Talk:Romance plurals

Classification

Romanian is an Eastern Romance language. Italian is in the Italo-Western group. There may be some dispute about how Italian should be grouped however, I'll get back to this Bonaparte. The Eastern-Western division is based on the La Spezia-Rimini line. There is a lot to it, but there are also other things to consider. I'll get some references eventually. For the purposes of this article however (detailing plural formation), the Western-Eastern division is accurate. Alexander 007 04:17, 2 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Alex 007's take on this: merge with La Spezia-Rimini Line. Further comments: I do not think linguists actually group Romanian and Italian in one sub-group, though the West-East division is interesting. Romanian and Dalmatian are not even in the same sub-group, aside from some linguists in the past who maybe grouped them together on some hypothetical branch of Romance. Alexander 007 05:47, 2 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, Romance languages are more like points in an Rⁿ space, rather than points on an R axis, so there can be more groupings, depeding in which subgroup of features you take.

True, I thought of that; a sub-group with further sub-groups, or a different type of "grouping" based on some features in common. But my own opinion, not usable in Wikipedia, is that Eastern Romance developed quite separately from Italian, so the East-West division is not indicative of some close branch. Alexander 007 00:02, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well, yes, it can be summarized like this. But indeed, Romanian developed many features that make it distinct from the Western Romance. The "s" plural was just an inovation that simply did not reach Italy, Romania or Sardinia and just proves that these languages were isolated from the other Romance languages, not that Romanian and Italian were connected. bogdan 00:18, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. It in fact indicates at least 3 groups to me. Western Romance; "Mid-Romance"; and Eastern Romance. Alexander 007 00:28, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Given that its been almost 14 months since the merge was proposed (and that a clear consensus isn't obvious - at least to me), I'm going to be bold and declare the merge proposal inactive at this point. -- MarcoTolo 01:39, 24 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

There is more to it...

What about the way plurals are formed in, say, Piedmontese or Lombard? Only in Lombard there are at least two (maybe three) ways (depending on the variety) to form the plural of nouns and adjectives...

Example (Ticinese/Western Lombard koiné):

m. ul gatt 'the (male) cat' ~ i gatt 'the (tom) cats' (sg.: Ø ending, pl.: Ø ending)

f. la gata 'the (female) cat' ~ i gatt 'the (female) cats' (sg.: -a ending, pl.: Ø ending).

That is to say:

m. sg.: Ø ending, pl.: Ø ending -- i.e. unchanged

f. sg.: a ending, pl.: Ø ending

Other varieties have:

m. sg.: Ø ending, pl.: Ø ending -- i.e. unchanged

f. sg.: a ending, pl.: i/e ending

Others have:

m. sg.: Ø ending, pl.: Ø ending -- i.e. unchanged

f. sg.: a ending, pl.: a ending -- i.e. unchanged

Moreover, many Lombard varieties make also use of metaphony:

m. sg. vecc 'old' ~ m. pl. vicc 'old'

m. sg. tòch 'piece' ~ m. pl. töch 'pieces'

--Jorgengb 22:44, 4 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Even Friulian, that is generally regarded as a language with s-plural, does pose some problems. Cf. Friulian language, 'Exceptions':

Masculine nouns ending in -l or -li form their plurals by substituting -i for the l or the li.

cjaval, cjavai = horse, horses

fîl, fîi = string, strings

cjapiel, cjapiei = hat, hats

cjaveli, cjavei = hair, hairs

voli, voi = eye, eyes

zenoli, zenoi = knee, knees

[...]
Some masculine nouns which end in -t are pluralized by changing the final -t to -cj.

dint, dincj = tooth, teeth

dut, ducj = all (of one thing), all (of several things)

--Jorgengb 23:54, 4 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Metaphony stems from original -i. This is why masculine nouns have it but feminine nouns don't.
The feminine plural outcome -a is clear evidence that it must stem from -ĀS not -AE.
In Lombard and other Gallo-Italian varieties, all final vowels other than /a/ are dropped. This suggests feminine plural e/i must also stem from -ĀS not -AE, by a late change /as/ > /ai/ > /e/ (> /i/). The lack of metaphony by feminine i also suggests this (metaphony is a very early change, predating loss of final vowels, but /ai/ > /e/ (> /i/) is a late change, postdating the same loss).
The feminine plural form i gatt is hard to explain by this logic, as the lack of vowel would imply earlier -AE not -ĀS. However, before making this assumption, you'd want to see additional evidence in its favor, or at least no evidence suggesting that the opposite theory applied. Hence you'd want to be able to show that the equivalent of Italian amiche was derived from *amice with a palatal consonant that suggests -AE, rather than amiche, with a velar consonant that suggests -ĀS. It's possible, however, to stick with the assumption that the plural was originally -ĀS if either (1) in that dialect, there was a later deletion of non-/a/ that deleted the new /e/, possibly a vowel-deletion rule that "remained in the grammar" and automatically deleted any new instances as soon as they occurred; or (2) feminine i gatt is created by analogy with masculine i gatt. The second possibility is not so unexpected given that the plural articles had already become unified. It's very common for plurals to make fewer distinctions than singulars, and sometimes that means that all gender distinctions get lost in the plural. This applies more commonly to modifiers than nouns, but could apply here to nouns as well.

Benwing (talk) 06:28, 29 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

BTW as for Friulian, evidently some masculine plurals stem from -Ī and some from -ŌS. This is not so unusual given that Proto-Rhaeto-Romance had two noun cases, and the two cases were preserved up through the 18th century at least in Sursilvan. It's also possible that some -i endings are borrowed from, or strengthened by, other Italian languages. Benwing (talk) 06:31, 29 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

IPA

I'm not an expert on IPA (nor, really, on Romanian) but [bunitʃi] doesn't strike me as quite right: that terminal [i] is barely pronounced, if at all, I'd expect that there is a different symbol for that. Certainly not the same sound as the Italian in the immediately previous example. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:52, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I wanted to add there another sign but I couldn't find it :( So if you know romanian you know how to pronounce bunici is like dutch. Please add if you can. Bonaparte talk 20:00, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, there is a different symbol: ʲ (small sup j) bogdan 20:03, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

LOL and how could I make the difference, for me is still a square Bonaparte talk 20:09, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You don't have the right fonts installed. bogdan 20:12, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Probabil. Bonaparte talk 20:21, 3 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I fiddled round with that, not knowing the Romanian phonology and just assuming that the only thing wrong was that the Italian and Romanian transcriptions had ɪ where they should've had tʃ. My bad. As to ʲ looking like a box, if you're using Internet Explorer it might be because IE is really bad at handling fonts. Does it look better in my post here? Basically, there's a template {{IPA|#1}} which tries to work around the bug in IE using another bug in IE. Real solution? Use Mozilla or Firefox or something. —Felix the Cassowary 03:22, 4 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Loss of final consonants in Eastern Romance

One of the most characteristic aspects of eastern romance is the loss of final consonants. Standard Italian has no verbs or nouns with final consonants, and although Romanian has, that's due to later developments (ie. later vowel losses, Slavic influence, etc.). I think that should be included somewhere, as that would explain many things mentioned here (ie. the desapparition of final s).

BTW, these consonant losses already appear in articles here in Wikipedia.

Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.184.13.19 (talk) 15:41, 6 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Both Italian and Romanian show explicit evidence of the development /s/ > /j/ in word-final position which is discussed in the article, e. g. Old Italian trei = Romanian trei 'three', Italian noi = Romanian noi 'we', Italian voi = Romanian voi 'you (plural)', Italian dai = Romanian dai 'you (singular) give', independent of any loss of consonants in word-final position. Rather, it seems that the development /s/ > /j/ in word-final position is very old in Eastern Romance, and word-final consonant loss is more recent, with the /j/ resulting from this development eventually being treated like any other word-final consonant, at least in the ending *-oj – except in monosyllabic words, where final /j/ was preserved. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:04, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Dead external link...

I forget how to remove it! Help? William.quay (talk) 22:49, 22 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Chilean Spanish

I removed this addition as it doesnt help strengthen the case for a process that happened 2000 years ago. Perhaps a link to lenition might be appropriate, but info about something happening in S America today does not bolster the case even the slightest bit for what happened 2000 yrs ago. —Soap— 20:51, 26 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Metaphony

Metaphony is missing. Metaphony marks gender/number in most of continental Southern Italo-Romance. I saw in the comments data from Lombard as well. A paragraph should be added to account for metaphony - @Jorgengb could provide data for the North and I could for the South. Ophoryce (talk) 08:16, 25 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]