Tuscan gorgia
Encyclopedia
The Tuscan gorgia is a phonetic
Phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...

 phenomenon which characterizes the Tuscan dialect
Tuscan dialect
The Tuscan language , or the Tuscan dialect is an Italo-Dalmatian language spoken in Tuscany, Italy.Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, specifically on its Florentine variety...

s, in Tuscany
Tuscany
Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....

, 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...

, most especially the central ones, with Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

 traditionally viewed as the epicenter.

Description

The gorgia affects the voiceless stops /k/ /t/ and /p/, which are pronounced as fricatives (or, more precisely as approximants) in post-vocalic position (when not blocked by the competing phenomenon of syntactic doubling
Syntactic doubling
Syntactic gemination, or syntactic doubling, is an external sandhi phenomenon in Italian and some other Western Romance languages. It consists in the lengthening of the initial consonant after words of certain categories....

):
→ [h] → [θ] → [ɸ]

An example: the word identificare (to identify) /identifiˈkare/ is pronounced by a Tuscan speaker as [ˌidentifiˈhaːre], not as [ˌidentifiˈkaːre], as standard Italian phonology
Italian phonology
This article is about the phonology of the Italian language. It deals with the phonology and phonetics of Standard Italian as well as with geographical variants.-Vowels:Notes:*In Italian there is no phonemic distinction between long and short vowels...

 would require. The rule is sensitive to pause, but not word boundary, so that /la kasa/ (the house) is realized as [laˈhaːsa].

(In some areas the voiced counterparts /ɡ d b/ can also appear as fricative approximants [ɣ ð β], especially in fast or unguarded speech. This, however, appears more widespread elsewhere in the Mediterranean, having become standard in 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...

 and Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

.)

In a stressed syllable, /k t p/, preceded by another stop, can occasionally be realized as true aspirates [kʰ tʰ pʰ], especially if the stop is the same, for example [apˈpʰuːnto] (appunto, note), [akˈkʰaːsa] (a casa, at home, with phonosyntactic strengthening due to the preposition).

Geographical distribution

Establishing a hierarchy of weakening within the class /k t p/ is not an easy task. Recent studies have called into question the traditional view that mutation of /t/ and /p/ is less widespread geographically than /k/ → [h], and in areas where the rule is not categorical, /p/ is often more likely to weaken than /k/ or /t/. On the other hand, fast-speech deletion [the «zero phone»] affects /k/ first and foremost wherever it occurs, while /t/ can reduce to [h], especially in high-frequency items such as participles (e.g. [anˈdaːho] andato). Fricativization of /k/ is by far the most perceptually salient of the three, however, and amongst Italians it has thus become a stereotype (geo- and sociolinguistic marker) of Tuscan dialects.

The phenomenon is more evident and finds its irradiation point in the city of Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

. From this point, the gorgia spreads its influence along the entire Arno
Arno
The Arno is a river in the Tuscany region of Italy. It is the most important river of central Italy after the Tiber.- Source and route :The river originates on Mount Falterona in the Casentino area of the Apennines, and initially takes a southward curve...

 valley, losing strength nearer the coast. On the coast the gorgia cannot already change /p/ and weakly changes /t/. The weakening of /k/ is a linguistic continuum in the entire Arno valley, in the cities of Prato
Prato
Prato is a city and comune in Tuscany, Italy, the capital of the Province of Prato. The city is situated at the foot of Monte Retaia , the last peak in the Calvana chain. The lowest altitude in the comune is 32 m, near the Cascine di Tavola, and the highest is the peak of Monte Cantagrillo...

, Pistoia
Pistoia
Pistoia is a city and comune in the Tuscany region of Italy, the capital of a province of the same name, located about 30 km west and north of Florence and is crossed by the Ombrone Pistoiese, a tributary of the River Arno.-History:...

, Montecatini Terme
Montecatini Terme
Montecatini Terme is an Italian district of 21,095 inhabitants within the province of Pistoia in Tuscany. The most important center in Valdinievole...

, Lucca
Lucca
Lucca is a city and comune in Tuscany, central Italy, situated on the river Serchio in a fertile plainnear the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Lucca...

, Pisa
Pisa
Pisa is a city in Tuscany, Central Italy, on the right bank of the mouth of the River Arno on the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Pisa...

, Livorno
Livorno
Livorno , traditionally Leghorn , is a port city on the Tyrrhenian Sea on the western edge of Tuscany, Italy. It is the capital of the Province of Livorno, having a population of approximately 160,000 residents in 2009.- History :...

. In the northwest it is present to some extent in Versilia
Versilia
The Versilia is a part of Tuscany in the north-western province of Lucca, and is named after the Versilia river.Known for fashionable Riviera resorts, it consists of numerous clubs that are frequented by local celebrities....

, and in the east extends over the Pratomagno to include Bibbiena and outlying areas, where /k t p/ are all affected, although variably, both fully occlusive [k], [t], [p] and "lenited" (lax, unvoiced) phones the major alternates. The Apennines
Apennine mountains
The Apennines or Apennine Mountains or Greek oros but just as often used alone as a noun. The ancient Greeks and Romans typically but not always used "mountain" in the singular to mean one or a range; thus, "the Apennine mountain" refers to the entire chain and is translated "the Apennine...

 are the northern border of the phenomenon, and while a definite southern border has not been established, it is present in Siena
Siena
Siena is a city in Tuscany, Italy. It is the capital of the province of Siena.The historic centre of Siena has been declared by UNESCO a World Heritage Site. It is one of the nation's most visited tourist attractions, with over 163,000 international arrivals in 2008...

 and further south, through at least San Quirico d'Orcia
San Quirico d'Orcia
San Quirico d'Orcia is a comune of c. 2,500 inhabitants in the Province of Siena in the Italian region Tuscany, located about 80 km southeast of Florence and about 35 km southeast of Siena inside the Valdorcia landscape...

. In far southern Tuscany it gives way to the lenition (laxing) typical of northern and coastal Lazio.

History

The Tuscan gorgia arose perhaps as late as the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

, as a natural phonetic phenomenon, much like the consonant voicing that affected Northern Italian dialects and the rest of Western Romance (now phonemicized, e.g. /amika/ 'friend, f.' > /amiɡa/), but remained allophonic in Tuscany, as laxing or voicing generally does elsewhere in Central Italy and in Corsica
Corsica
Corsica is an island in the Mediterranean Sea. It is located west of Italy, southeast of the French mainland, and north of the island of Sardinia....

.

Although it was once hypothesized that the gorgia phenomena are the continuation of similar features in the language that pre-dated Romanization of the area, Etruscan
Etruscan language
The Etruscan language was spoken and written by the Etruscan civilization, in what is present-day Italy, in the ancient region of Etruria and in parts of Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna...

, that view is no longer held by most specialists. Instead, it is increasingly accepted as being a local form of the same consonant weakening that affects other speech in Central Italy, and extends far beyond, to Western Romance. Support for this hypothesis can be found in several facts:
  • The phonetic details of Etruscan are unknown, thus it is impossible to identify their continuance.
  • There is no mention of the phenomenon until the 16th century, and no trace in older writing (since the gorgia is a phonetic phenomenon, not phonemic, its appearance in writing might not be expected, but it does appear in writing in the 19th century).
  • The gorgia is less evident in Lucca
    Lucca
    Lucca is a city and comune in Tuscany, central Italy, situated on the river Serchio in a fertile plainnear the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Lucca...

     and does not exist in far Southern Tuscany, nor in Lazio, where Etruscan settlement was quite concentrated.
  • Sociolinguistic studies in Eastern Tuscany (e.g. Cravens and Giannelli 1995, Pacini 1998) show that the gorgia competes with traditional laxing in exactly the same post-vocalic position, suggesting that the two results are phonetically different resolutions of the same phonological rule.
  • The gorgia shows all the characteristics of a naturally-developed allophonic rule in its alternations with full plosives ([ka:sa] 'house', [la ha:sa]'the house', [trekka:se] '3 houses').
  • Fricativization of /k t p/ is not uncommon in the languages of the world. Similar processes have happened in e.g. Proto-Germanic (which is why in Germanic languages
    Germanic languages
    The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...

     there are words such as father, horn, tooth as opposed to Italian padre, corno, dente - see Grimm's Law
    Grimm's law
    Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...

    ), and during the development of the Hungarian language
    Hungarian language
    Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....

    .
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