romance dialectology. One reason for this is that while it demarcates preservation (and expansion) of phonemic geminate consonants (Central and Southern Italy) from their simplification (in Northern Italy, Gaul, and Iberia), the areas affected do not correspond consistently with those defined by voicing criteria. Romanian, which on the basis of lack of voicing is classified with Central and Southern Italian, has undergone simplification of geminates, a defining characteristic of Western Romance.
La Spezia
La Spezia , at the head of the Gulf of La Spezia in the Liguria region of northern Italy, is the capital city of the province of La Spezia. Located between Genoa and Pisa on the Ligurian Sea, it is one of the main Italian military and commercial harbours and hosts one of Italy's biggest military...
–Rimini
Rimini
Rimini is a medium-sized city of 142,579 inhabitants in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, and capital city of the Province of Rimini. It is located on the Adriatic Sea, on the coast between the rivers Marecchia and Ausa...
Line (sometimes also referred to as the Massa
Massa
Massa is a town and comune in Tuscany, central Italy, the administrative centre of the province of Massa-Carrara. It is located in the Frigido River Valley, near the Alpi Apuane, some 5 kilometers from the Tyrrhenian Sea....
–Senigallia
Senigallia
Senigallia is a comune and port town on Italy's Adriatic coast, 25 km by rail north of Ancona, in the Marche region, province of Ancona....
Line), in the linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
of the Romance languages
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
, is a line that demarcates a number of important isogloss
Isogloss
An isogloss—also called a heterogloss —is the geographical boundary of a certain linguistic feature, such as the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or use of some syntactic feature...
es that distinguish Romance languages south and east of the line from Romance languages north and west of it. Romance languages on the eastern half of it include Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
and the Eastern Romance languages
Eastern Romance languages
The Eastern Romance languages in their narrow conception, sometimes known as the Vlach languages, are a group of Romance languages that developed in Southeastern Europe from the local eastern variant of Vulgar Latin. Some classifications include the Italo-Dalmatian languages; when Italian is...
(Romanian
Romanian language
Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...
, Aromanian
Aromanian language
Aromanian , also known as Macedo-Romanian, Arumanian or Vlach is an Eastern Romance language spoken in Southeastern Europe...
, Megleno-Romanian
Megleno-Romanian language
Megleno-Romanian is a Romance language, similar to Aromanian and Romanian, or a dialect of the Romanian language...
, Istro-Romanian
Istro-Romanian language
Istro-Romanian is an Eastern Romance language that is still spoken today in a few villages and hamlets in the peninsula of Istria, on the northern part of the Adriatic Sea, in what is now Croatia as well as in other countries around the world where the Istro-Romanian people settled after the two...
), while Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, Catalan
Catalan language
Catalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
, Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
as well as Gallo‒Italic languages are representatives of the western group. It has been suggested that the origin of these developments is to be found in the last decades of the Western Roman Empire
Western Roman Empire
The Western Roman Empire was the western half of the Roman Empire after its division by Diocletian in 285; the other half of the Roman Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire, commonly referred to today as the Byzantine Empire....
and the Ostrogothic Kingdom
Ostrogothic Kingdom
The Kingdom established by the Ostrogoths in Italy and neighbouring areas lasted from 493 to 553. In Italy the Ostrogoths replaced Odoacer, the de facto ruler of Italy who had deposed the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire in 476. The Gothic kingdom reached its zenith under the rule of its...
(ca. 395-535 CE). During this period, the area of Italy north of the line was dominated by an increasingly Germanic
Germanic
Germanic may refer to* The Germanic languages, descended from Proto-Germanic.* The Germanic peoples**List of Germanic peoples**List of confederations of Germanic tribes* German people* Germanic mythology...
Roman Army of (Northern) Italy, followed by the Ostrogoths; while the Roman Senate
Senate
A senate is a deliberative assembly, often the upper house or chamber of a legislature or parliament. There have been many such bodies in history, since senate means the assembly of the eldest and wiser members of the society and ruling class...
and Roman Catholic Church
Roman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...
became the dominant social elements south of the line. As for the provinces outside Italy, the social influences in Gaul and Iberia were broadly similar to those in Northern Italy, while the Balkans were dominated by the Byzantine Empire
Byzantine Empire
The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania to its inhabitants and neighbours, the Empire was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State...
at this time (and later, by Slavic peoples
Slavic peoples
The Slavic people are an Indo-European panethnicity living in Eastern Europe, Southeast Europe, North Asia and Central Asia. The term Slavic represents a broad ethno-linguistic group of people, who speak languages belonging to the Slavic language family and share, to varying degrees, certain...
).
The line runs through northern Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, very roughly from the cities of La Spezia
La Spezia
La Spezia , at the head of the Gulf of La Spezia in the Liguria region of northern Italy, is the capital city of the province of La Spezia. Located between Genoa and Pisa on the Ligurian Sea, it is one of the main Italian military and commercial harbours and hosts one of Italy's biggest military...
to Rimini (some linguists say that the line actually runs through Massa
Massa
Massa is a town and comune in Tuscany, central Italy, the administrative centre of the province of Massa-Carrara. It is located in the Frigido River Valley, near the Alpi Apuane, some 5 kilometers from the Tyrrhenian Sea....
and Senigallia
Senigallia
Senigallia is a comune and port town on Italy's Adriatic coast, 25 km by rail north of Ancona, in the Marche region, province of Ancona....
about 40 kilometres further to the south, and would more accurately be called the Massa–Senigallia Line).
North and west of the line (excluding some Northern Italian varieties, such as Ligurian
Ligurian language (Romance)
Ligurian is a Gallo-Romance language spoken in Liguria in Northern Italy, parts of the Mediterranean coastal zone of France, Monaco and in the villages of Carloforte and Calasetta in Sardinia. Genoese , spoken in Genoa, the capital of Liguria, is its most important dialect...
, which probably once had the characteristic but lost it under influence from standard Italian), the plural
Plural
In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity representing a value of more-than-one. Typically applied to nouns, a plural word or marker is used to distinguish a value other than the default quantity of a noun, which is typically one...
of noun
Noun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
s was drawn from the Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
accusative case
Accusative case
The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions...
, and is marked with /s/ regardless of grammatical gender
Grammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
or declension
Declension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
. South and east of the line, the plurals of nouns were usually taken from the Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
nominative case
Nominative case
The nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments...
, and plurals are marked with vowel
Vowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
s. Compare the plurals of cognate
Cognate
In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. This learned term derives from the Latin cognatus . Cognates within the same language are called doublets. Strictly speaking, loanwords from another language are usually not meant by the term, e.g...
nouns in Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French and Latin:
| Romanian | Italian | Spanish | Portuguese | Catalan | French | Latin (nom. Nominative case The nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments... pl. Grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions .... ) | Latin (acc. Accusative case The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions... pl. Grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions .... ) | meaning |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| viaţă, vieţi | vita, vite | vida, vidas | vida, vidas | vida, vides | vie, vies | vitae | vitās | life, lives |
| lup, lupi | lupo, lupi | lobo, lobos | lobo, lobos | llop, llops | loup, loups | lupī | lupōs | wolf, wolves |
| om, oameni | uomo, uomini | hombre, hombres | homem, homens | home, homes/hòmens | homme, hommes | hominēs | hominēs | man, men |
Generally speaking the western Romance languages show common innovations that the eastern Romance languages tend to lack. Another isogloss that falls on the La Spezia–Rimini line deals with the restructured voicing
Voice (phonetics)
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds, with sounds described as either voiceless or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts. Voicing can refer to the articulatory process in which the vocal cords vibrate...
of voiceless consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
s that occur between vowels. Thus, Latin ('chain') becomes catena in Italian and catenă or cătină in Romanian, but cadeia in Portuguese, cadena in Catalan and Spanish and chaîne in French. Voicing, or further weakening, even to loss of these consonants is characteristic of the western branch of Romance; their retention is characteristic of eastern Romance. There are, however, exceptions which undermine this isogloss: Gascon
Gascon language
Gascon is usually considered as a dialect of Occitan, even though some specialists regularly consider it a separate language. Gascon is mostly spoken in Gascony and Béarn in southwestern France and in the Aran Valley of Spain...
dialects in south-west France and Aragonese
Aragonese language
Aragonese is a Romance language now spoken in a number of local varieties by between 10,000 and 30,000 people over the valleys of the Aragón River, Sobrarbe and Ribagorza in Aragon, Spain...
in northern Aragon (Spain) — i.e. geographically Western Romance — also retain the original Latin voiceless stop between vowels. Indeed, the significance of the La Spezia–Rimini line is often challenged by specialists within both Italian dialectology and Romance dialectology. One reason for this is that while it demarcates preservation (and expansion) of phonemic geminate consonants (Central and Southern Italy) from their simplification (in Northern Italy, Gaul, and Iberia), the areas affected do not correspond consistently with those defined by voicing criteria. Romanian, which on the basis of lack of voicing is classified with Central and Southern Italian, has undergone simplification of geminates, a defining characteristic of Western Romance.
See also
- Classification of Romance languagesClassification of Romance languagesThe internal classification of the Romance languages is a complex and sometimes controversial topic which may not have a unique answer. Several classifications have been proposed, based on different criteria....
- Romance pluralsRomance pluralsPlurals in Romance languages appear to be formed in two quite different ways:#By adding -s ; also in Sardinian....
- Plural inflection in Eastern Lombard
- Gothic LineGothic LineThe Gothic Line formed Field Marshal Albert Kesselring's last major line of defence in the final stages of World War II along the summits of the Apennines during the fighting retreat of German forces in Italy against the Allied Armies in Italy commanded by General Sir Harold Alexander.Adolf Hitler...