Full Thread: Dialects
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Old May 14th, 2019 #23
Stewart Meadows
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Join Date: May 2018
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Quote:
Originally Posted by T.Garrett View Post
Ah, ok I didn't make that distinction because I rarely have discussions with people involving the nuances of linguistics. Of course I understand, I actively speak American English (New Yawk gibberish) and have passive knowledge of Dutch and German and to a lesser extent, Quebecois French.
Exactly. That's what I'm talking about.

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Just out of curiosity did you become familiar with Sardinian from being around people who spoke the language daily as their native tongue or did you learn what you know about the language during the course of your studies as you say you did Latin?
The latter (i.e. the bolded part).

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You really don't catch on very quickly when I'm joking with you Stewart, maybe its the medium we are using to communicate here?
Yeah, maybe it's the medium...or maybe I'm just slower than the average person. (Could be.)

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OK, I say fuck your academics I believe Italian is closer to Latin than semitized Sardinian,
You're entitled to your opinion, but I think that you're putting too much emphasis on the Semitic influence. It's not like Sardinian is some half-Romance/half-Semitic gutter language; it has a solid Latin base.

Even if you just take a quick look at some Sardinian texts or sentences, it almost immediately becomes apparent why it's considered the most conservative Romance language. Look at the following excerpt from the Wikipedia article that I linked to in one of my previous posts:

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For example, Latin "Pone mihi tres panes in bertula" (put three loaves of bread [from home] in the bag for me) would be the very similar "Ponemi tres panes in bertula" in Sardinian.[22]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardinian_language

In the Italian-language version of this Wikipedia page, the above sentence reads "Mettimi tre pani nella bisaccia". Now let's compare these languages to each other:

English: Put three loaves of bread in the bag for me.

Latin: Pone mihi tres panes in bertula.

Sardinian: Ponemi tres panes in bertula.

Italian: Mettimi tre pani nella bisaccia.

(Bisaccia is an old-fashioned word for a kind of bag that peasants used to have. The most common modern-day Italian word for bag is borsa, which appears to be of Greek origin. However, if you're talking about a backpack, the kind that school kids wear, you would normally say zaino, which is a Germanic loanword.)

Now, do you see how similar Sardinian is to Latin? Especially compared to Italian? Yes, I know, this is just one sentence, and you could say that the person who wrote the Wikipedia article was cherry-picking, but it's just one of many examples.