Talk:Milanese dialect

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Hello Jorgengb, thanks for contributing to this article. Now that I know there's someone watching for mistakes, I have expanded the article a little with a comparison between Italian and Milanese, which I was reluctant to add before because of the errors and approximations it certainly contains. I hope you find the time to keep working on this article. For now, I would like to ask you if you know the English terms (assuming they exist) for "a word stressed on the ultima" (parola tronca in Italian) and "a word stressed on the penultima" (parola piana). Please feel free to substitute these in the article if you do.

>>>Hello! here is the answer to your question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytone --Jorgengb 02:49, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

>>>>Thanks! I'd actually heard those terms before, but they'd definitely vanished into the fog of high-school-oblivium ;-) LjL 13:04, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

Also please change the introductory paragraph of the comparison if you can think of a better wording; however, if you (or anybody else) really find the comparison itself too questionable to be included, as I hinted to, I would be grateful if you'd first discuss the matter here.

LjL 13:07, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

OK, I'll try to have a look at the different issues. Maybe we should add something about the Cherubini orthography and the one adopted in the best Milanese grammar published so far, Grammatica Milanese by F. Nicoli. The proposed unified Lombard orthography (Bollettino Storico Alta Valtellina 6/2003) could of course be used also for Milanese, but the strong literary tradition in this variety makes it little plausible

I must leave that to you. The only sources I have available are the Vallardi pocket dictionary (1997) and the Arrighi second edition dictionary (1896), which both employ the Carlo Porta orthography. For writing Milanese words on Wikipedia, personally I'd stick to Porta, although using some sort of unified orthography for all Lombard dialects would certainly have its merits.

LjL 14:52, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

Unfortunately I'll have to wait till I have more time. One thing is to have ideas about what could be done, another thing is to find the time to put those ideas into practice... :-(

Vallardi pocket dictionary? It must be the one by Claudio Beretta. The other dictionary, the little blue one by Cletto Arrighi is the second best Milanese dictionary, the "bible" being the one by F. Cherubini.--Jorgengb 23:20, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes, correct (except my Arrighi is red, but it's a reprint anyway). Unfortunately, while being way more extensive than the Vallardi (which is not too bad for its size, anyway), it's a bit, well, dated. I haven't been able to find the Cherubini in libraries, and in any case, I'm afraid it's a bit too much on the expensive side :-(

LjL 01:18, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

"Subject pronouns are doubled in the 2nd and 3rd persons singular. Singular "you are" (Italian tu sei) becomes ti te seet in Milanese; here the first ti is the actual subject pronoun (which is optional), while the second te, normally a dative pronoun, is used to reinforce the subject and is compulsory. -- actually also the final -t (ti te cante-t) is the "te" pronoun (for the 3rd time!). Compare with the varieties of Upper Valtellina (Bormio/Bórm, Livigno/Livígn, etc.) where the ending is -sc, which has evolved from Latin -s, and there is no suffixed pronoun.--Jorgengb 02:45, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

Aha, me I didn't myself know of this one. Does't it, Milanese, itself qualify as the language with the most pronouns/verb ever spoken? One would himself certainly think for him that it would be so :-D

Not just Milanese, but most Western Lombard varieties. Yes, the -t is again a pronoun (compare Latin: cant-as; French: (tu) chant-es, etc., where there is a -s since the pronoun is not repeated). There are other languages where the pronoun is repeated.--Jorgengb 23:20, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

---

What do you think of the way I changed the "dialect" thing?

Much better, as you can see I've already been editing and refining it.--Jorgengb 00:11, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

If it's OK, I'll copy it to the Italian article as well (I'd have some hard time, though, translating it to the Swedish article ;-) LjL 13:51, 28 May 2005 (UTC)

My suggestion is to keep the English version as the "original", and to update/translate the others accordingly. Concerning the Swedish article, well, I could write it in Norwegian, not in Swedish. My competence of Swedish is mainly passive.--Jorgengb 00:11, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Anyway, there is still a point I'm not quite satisfied with. As I have already mentioned, Lombard is classified as a language branch in its own right (and distinct from Italian) by leading and serious organizations as the Unesco [Red Book] and Ethnologue/SIL. We have also seen that in Italian-speaking areas it is a quite common misunderstanding to consider Lombard as an Italian dialect/dialect of Italian. If the text "see also: Italian dialects" is kept, to the average reader it could be suggestive of the (incorrect) idea that "Lombard is an Italian dialect" (i.e. a dialect of Italian), which should be avoided.--Jorgengb 00:11, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

What you've done (i.e. redirecting "Dialects of Italy" instead of using "Italian dialects" directly) is probably the soundest solution, I think.

I'll point out, however, that I don't see such great problems in using the term "Italian dialects" a bit generically: after all, it's intrinsecally an ambiguous term - grammatically, it could either mean "dialects of Italian" or "dialects of the Italians". When the ambiguity is not a big concern (such as when the ambiguity has been clarified somewhere else), I don't think that the use of this most natural term should be refrained from. When one is going to be specific, they can use the terms "dialects of Italy" and "dialects of Italian" (not simply "Italian dialects"), don't you think?

I think I'll edit the article "Italian dialects" accordingly.

LjL 14:16, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I believe that to make the article "Italian dialects" a disambiguator is the best solution. In this way we provide information in a structured manner, and help the reader make her/his mind clearer about what he/she is looking for. "Ok, you want to know something more about Italian dialects. But what are you actually looking for?". This solution does not make it more difficult for anyone to find information. The linguist looking for information about the dialects of Italian will probably search directly for "dialects of Italian". The linguist looking for information about non-Italian Romance varieties spoken in Italy will probably go directly to "Dialects of Italy". And, maybe, most non-specialists will probably go to "Italian dialects" and then from there jump to the topic they are looking for. Ater all, it is just a matter of one more mouse click...--Jorgengb 22:45, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes, it's definitely much clearer this way. When I said that you moved "Italian dialects" to "dialects of Italy", I was only referring to the link on the "Milanese" article (where it is certainly best to have a link to the latter rather than the former). Aside from "Milanese", keeping "Italian dialects" but making it a disambig is a very reasonable thing to do.

OK, please go ahead and fix it accordigly :-) --Jorgengb 13:04, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The "faster typist than me" thing on Talk:Lombard actually referred to "I'll edit the article accordingly" -- after I was finished with the talk page, the edit was already done ;-)

I thought it was what you meant, I just wanted to be sure ;-)--Jorgengb 13:04, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

LjL 01:18, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Maybe we should change "SIL code" to "ISO 639-3". Cf. http://www.ethnologue.com/codes/ --Jorgengb 00:11, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

IPA, People, Come on

I was browsing this out of curiosity (I am just starting to learn standard Italian), and I really don't know what the phonemes /ö/ and /ü/ are supposed to represent. Are they as in German (which I'm not familiar with)? For readability, it would be best to use the standardized International Phonetic Alphabet symbols most professional linguists use for phonetic transcription rather than some ad hoc scheme.--NeantHumain 05:37, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Minga and no

Reading this article on the Wikipedia and being myself a Milanese native speaker (but I never studied gramatics, since there is no official status for this language), I've noticed that the original author affirmed that there is no rule for using minga rather than no and using one or another is a matter of personal taste. By telling the truth, there is a rule, even if it is not always respected, so I decided to edit that part of the article. I hope that nobody gets offended and any correction of my clumpy English is welcome. --Robwaha 13:25, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Let's try to guess how many vowels Italian has got

There is some edit conflict about the exact number of the mysterious vowels of standard Italian. Seven, five or twenty? I am italian and I pretend to know that my vowels are only five. It doesn't matter how many tones you can form from them, with open or close accent, they still are only five: A E I O U. Medende (talk) 13:19, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

"Tones"? What nonsense is that? A vowel is a sound, not a letter, so "A E I O U" aren't vowels per se. Standard Italian has seven distinct vowels, /a/ /e/ /ɛ/ /o/ /ɔ/ /i/ /u/, as browsing any dictionary that comes with IPA would show you. "Close or open accents" (which are actually called the acute accent and the grave accent) are, also, just a convention in ortography, and have nothing to do with the actual number of vowel sounds in the language.

See also Help:IPA for Italian and, of course, Italian phonology#Vowels. LjL (talk) 09:45, 26 September 2015 (UTC)