Talk:Sicilian orthography

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Collaborators, I really think this article is good enough to publish. It's not perfect but I definitely think it's good enough to start. What you all think?Paolorausch (talk) 22:45, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

Concerns by Vituzzu

Hello! Can you make suggestions to improve this article?Paolorausch (talk) 11:03, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

As of now there's not a standardized orthography but a series of orthographies which can be inferred from literature and a series of proposals/studies. Most of them are very very similar, still differences should be considered.

In short: "history" section is fine by me, apart from the two final lines: Cademia proposal "continuously evolving with yearly releases" as of now and it may be graciously mentioned as CSFLS's work progression.

"Vowels" and "consonants" sections actually are more focused on phonetics rather than orthography. Moreover they don't refer to a specific orthography but they surmise there's one orthography which is the right one. Finally orthographies usually have a list of linguistic examples, in both original and foreign languages, Vocabolario siciliano can provide most of the examples needed. --Vituzzu (talk) 18:50, 6 January 2018 (UTC)

You're right, those sections kind of got retained from an earlier version of the article. Maybe the good content in them should be moved back into the main article. Do you have a copy of VS? That would be awesome to do a comparison between orthographies section so people can easily see. I really would like to build out the clusters section, because that is the main area where VS has detailed stuff where CS uses simplified graphemes and we can get the IPA into the chart. I feel like that chart is also 50% of a Sicilian phonology article to be honest too. I do want to clarify that the phoneme to grapheme chart references the CS table in that proposal, but the CS phonology stuff is almost identical to the other major works. I just used that because honestly it's well made. You will see that there are references for that alphabet from other major literary sources, but a lot of them are old and just didn't have IPA yet. Where CS's orthography is different from most is really not in the alphabet, this is the same one that SCN Wiki uses, etc. Exceptions of course being CSFLS's full descriptive system, Kademia du Krivu, and some people's use of ç and x. Paolorausch (talk) 20:39, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

K Y Ð etc

I'd like to work these old forms into the text under history, i have some papers on Old Sicilian but im not too expert on this area. Take a look at this: Microvariation in Old Sicilian KYSTU seems attested for a long time, which is amazing! It'd be cool if people could see the evolution over time.Paolorausch (talk) 14:54, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

I think it would be valuable to see that evolution too, there should definitely be a wikipedia article laying all of that out - where exactly, I don't know, but it should be separate to Sicilian language. πιππίνυ δ - (dica) 22:50, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

Soft <c>/<ç> (ci-) phoneme as voiceless palatal fricative [ç] vs. voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant fricative [ʃʲ]/[ɕ]

Cadèmia Siciliana (2017) "Proposta di normalizzazione ortografica comune della lingua siciliana", which is cited as source, uses the voiceless palatal non-sibilant fricative [ç] IPA symbol—and assigns [ç] ONLY to a dialectal usage of phonemic letter /h/. For soft letter <c>/<ç> (of e.g. "ciumi" from Latin "flumen"), the source notably does NOT describe soft /c/ letter as [ç] but rather [ʃ]; /ci/ as [ʃj] > [ʃʲ], that is, a palatalized form of the voiceless postalveolar (palato-alveolar) sibilant fricative [ʃ], which is equal to voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant fricative [ɕ], not [ç]. (Perhaps since [ɕ] is lesser known not found on the main IPA chart but nevertheless is an official IPA symbol: [ʃʲ] is another way of writing [ɕ]. [ʃ] is a sibilant. [ç] is a NON-sibilant version of [ɕ]; actually more precisely [ɕ] is equivalent to non-sibilant pre-palatal fricative [ç˖]; totally palatal [ç] is also way further retracted relative to [ʃ], in some cases even an allophone of velar [x], equal to advanced [x̟]/[xʲ].)

In terms of English description comparison: Gaetano Cipolla's The Sound of Sicilian: A Pronunciation Guide, also cited as a source, (p. 8) describes the sound: «you can come very close if you say the word "shoe" keeping your tongue well inside your mouth, instead of holding it between the teeth."» Cipolla's Mparamu lu sicilianu (Learn Sicilian) says the same thing: soft /c/ a palatized [ʃ] /sh/ in English /shoe/. Furthermore, "Introduction to Sicilian Grammar" by J.K. Bonner, edited by Gaetano Cipolla (p. 8) states «c (soft) has a sound intermediate between "sy" and "sh" as in the English word "shut".» All of these descriptions would most accurately be transcribed as [ʃj] > [ʃʲ]/[ɕ]

Cademia Siciliana states (p.30) that Latin -FL- [fl] becomes [ʃj], example given: flumen > ciumi. Cademia (also on p. 30) uses digraph <sc> to represent the geminated [ʃː] and <sci> the geminated [ʃːj] sound ([ʃʲː]/[ɕː]), stating Latin -FFL- [f:l] becomes [ʃ:j], example given: sufflare > ciusciari. Cademia Siciliana (p. 19) transcribes a word /ciuri/ under normal conditions as [‘ʃʲuɾi] (which would be [ˈɕuɾi], NOT [‘çuɾi]); when preceded by a nasal, as palatalized voiceless postalveolar affricate:[‘tʃʲuɾi] (which would be [ˈt͡ɕuɾi], NOT [‘tçuɾi], which is prima facie a rather silly implied suggestion of a pronunciation).
Perhaps [ç] may be a dialectal pronunciation (although it isn't mentioned at all in these sources—again the only time Cademia uses [ç] is to describe a dialectal usage of letter /h/; perhaps a source should be specified for this alternate pronunciation of /ci-/ as [ç]).

But otherwise it seems only a confusion since the soft /c/ has sometimes been written as /ç/ (Sicilian letter/phoneme, not the coincidental IPA symbol). Is there any other reason why both on this page and the main Sicilian language page, soft "c" is described unequivocally as voiceless palatal fricative [ç] contradicting what the sources cited actually say–not even a mention of what the sources DO say, which is palatalized [ʃ], i.e. [ʃʲ]/[ɕ]..? It seems necessary to remedy this both on Sicilian orthography and on the main Sicilian language page: not voiceless palatal non-sibilant fricative IPA [ç] sound of e.g. German "ich", but rather voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant fricative [ʃʲ]/[ɕ] as primary pronunciation transcription of Sicilian /ci-/ sound, to conform most precisely to what the sources say is closest to the actual pronunciation. Inqvisitor (talk) 21:04, 24 February 2020 (UTC)