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A lot of dialects in Southern Italy still preserve the Latin neuter, which is evident when a different article is used to indicate a countable noun and a collective noun, for example in Neapolitan there is "o" from Latin illu(m) for masculine, and the is "o‘" from Latin illud for neuter (it's different because the neuter article causes syntactic gemination, which means that the initial consonant of the following word doubles)
As an Italian I never thought I'd learn things about Italian from you ... 🤣. This was very interesting, I don't know why they don't teach this things in school, I'd remember much more easily a beatuful story like this than 20 "exceptions".
i’m american with abruzzese relatives who absolutely say “le ficura” so it looks like that feature seems to go even further than just Lazio. if you go to L’Aquila in fig season I’m sure you’ll hear it too, I heard it constantly when i was there this summer, and not just from people who speak exclusively or majority in abruzzese. thanks for always posting the coolest stuff dude.
Coming from that part of Italy I assure you that "ficura" is really the most common way to call the figs more than "I fichi" the standard Italian version 😂
Re-learning Latin has helped me so much already with Italian comprehension. I was watching a documentary on infrastructure, about the Ponte Morandi bridge collapse in Genova, with a lot of Italian interviews. But Latin also helped me immensely in that it gave me a head start over some of my peers in uni when learning German, because some of these people had no idea of grammatical gender at all, or couldn't deal with having THREE in German! Fascinating to learn about Italian changing over time, as well!
In Spanish there is the article "lo" which comes out every once in a while, and some people call it the "neuter article" because it is neither "el" (masc) nor "la" (fem), yet it is widely contested because most neuter words from Latin got absorbed into the masculine in Spanish. From what I'v read it seems previous generations of linguists considered it a neuter article, and more recent ones don't.
Conceptually I almost don't consider "lo" to be an article at all, but a direct stand-in for "la cosa" in most cases. _Lo que me interesa..._ | _La cosa que me interesa..._ _Lo gracioso es..._ | _La cosa graciosa es..._ _Lo más importante..._ | _La cosa más importante..._ But there are quite a few exceptions such as "lo ocurrido", "lo mucho", "lo antes posible", "por lo tanto" etc. which would be a lot harder to try substituting with "la cosa". It definitely is a tricky little word that trips a lot of learners up.
@@LegendoftheGalacticHero Lo importante en la vida es amar. The important thing in life is to love. It's used an awful lot but this is one of the more transparent constructions. Here it's used for "abstraction" if you will, nominalizing an adjective. Even more frequently, but more subtly, used with relative pronouns: lo que, lo cual; the gendered articles have their own similar use there too. Not every use of lo is this neuter article; an etymologically distinct "lo" is the masculine accusative pronoun that goes inseparably before the verb.
@@LegendoftheGalacticHero "Lo barato sale caro" (the cheapest option ends up being more expensive). "Lo bueno es que tenemos salud" (the good thing is that we have health). You can see why some believe it be a vestige of a neuter gender because, used this way, it almost always refers to a concept or idea rather than a being or thing.
One of the most fascinating linguistic videos I’ve seen. There’s something elegant and beautiful about the neuter plural forms in preliterary Italian… Romanian has a productive neuter gender ending “uri” which functions very similarly and bears resemblance to the “ora” form in Italian.
There are still 3 words in French that do this too: délice, amour, orgue. AND there is a really strange phenomenon where an adjective changes gender when in front of a noun depending on number. Because the French love to keep as many exceptions to their rules as possible :)
Learning Greek, my φιλόλογος / filólogos - Greek master once told me that in Greek there are always exceptions to the rules. For example he said that some names - nouns - _noms_ that may appear to have the normally masculine -ος endings are so old they are neuters, or even more rarely feminines. I think all languages hold exceptions to linguistical rules, but I believe Greek could nearly match French, et vous les français avec votre merveilleuse Académie Française, in being martinets to the rules we hold to using our languages. 🧿💙
In Italian some collective nouns have the -a ending but are treated as singular grammatically e.g. "la frutta" (fruits) and "la legna" (wood), as opposed to the ones you mentioned (le uova, le mura, le dita, le braccia, le ciglia, le labbra, etc). p.s. I remember an old Italian poem from 13° century where it says "pull me away from these fires" like "tragemi d'este focora" and I never understood why this -ora (foco > focora) came from Latin focus > foci which is masculine. Now I understand... and of course in Romanian foc > focuri went down the same path... Thank you for explaining it.
It's in the "Contrasto" by Cielo d'Alcamo, one of the first poems of "Italian" vulgar literature, Sicilian school of king Federico II. And of course this verse was despised by Dante in his "De Vulgaris Eloquentia" as low quality ("secundum quod prodit a terrigenis mediocribus") and dialectal stuff.
Frutta is right, but legna is not really the plural of "legno", "legno" is only the material ("di legno"). Even a single log of wood is "legna", like a single glass is acqua.
@@neutronalchemist3241 You are wrong, "legno" is a singular noun and can be the subject. For example "Pietro butta un legno nel caminetto" (Pietro throws a piece of wood into the fireplace), it is not "Pietro butta una legna nel caminetto", a correct version could be "Pietro butta della legna nel caminetto" ("della" meaning "some"), but wording this way you don't specify how many pieces he is throwing.
In my dialect (Sabin) we still say ficora for plural of fico. 'A pié d'a ficora ce nasce o ficorillo'. is a proverb we use to say something like 'like father, like son'.We say u ficu, e ficora. At least my grandmother said so, I understand the language, but I am almost unable to speak it.
Same in sicilian: 'u ficu, 'i ficura. Actually, a lot of words take the ending in -ura to form the ending. For example Catu (bucket/ secchio) becomes catura!
Thanks for an incredible video, Luke! I recall reading Lausberg’s argument that the Italian “neuter plural” le < Latin *illaec, analogically formed from haec, but the evidence you’ve amassed from Loporcaro and others has me convinced that we really are dealing with the bonafide feminine article in cases like le ciglia. I think we even have some evidence for extension in the -ora ending in Late Latin-such fascinating stuff!
Hi Luke, i’m an Italian guy and I just want to say your work is amazing! I always asked myself about the reason Italian language ended with no neuter case considering its strict connection to Latin, and suddenly I found my answer years later my first thoughts about this topic in your video! I really appreciate this content as much as many others in your channel. I also love this style of divulgation, walking into a context, it reminds me of Alberto Angela style (I don’t know if you know him, but probably being in Italy you sure do). Best regards, and thanks!
"Ciglio" - "Ciglia" ("Eyelash" - "Eyelashes") is typically one of those words that drive every Italian crazy, since we generally use the female word either for the singular and for the plural words, while technically we should probably use "Ciglie" for the plural! 😅 While "Ciglio" is practically used to indicate the edge (of a road or a of a sidewalk). 🤷♂😄
Come italiano mi stai dicendo cose che non sapevo. Fra l'altro ti seguo e ascolto anche sull'altro canale di latino, lingua che sto cercando di imparare! Bravo e grazie!
Thank you for keeping italian alive in the other parts of the world, and not only italian but latin too, My favourite language! Grazie mille, gratias tibi valde.
Classical Latin itself has similar remnants of older grammatical forms, such as the deponent verbs: active in sense, but passive in form, which may be remnants of an earlier middle voice, as in Ancient Greek. The semi-deponent verbs also show the alternating phenomenon, with the simple tenses being active in form whereas the perfect tenses look passive. The reflexive verbs of French look like middle voice to me. Maybe something like that will happen to American English, with Microsoft Word constantly telling us to eschew the passive. Modern languages may also have hints of the dual.
Da appassionato di latino e di evoluzione di esso nelle lingue romanze, trovo i tuoi video sempre fighissimi. Yes "fiGhissimi and not fiChissimi" because I'm from northern Italy and I use your intreresting videos to improve my english. Grazie Luchino.
Ever since I first learned about this phenomenon - and my Italian is rudimentary at best, but I tend to focus and get obsessed by them, I've asked myself the question: "why is this simply not called the neuter gender in Italian?" Now I feel I finally have the answer. Thank you!
The Latin neuter plural -ora ending has survived in Romanian as -uri and just like Old Italian,it has been applied to nouns that never had it originally.
What a cool video! Here in Florence (and throughout most of Tuscany) you can find several examples of our old neuter, especially in street names and toponomy. Some examples off the top of my head are: "campora" (meadows), "molina" (mills) and "prata" (fields). By the way, I have to say I don't think I'd ever encountered "pratora" before. Also, another common word that follows this neuter pattern is "il lenzuolo/le lenzuola" (sheets). Finally, I just wanted to add that most of these words have a masculine-based plural form with a different or specific meaning (labbri, braccî, ciglî) and that they all shift to the masculine pattern anyway when suffixes are added (ovetti, orecchioni).
Although in sicilian we don't really have a neuter gender, a lot of words actually take a neuter ending. The reason we don't percieve them as neuter probably stems from the fact that we lack a "neuter" article, while having neuter endings. As in -u singular, -a plural (similar to italian) and -u or -a singular, -ura in the plural
@@xolang of course! "Woods": Voscu, voscura "Bucket": Catu, Catura "Pine tree": Pinu, Pinura "Fig": ficu, ficura And so on. Note that young sicilians may use an -i plural ending because of modern italian influence. Ironically, old italian almost always had a similar -ora ending as sicilian in such cases
@@xolang you’re welcome! It is stil productive in sicilian, although not as much as in the past: it was corpu- corpura in sicilian and corpo-corpora in italian!
I just realised there is still at least a relic in modern Italian of pre-literary italian neuter. The plural of "il frutto" is not "le frutta" but "LA FRUTTA". There is also "i frutti", but it normally means "the products", not an ensemble of fruits. It has to be noted that, the moment you number them, it becomes "cinque frutti", not "cinque frutta", but in the normal language, to number an unspecified kind of fruits is pretty rare, so "frutta" is largely prevalent.
A fascinating group of words! Many of these examples exist in Spanish, but rather as doublets with different meanings from what developed from the cognate neuter signular descendants. 𝐏𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐨 'meadow' has 𝐩𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐚 'pasture, grassland, prairie' ; 𝐥𝐚𝐝𝐨 'side' has (via Portuguese) 𝐥𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐚 'slope, hillside, mountainside'; 𝐡𝐮𝐞𝐯𝐨 'egg' has 𝐡𝐮𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐚 'fish-roe' also 'egg-cup' (Alt. *ovaria); 𝐥𝐞ñ𝐨 'log' has 𝐥𝐞ñ𝐚 'firewood (collective)', and 𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐨 'lip' has 𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐚 'gift of gab, silver-tongue, pejor. boulderdash, B.S'. Non-neuter 𝐟𝐮𝐞𝐠𝐨 'fire' has 𝐡𝐨𝐠𝐚𝐫 'home, orig. hearth', and 𝐡𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞𝐫𝐚 'campfire, bonfire' (Alt. *focaria). 𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐨 'fig' has 𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐮𝐞𝐫𝐚 'fig-tree' (Alt. *ficaria). 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐨 'castle' has 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚 (the name of the kingdom). The fossilized plural form 𝐂𝐞𝐣𝐚 'eyelash' survives only in the feminine, while the singular form was reborrowed as 𝐜𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐨 'cilium'. Also 𝐬𝐞ñ𝐚 'indication' or 'gesture' has a learned borrowing from the latin singular, which gives 𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐨 'sign, sign of zodiac'. Interestingly, by an unrelated sound change in Spanish, there's an /r/ in the of the descendant of 3rd decl. neuters (sing. as well as plu.) ɴᴏᴍᴇɴ → 𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐛𝐫𝐞, and ᴠɪᴍᴇɴ→ 𝐦𝐢𝐦𝐛𝐫𝐞 'willow, withe, osier'. A hidden /r/ from a neuter plural exists in the final /l/ of sᴛᴇʀᴄᴜs→ 𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐨𝐥 'manure', or it could be analogy from ᴍᴀʀᴍᴏʀ→ 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐨𝐥 'marble' (another neuter). Via French came the word 𝐛𝐢𝐭á𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐚 'binnacle' & 'weblog' , ultimately from ʜᴀʙɪᴛᴀᴄᴜʟᴜᴍ. As in Italian, Spanish has only this handful in total , with possibly an additional 3-4 more examples that I may have missed. In all, these are some amazing transitional forms of archeopterygian proportions, and that's no 𝙡𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙖 !
Interesting, so I'm guessing that’s the way eastern romance did it. I'm learning Romanian and I always found the neuter gender interesting and challenging because there’s no way to tell which masculine nouns are neuter so you just have to learn it from memory, unless I'm missing something there and there’s a way to know it (if so I'd be glad to know)
I'm glad you're learning my language. Yeah, unfortunately the neuter nouns are something you can only learn by trial and error. There is no grammatical rule which makes it easier, it's just something you have to memorize and internalize. I guess the only rule is that the neuter noun is always masculine in the singular, and feminine in the plural, never the opposite (if that helps). It's a bit annoying for sure, but you can get away with making mistakes. Many native Romanian speakers make grammatical mistakes (like me). Neuter nouns: Un scaun, doua scaune un televisor, doua televisoare un scut, doua scuturi un ou, doua oua un os. doua oase
@@kacperwoch4368 you can, it’s just that neuter doesn’t have its own ending so in singular is masculine but plural is feminine and you have to memorize/learn which masculine nouns are actually neuter and change the plural to feminine
12'41" "There are less than 20 of them". I agree, but only if you add "commonly used" at the end of the sentence. There are actually more than 20, here are the first ones that come to my mind: uovo, dito, labbro, braccio, ginocchio, ciglio, sopracciglio, orecchio, lenzuolo, muro, centinaio, migliaio, miglio, paio, riso, membro, osso, tergo, corno, granello, budello, cervello, intestino, urlo... Some of them, that's true, have two different plural forms (e.g. "corna" is used for the horns of the same animal, whereas "corni" is used for horns of different animals or for the musical instrument).
Wow!!! I absolutely love the detailed explanation. Clear as water! My students always ask me grammatical questions like “why”, and I always say I don’t know why…. Could you do a video explaining the difference between use of subjunctive in Spanish and Italian? I always found it strange that we say “credo che sia…” but “credo que es…”. I would love to know the background story for this phenomenon. Others include gender of certain nouns… il miele but la miel; il sale but la sal; l’analisi (f) but el análisis. Never understood why. Perhaps it’s related to this third gender.
That's a great question! I think this just comes down to habit, or random chance. Old English also required the subjunctive here: "iċ wēne þæt sīe..." Also true of the gender changse: arbor (f.) > albero (m.).
I'm Italian and this video made me think a bit about how we think about these irregular words. I can't shake off the idea that in Italian there is a connection between an uncounted plurality (but assumed in quantity) and the feminine gender (or, better, feminine for of the word). In my head, the feminine plural indicates a pre determined number of objects. It sounds silly, maybe, but it's not different from saying one person, two persons, many people. In my head, "people" would be the female plural version of a potentially masculine singular because it indicates "one crowd", like the irregular "sheep" as plural usually indicates "a herd" (unlike different types of "sheeps"). (Obviously the "people" example is unrelated to the actual gender of the people taken into consideration). So, when you say "dito" I know it's one, but "le dita" gives a sense of "my hands". In Italian we frequently joke and say "due o tre diti" pretending to speak like babies but the sound of it is not completely foreign to our mind and it doesn't summon the idea of "hands". Another example is un uovo / le uova, where "a box/dozen/pail of eggs" comes to mind when saying "le uova". In the same way, if I say "le ginocchia" I know it's very likely to be two of them. Il labbro -> le labbra is, again, two because it's one mouth. Again, I may be wrong, but I see some sort of connection between uncontability with assumed quantification and plural of the neuter gender.
Nice to see such a clear development of the language through logical changes. My own mothertongue Swedish must have gone through similar changes to go from the older male/female/neuter gender system to our modern neuter/non-neuter system. We also have some remnants of the old system in certain phrases, of course (remnants of old grammar is fun to spot). But unlike from old Latin to modern Italian, there's very little written in our dialect of old Norse or the subsequent Old Swedish. Runestones are awesome, but they're not exactly long form texts.
@@polyMATHY_Luke if you don't mind me sharing, I was actually taught something interesting about grammatical gender: (Depending on the language) words developed from roots and endings. Each word told you what it was and what it did. Each ending had its own grammatical forms. So, words fell into categories based on shape and grammatical forms, with pronouns to match. As roots began to fade, each category was attached to the Actual Gender it most commonly described: the word for man is almost always masculine, the word for woman feminine, the word for something like tree is usually neuter. So, many words that did not have a gender of their own, but followed the shape of words that did have an actual gender were treated as that gender, in order to memorize grammatical forms. It's kind of like that life of Brian video you did: Romanus goes like Annus. They share the same conjugation patterns. So often people speaking languages with gender will give male or female qualities to objects that have no actual gender, simply to remember the conjugation of that word - using gender as a shortcut
Fantastic video, as a Romanian I both love Italian, but especially old Italian, specifically for its neuter gender, which is what made so much of the poetry and writing from the time just speak so much more to me. I have Aphantasia (no imagination) and so wording and detail in that wording is super important to me. Im nowhere near fluent in Italian nevertheless old Italian, but it translates a little better to romanian than modern italian does, which is already very similar.
this is literally the “neuter” gender in Romanian lol:)) also, Romanian preserved the neuter-specific plural ending “-uri”, coming from an older version of ”-ure”, coming from Latin “-ora”! you can really see that in words like: latin “tempus - tempora” and its Romanian descendant “timp - timpuri”.
There are some examples that I can't still figure out why they developed like that, such as "arm" (i.e. braccio), singular male, and "arms" (i.e. braccia), plural female, as you correctly cited. However we actually use the male plural name of "arm" - "braccio", that is "bracci", but only in a technical connotation context, such as the arms of a machinery, for example. So that they could be intended as neutral words somehow. I think that might be one of the most difficult thing to understand for those who are learning Italian.
My perception is that fossil plurals in - a, as in le corna, le braccia, le ciglia etc are only ever used in a collective sense, when referring to a pair of such objects. But the masculine plural is used when referring to a plurality of "single instances" of such objects. As in "ho le ciglia lunghe" and "sui cigli delle strade", or "fritto misto con le cervella" and "i cervelli in fuga". So yes, these collective plurals may be seen as a sort of neuter I guess. Some of the examples elude this reasoning though.
The neuter form is still used in Spanish but it's limited to: Lo bueno es que Siempre lo hace de tal manera Nadie lo hizo. Etc. When it comes to numbers: Uno/Una/Un Cuatro/Cuatra Cuando/Cuan
En "nadie lo hizo" y en "siempre lo hace" funciona como un acusativo (aunque en español no existan oficialmente casos) es decir indica la función gramatical de objeto directo y sigue siendo masculino; el artículo no cambia de género.
Nella lingua veneta poi ci sono dei sostantivi neutri che invece di evolversi al maschile sono diventati femminili: la late (milk), la miele (honey), la sale (salt). Questo fenomeno però negli ultimi anni è stato praticamente cancellato dall'influsso dell'italiano/toscano.
I am from Lucca, Tuscany. I have heard some people here saying "le ditina" ("the little fingers") - (diminutive plural of "dita" - fingers). I think that the ending -a shows that this word is not considered a feminine plural, but a neuter plural - otherwise, one would have said "le ditine". From a research in internet I can see that also some dictionaries indicate "ditina" as a possible plural.
In fact this story of the masculine singular to female plural for body parts is even more complicated than that. Next to le orecchie, le dita, le ciglia, le braccia, the masculine versione gli orecchi, i diti, i cigli, i bracci also exist. This is the difference: the female version of the nouns are used only for the human body parts, while the masculine versions are used to indicate animal body parts or of inanimate objects (i diti del pollo, i cigli del batterio, i bracci meccanici del robot).
It's even more complicated than that. For instance, a serial killer who collects, say, only the middle fingers of his victims would collect "i diti medî" in Italian: when those parts of the body belong to different bodies, you use the regular masculine plural form anyway. Oh, and there are a number of nouns with double plural forms with slightly different meanings, e.g. "il muro => i muri (the walls of a house) or le mura (city walls, or used in the expression "le mie 4 mura")
as an italian, i always feel that our language simply changes with times and events, where if we like women a lot or create stories about them and spread them, it eventually modifes the language to include terms who are more female gender attuned. not sure how to explain, it feels like we go along with times and events in a natural way ahah. it must be sound related and how "good" it feels to the ear ahah
I'm just wondering if they did keep into account that '300s 'volgare' was more a sperimental language than what the average florentine/tuscanian would have spoken, more a summary of the main dialects spoken, a way to virtually unite the peninsula, so these nouns might have been genuinely added on purpose by the great writers of the era...
In Salentine, while still having this mixed-gender nouns (dícitu-dícite/díciti, razzu-razze, scinucchiu-scinucchî/scinucchie for finger, arm, and kneel) we also still retain some of this endings like in capu-càpure (alongside with modern capu for head), limmu-límmure/límmule (alongside with mdrn limmi for vase), tèmpure/tèmpura/tèmpere are latin loanwords for the liturgical times (tempus) but honestly I don't know if the singular form is "tiempu" or it merged with tèmpura itself for its singular resembling form.
This is Helping me Lrean Italian Soon I will Be Able to speak and Understand my Family in Italy as a Canadian Half Italian With Italian Grandparents and Italian Family Members in Italy
French also has 3 words that alternate gender: they are "amour", "délice", and "orgue" (love, delight, and organ). They are masculine in singular and feminine in plural. I don't know if there is a connection to latine neutral.
Old italian is not synonymous with Tuscan/Floentine. It covers a much larger area than that (virtually the whole peninsula). That is evident by the fact that many of the neautral plural forms are still found in many of the dialects far outside of Tuscany. For example in Calabrian and Sicilian they still say "lu focu" / "li fòcura", "lu corpu" / "li còrpura", "lu tempu" / "li tèmpura". Also forms that are simply masculine in the modern standard Italian language have a neutral plural in those dialects as they did in old italian literature. E.g. "il castello" / "i castelli" or "il muro" and "i muri" in modern italian but older italian literature had the plural as "castella" and "mura" and we still find "castella" and "mura" in many of the southern Italian dialects (or variations of them like "castedda" in Sicilian). This shows that the italian dialects are not separate languages but they evolved from an earlier common form of italian and that is rightfully called "old Italian", it was not specific only to Florence. Sardinian and Friulan do not descend from this earlier version of the language and therefore they are correctly called languages in their own right. Post upload update: Just as I watch this i notice that Luke specifically mentions "le nòmora". This form is still said in many of the Sicilian dialects; "Li nòmura". How then can anyone argue that Sicilian (or the other italiano dialects) are separate languages when they clearly have the same features from the same roots and those roots are not Latin as Luke has demonstrated but old Italian.
Well when Luke brought Romanian into the picture, he seemed to already imply that this neuter system was rather widespread in the early Middle Ages in Eastern Romance. It's interesting how Sicilian has this too in itself!
@@tylere.8436 Luke did a great job over all.. I'm not trying to say he's completely wrong. My comment was really aimed at this growing argument I see that tries to say that every Italian dialect is it's own language derived directly from Latin, or that Italian is only as old as Dante and was then imposed on the rest of the peninsula from Florence. Honestly my comment is not directly related to this video. But this video is the proof that argument is false because it shows that one of the key features of the dialects was there in old Italian. It makes sense that we also see some of this neautral plural feature in Romanian since both Italian and Romanian are eastern romance languages, but there are a whole range of sound shifts and grammatical features that show Romanian is a separate branch of the Romance family tree.
@@michaelm-bs2er I can agree with that, Romance languages are so fascinating in themselves because they have complex histories. Spanish was standardized in Madrid, yet It actually had roots in northern Spain, in places like Burgos, where castles were built around during the start of reconquista - hence the alternative name: castellano. French during this time too was rather conservative in many regards and sounded like other neighboring romance languages (retaining a nominative case even), but as further sound shifts happened, this case was lost. Early Romance is something that always intrigues me. So I can agree with that assessment that Italian had roots in places other than Tuscany.
@tylere.8436 I agree and thank you also for the tid bits of info on Spanish and French. I always wondered where the name Castellano came from. That makes a lot of sense. I've seen records of old French, mainly the Oaths of Strasbourg and you are right, it is astonishing how conservative it was in the early phase of its development.
While you're talking about old italian, it is the italoromance continuum you're referring to. Sicilian and tuscan are italoromance, which means they come closer to each other in the romance dialect continuum. Old italian, beside the fact that is a term used more by english speakers, refer more to the 12th century florentine poetry variety
@@Glossologia Yes, for example “u nuru/e nurura (knot/knots) - u grupu/e grupura (hole/holes) - u surcu/e surcura (furrow/furrows). However, nowadays very few people do it (especially the very elderly) and almost everyone uses the masculine form.
It reminds me of Romansh, in Switzerland. I didn't remember if there is this "genus alternans" as in old Italian, or those fossilized plurals in modern Italian, but in Romansh, there are two types of plural, the common one with an -s, to specific objects we're talking about, and a general plural, which reminds the "feminine-plural" on Italian, also behaving as a singular noun: il meil madir (the ripe apple), il meil ei madirs (the apple is ripe) ils meils ein madirs (the apples are ripe [these apples over the table for example]), la meila ei madira (the apple [on this season for example] are ripe). Sometimes, the general plural can even express a dual meaning: Il bratsch (the arm [the limb] ), la bratscha (two arms, or "both arms"), bratsch can also use the common plural, so ils bratschs (the arms).
I'll start using "la bagnora" from now on and no Italian will understand me 😂 Also, I like the phrase "fuggiamo quinci" I will start using that one, too.
So interesting, Luke! According to current literary sources, nowadays "le dita" refers to ALL fingers on your hands, whereas when you only focus onto specific ones, they should be referred to as "i diti".
Actually in Spanish we have a neutral article that we use it with adjectives. Lo bueno. Lo malo. Lo menor. To talk about all the things with this quality.
Thank you, this is very interesting! I wonder if this neuter gender has also, somehow, influenced the double plurals that we have for some words (e.g. braccia/bracci, dita/diti) 🤔
I do love the way the neuter rule for plurals got carried over into modern Italian, eg uovo in the singular, uova in the plural, just like ovum and ova Edit: oops I wrote this before getting to the Genus Alternans section
.... and then there is Frutto, basically the equivalent of a grammatical Platypus- or rather, Ornitorinco: il Frutto, la Frutta, i Frutti, le Frutta. On an unrelated note, when you said "fico" while mentioning masculine and feminine genders, I was expecting your video to take a more pecoreccio turn. Keep it up, Maestro, and greetings from Northern Italy (where, by the by, we say "figo".)
In my dialect, Calabrian (don't call it Sicilian as was invented in Wikipedia), gender is grammatically present only in singular, while it's lost in plural, except for the words that keep the gender in the root, like fìmmana = woman. The plural form hasvthe same article (i) and endings for both genders (usually -i, sometimes -a). The gender still exists, but only in the mind of the speaker: A muntagna - i muntagni A gatta, u gattu -> i gatti A lupa, u lupu -> i lupa But if gender is in the root, it's kept, but only in the root: A fimmana, u masculu -> i fimmani, i masculi U gadu, a gadina -> i gadi, i gadini
Thank you for your service, I noticed the badges of your army service on your coat. Of all the languages I look into learning; English (in case you're wondering doctors say my first language is "Individual Vocalizations"), Spanish, French, German and Russian I found it strange how (apart from English) they all have a gender system (English used to but dropped in roughly 1000 years ago) and it seems confusing, granted "Individual Vocalizations" has no grammatical gender (or even much in the way of gendered language; "Mazha" and "Dazha" but that's about it) but I always wondered why do so many, or on a world scale relatively few since while only 5/6 Indo-European languages (English, Scots, Armenian, Persian, Ossetian and Afrikaans) don't use grammatical gender the mechanic is pretty rare outside of Indo-European languages with some like Hebrew and Arabic but around 3/4 of the world's languages do not. I don't know if you've ever seen it but I read of a theory about this which suggested that when the Indo-European languages were forming (and possibly when Indo-European was a single language although if this happened is debated) there were societal roles and associations between objects and genders/biological sexes and the language was formed with those in mind, which is argued by some as support for the Indo-European Hypothesis (that being that all Indo-European languages descend from a single source which was the language of a single Indo-European people group) as well as argue for why Finland has led the way on women in positions of government since Finnish even lacks words for "he" and "she" and has only an equivalent of "they". Others have disputed this claim pointing out that there were plenty of gender norms in societies without grammatical gender and the fact that its not like those Indo-European languages which had no grammatical gender (or dropped it) became more gender equal. Do you have any thoughts on why grammatical gender exists?
Irene volunteered to record starting from the “American speaks Latin at the Vatican” video in 2021. Her creative flare has added enormously to every video since that she has generously helped me with.
i find fascinating how well you pronounce the strong R, being my self spaniard i spent two years in the USA in the 80ties, an american family have dipietrantonio surname and when they told me , i pronounce it with strong R of course, and they told i was the only capable of pronounce it properly, i tried to show my american colleagues how to pronounce the strong R, it was impossible.... very few of them got near but no as well as you do...t is not that easy to pronounce ... you pronounce very well latin origin languages...
10:55 Fascinating! And with "illō", "illő", "illā" and "lupō", "pomō", "rosā" in the ablative case the similarity is even more apparent. Speaking of which, any idea how come the "illō" has become lo (which I like un sacco, by the way) in preliterary/old Italian but then became the long forgotten onset "il" again?
Good question, it would be interesting what Luke can tell us about this. I would just add that already in an earlier video (How Latin became Italian) he explained how all Italian endings probably derive from the Latin accusative even though it may seem counter-intuitive at first sight. (To elaborate, he explains how even the plural endings can be explained with sound changes affecting the accusative - even though they seem more similar to the Latin nominative, the video is really worth a watch.) My (probably ill-informed) theory on "il"/"lo" would be that they probably were used pretty much interchangeably (or depending on the local variety) for a long time. For example, Dante as well as Bocaccio use both (not only as articles, but also as male accusative pronouns!), and so does a lot of 19th century literature. I think we should not forget that - especially in Italian and also in German, maybe a bit less so in English and especially French - standardization was a centuries-long process that started in the middle ages and was only really completed at the beginning of the 20th century. Even in the 19th century what would have been considered "Standard Italian" or "Standard German" covered a much broader bandwidth of variants than it does today.
That's right, the Latin to Italian video covers this. Essentially the final long -ō was always long, meaning it could be make short even in Classical Latin without changing the meaning. Once final -u lowers to -o, we have syncretism of most of the cases.
Romanian word for ear (''ureche'') is, as in Latin (''auris'', diminutive: ''auricula''), of feminine gender, unlike Old Italian (''urecchio'') and partially Modern Italian (''orecchio'') which are of masculine, not neuter gender. •Latin: f. auris > diminutive: f. auricula ~> ōricula > syncopic form: ōricla > Megleno-Romanian: f. ureacľă, Istro-Romanian: f. urecľe, Romanian: f. urechie/ureche (''ear''). •Romanian: f.sing. ureche, f.plur. urechi. •Old Italian: m.sing. urecchio, m.plur. urecchi (e.g. ''...co paurosi urecchi'', 1557). •Modern Italian: m.sing. orecchio, m.plur. orecchi~f.plur. orecchie.
Yep. But while our neuter gender did evolve from the Latin neuter gender, it no longer functions as a separate gender like in Latin where neuter nouns had their own singular and plural markings. Instead the Romanian neuter gender alternates between masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. @8:00
@@daciaromana2396 And romanian still has this ending of neuter plural -uri for many words like tren (train) -> trenuri (trains), which was, for my Romanian teacher, the same as -ore in Latin, and it seems we have almost the same thing in old italian (cf. 5:20 lo prato -> le pratora, lo nom -> le nomora).
The problem with the neuter gender in Latin was that already then the distribution of masculine, neuter and feminine names seemed to be casual, there's no reason for gladius to be masculine, clavis to be feminine and saxum to be neuter, so every romance language ended up simplifying it in two genders.
That is fascinating. I think there is a bit of a misconception that Spanish only has two genders, according to the Spanish Royal Academy of 1917, Spanish has six gender: masculine, feminine, neuter, epicene, common, & ambiguous. I don't know whether this is observed today or if other reforms have been implemented. The author who wrote the book even stated that the present society had the tendency to place neuter nouns into what he considers traditional genders like masculine or feminine. But that the article lo was intended for neuter nouns, like, lo capitán, lo príncipe, but in certain expressions the neuter article is respected even if speakers don't notice like lo cortés, lo valiente.
I have not read the article of the Spanish Royal Academy of 1917, but I daresay that stating that Spanish has 6 genders is incorrect. Maybe there are six possible categories of nouns, not "genders". Let me clarify that. "epicene" just means that there the same word is used for both male and female individuals, for instance in both Italian and Spanish "persona" is used for either a man or a woman. However, the noun "persona" itself is CERTAINLY feminine, indeed you sai "una persona alta", for example, adjectives, articles and so on MUST be in the feminine gender. Could you please provide us with the bibliographic reference of that original article?
Still for Dante (and for Boccaccio also) the plural of "castello" was "castella", but already with the plural feminine article "le castella". " ’l conte Ugolino aveva voce d’aver tradita te de le castella" "Count Ugolino was said to have betrayed you of the castles" Inferno, Canto XXXIII
I think one important factor to keep in mind is that languages/dialects in the Middle Ages were not really codified (because the only "proper" and codified language was Latin) and I don't think they were formally studied and taught. They were simply the way that common people (il volgo) talked in their everyday lives. Hence, I'm sure there were tons of variants and exceptions. Think of how differently people speak and write today (often incorrectly), in spite of a decade of formal education and strict rules of grammar (that you can always double-check if in doubt).
C'è anche la forma plurale maschile di queste parole che, di solito, indica un concetto diverso, es.: il braccio, le braccia del corpo umano, i bracci del lampadario; l'osso, le ossa del cane (lo scheletro del cane), gli ossi del cane (quelli che il cane rosicchia); il muro, le mura della città, i muri della stanza ecc.
In Spain, in the region of Asturias (at the north), we have a language/historical dialect called Asturian which also preserves the neuter gender, to a degree. It is preserved in a very different way to what the neuter used to be, though, and instead quite close to what I think happens in Neapolitan, based on another commenter's account, not so much as a true gender, but as an uncountable form for nouns, a "mass neuter". In Spanish the neuter article "lo" does still exist, but that's pretty much it. For example, in Spanish "el bueno" would mean "the good one", but "lo bueno" would mean "the good/what's good". Simmilarly, the demonstratives "esto", "eso", "aquello" (and the personal pronoun "ello") are used only for uncountable or undefined things ("this", "that"...), while "éste", "ése", "aquél" (the tildes are now optional) are used for defined things ("this one", "that one"...) ("ello" is used only for verbs constructions, basically; for a noun, you'd rather use "eso"). Clarification: in Asturian we use the neuter 'article' the same way as in spanish, and neuter nouns instead get masculine or feminine articles based on their original gender (though do note how some mass nouns have the masculine gender in Asturian even when they don't in Spanish, such as "sal" ("salt")). In Asturian, however, many masculine nouns change a bit when used in an uncountable sense ("pelu"~"pilu" (hair strand)→"pelo" (hair)), and so do adjectives ("agua cristalino", with an adjective ending in -o, where it would be -u/-os~-us for the masculine and -a/-es~-as for the feminine). (dialectal variation shown with ~; please note that Asturian itself varies a lot from place to place, with the neuter gender existing in central dialects, and being less prevalent in southern and coastal ones). An example from Wikipedia: una fueya seca (a dry leave) unes fueyes seques (some dry leaves) fueya seco (dry leaves, uncountable). The sad thing is Asturian is basically a relic by now, with very few people actually speking it, though many words and expressions have made it into the Spanish spoken here. As for words that change genders, there's "el arte"→"las artes", and a few words with either gender ("el/la calor", "el/la mar" (note that "the seas" is always "los mares", I don't think I've ever heard "las mares")), but that's basically it. In Asturian you also get words that have different genders depending on where in Asturias you are (this also happens in all of Spain, but only with a few words), with things getting particularly weird nearing the border with Galicia, as you enter into the Galician-Asturian "Fala" (the way they speak there). Also, I'm unsure, but... "el sal" instead of "la sal" ("the salt") could be referring to what in Spanish would be "salitre" or something like that, because I've heard the same people use both (or maybe it's just free variation?). Anyway, if someone actually read this, thx. Edit: clarifications.
In modern Italian, the plural of braccio is "braccia" referring to a human body parts and "bracci" for tools and all the limbs of those fabricated objects. Osso ( bone) becomes "ossa" for human bones and "ossi" for animal bones. Thank you for your beautiful channel.
Well, I'm studying russian. But I've booked a trip to Paraguay so I may need to improve my little to no spanish skills. And I'm into health sciences college which implies that a lot of the technical terms come from latin. YET, Luke publishes a video about OLD ITALIAN and for some reason I can't just not watch it... as if I had nothing more important to study in terms of languages.... oh well. I actually understand 50%~ish of italian since I'm brazilian and I guess that helps?
Il dito / Le dita... It's just crazy. But you will learn that it's even crazier when you say "Il dito" - "I diti" only when you refer only to plural fingers at a pair... I diti indici= Index fingers... I diti mignoli= small toes.
This analysis is fascinating, and yet it doesn't fully safisfy me. Calling those examples from a short period of the early history of Italian "a third gender", "intermediate cases", "exceptions" or "genus alternans" is, in my humble opinion, more a matter of personal choices than an accurate description of reality. Some of the examples you mentioned, for instance, may easily be considered as analogies. You mention "dito" (Latin "digitus"), and said that the plural "dita" has no reason to be like that, etimologically; and yet, since many other parts of the body (braccio, labbro, orecchio, ginocchio...) follow that pattern, it is easy to accept that the word "finger" simply ended up following a more common pattern, conveniently. Another thing to remember is that many Italian words may change gender, EVEN IN CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN, for no apparent reason. For instance, this is very common with alterative suffixes, e.g. "la maglia => il maglione" (but I could give you hundreds of examples). More in general, we should never forget that grammars are normally written CENTURIES after the birth of a language, trying to make sanse and establish an order out of the innumerable inconsistencies, contradictions and unexplained phenomena which can only be reconstructed on the basis of a limited number of written texts whose authors (in many cases anonymous) have already long passed away. So, when Loporcaro and Faraoni analyzed ancient Italian, they proposed a model which best accounted, in their opinion, for the available documentation, and I take my hat off; however, I believe that denomination or considering the "third gender" a fixed characteristic of Italian at that stage is, in my opinion, a bit too simplistic
I wonder how many of these rules had been actually forced by 19th century linguists of Romance languages countries; in Italy specifically by the post unification linguists.
I daresay that the rules (I'd rather say "statistical tendencies") mentioned in this video were not touched at all in the 19th century: they had already long disappeared by then. In the 19th century many choices were made after the unification of Italy, because they needed to codify the way Italian would be taught in schools, so for instance they decided what the plural of "ciliegia" was or if it was correct to say "è piovuto" or "ha piovuto", and a number of other little rules which we are generally taught in elementary school and which we invariably forget by middle school
9:38 This text is literally written in Sicilian. We speak still this way nowadays. In Old Sicilian it should be like this: li ditta casteḍḍa pi chiḍḍi mura nti li letta li rina li sacca nti li casteḍḍa
Adding an apostil, it can be observed that in modern Italian morphology an ordinary masculine plural form in « i »may coexist with an archaic so to speak neutral plural-singular form in « a », such as for : il labbro (the lip) / le labbra or I labbri ; il corno (the horn) / le corna or i corni ; il braccio (the arm) / le braccia or I bracci ; il lenzuolo (the bedsheet ) / I lenzuoli or le lenzuola. Of course the two forms aren’t interchangeable. The « a » ending which is the more common in those examples applies to a set perceived as typically indissociable. Otherwise the « i » ending is used. So : le labbra della bocca (the lips of the mouth) / I labbri della ferita (the edges of the wound) ; le corna della mucca (the horns of the cow)/ I corni dell’altare (the horns of the altar) ; le braccia di un uomo (a man’s arms) / i bracci della croce (the arms of the cross) ; le lenzuola vanno cambiate spesso ( bedsheets should be changed often) / un venditore di lenzuoli (a bedsheets seller). Lastly, the notional unity of a set of objects as rendered by a neutral plural-singular form can be traced back to ancient greek where such a subject governed a singular verb (« ta zoa trekhei » the animals run).
I knew about this already but I would’ve never thought to see it explained by an American honestly, also one thing we’ve lost is the formal plural third person pronoun “vi” which was used with strangers, which in today’s italian has been replaced with “la”, used for both show respect to strangers and show respect to people that are more important than you, like a professor or a judge.
I beg your pardon, but it's currently the 6th most spoken language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi and Bengalese
@thiagoracca Oh, certainly. When we want to make a classification of the most spoken languages, we should always specify a few general conditions, since the list may slightly vary depending on how you make the calculations. Nobody doubts that Portuguese is a major language. However, why did you say that only the population of India is growing on that list? The Chinese-speaking population is also growing (though less quickly) and so are the numbers of Spanish and English speakers
@@nicolanobili2113 actually most off the west is dwelling because birthrates and this is true for italian, portuguese, english… but this is another discussion
German currently has a neuter gender for the word "girl" - Mädchen (because of the diminutive suffix "-chen") which in most other languages would be considered feminine.
You'll certain similarities in neuter gender in Romanian. It. uovo/uova - Ro. ou/ouă (o becomes a in plural) It. capo/capi - Ro. cap/capete (added -ete in plural like the adding of -ora in old Italian)
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You nailed romanian language and the accent was pretty good !
What about this: 1) BraccI delle gru ---> Crane arms vs 2) BracciA delle persone ---> People's arms
A lot of dialects in Southern Italy still preserve the Latin neuter, which is evident when a different article is used to indicate a countable noun and a collective noun, for example in Neapolitan there is "o" from Latin illu(m) for masculine, and the is "o‘" from Latin illud for neuter (it's different because the neuter article causes syntactic gemination, which means that the initial consonant of the following word doubles)
Super interesting 😮 in sardinian there are only fossils, like duos, duas 'two' becoming dua when said together with mizza 'thousands'
@@viperking6573Como en catalán dos, dues, portugués dois, duas y occitano dos, doas y duas.
@@juanfranciscocampoycaballero si 🤗
I'm pretty sure at this point most speakers with syntactic gemination apply it at the start of every emphasised word regardless of what precedes it
That's not true. "O" is the equivalent of "il". It's not neutral. It's masculine.
As an Italian I never thought I'd learn things about Italian from you ... 🤣. This was very interesting, I don't know why they don't teach this things in school, I'd remember much more easily a beatuful story like this than 20 "exceptions".
Grazie!
Eidem
Si vede che aveva delle lacune in grammatica.
i’m american with abruzzese relatives who absolutely say “le ficura” so it looks like that feature seems to go even further than just Lazio. if you go to L’Aquila in fig season I’m sure you’ll hear it too, I heard it constantly when i was there this summer, and not just from people who speak exclusively or majority in abruzzese. thanks for always posting the coolest stuff dude.
Coming from that part of Italy I assure you that "ficura" is really the most common way to call the figs more than "I fichi" the standard Italian version 😂
@@horos5870wow io invece non ho mai sentito dire ficura ma solo i fichi 😂
@@TommyTommy io sono della zona di confine tra Abruzzo e Marche e da noi a un certo punto dell'anno si vanno a cogliere "li ficura" 🤣🤣
"Ficura!" Che fico!
Re-learning Latin has helped me so much already with Italian comprehension. I was watching a documentary on infrastructure, about the Ponte Morandi bridge collapse in Genova, with a lot of Italian interviews. But Latin also helped me immensely in that it gave me a head start over some of my peers in uni when learning German, because some of these people had no idea of grammatical gender at all, or couldn't deal with having THREE in German!
Fascinating to learn about Italian changing over time, as well!
In Spanish there is the article "lo" which comes out every once in a while, and some people call it the "neuter article" because it is neither "el" (masc) nor "la" (fem), yet it is widely contested because most neuter words from Latin got absorbed into the masculine in Spanish. From what I'v read it seems previous generations of linguists considered it a neuter article, and more recent ones don't.
It's the exact same thing in Italian, only the masculine article is "il", while "lo" and "la" have the same meaning
Could you use it in an example sentence please? For learning purposes
Conceptually I almost don't consider "lo" to be an article at all, but a direct stand-in for "la cosa" in most cases.
_Lo que me interesa..._ | _La cosa que me interesa..._
_Lo gracioso es..._ | _La cosa graciosa es..._
_Lo más importante..._ | _La cosa más importante..._
But there are quite a few exceptions such as "lo ocurrido", "lo mucho", "lo antes posible", "por lo tanto" etc. which would be a lot harder to try substituting with "la cosa". It definitely is a tricky little word that trips a lot of learners up.
@@LegendoftheGalacticHero Lo importante en la vida es amar. The important thing in life is to love. It's used an awful lot but this is one of the more transparent constructions. Here it's used for "abstraction" if you will, nominalizing an adjective. Even more frequently, but more subtly, used with relative pronouns: lo que, lo cual; the gendered articles have their own similar use there too. Not every use of lo is this neuter article; an etymologically distinct "lo" is the masculine accusative pronoun that goes inseparably before the verb.
@@LegendoftheGalacticHero "Lo barato sale caro" (the cheapest option ends up being more expensive).
"Lo bueno es que tenemos salud" (the good thing is that we have health).
You can see why some believe it be a vestige of a neuter gender because, used this way, it almost always refers to a concept or idea rather than a being or thing.
One of the most fascinating linguistic videos I’ve seen. There’s something elegant and beautiful about the neuter plural forms in preliterary Italian… Romanian has a productive neuter gender ending “uri” which functions very similarly and bears resemblance to the “ora” form in Italian.
Thanks! That's true.
There are still 3 words in French that do this too: délice, amour, orgue. AND there is a really strange phenomenon where an adjective changes gender when in front of a noun depending on number. Because the French love to keep as many exceptions to their rules as possible :)
Learning Greek, my φιλόλογος / filólogos - Greek master once told me that in Greek there are always exceptions to the rules. For example he said that some names - nouns - _noms_ that may appear to have the normally masculine -ος endings are so old they are neuters, or even more rarely feminines. I think all languages hold exceptions to linguistical rules, but I believe Greek could nearly match French, et vous les français avec votre merveilleuse Académie Française, in being martinets to the rules we hold to using our languages. 🧿💙
It happens very frequently in the Mediterranean languages and the romantic written too.
In Italian some collective nouns have the -a ending but are treated as singular grammatically e.g. "la frutta" (fruits) and "la legna" (wood), as opposed to the ones you mentioned (le uova, le mura, le dita, le braccia, le ciglia, le labbra, etc).
p.s. I remember an old Italian poem from 13° century where it says "pull me away from these fires" like "tragemi d'este focora" and I never understood why this -ora (foco > focora) came from Latin focus > foci which is masculine. Now I understand... and of course in Romanian foc > focuri went down the same path... Thank you for explaining it.
Focora! Mi piace.
It's in the "Contrasto" by Cielo d'Alcamo, one of the first poems of "Italian" vulgar literature, Sicilian school of king Federico II. And of course this verse was despised by Dante in his "De Vulgaris Eloquentia" as low quality ("secundum quod prodit a terrigenis mediocribus") and dialectal stuff.
Frutta is right, but legna is not really the plural of "legno", "legno" is only the material ("di legno"). Even a single log of wood is "legna", like a single glass is acqua.
@@neutronalchemist3241il melo la mela ,il però la pera ,il fico la fic@
@@neutronalchemist3241 You are wrong, "legno" is a singular noun and can be the subject. For example "Pietro butta un legno nel caminetto" (Pietro throws a piece of wood into the fireplace), it is not "Pietro butta una legna nel caminetto", a correct version could be "Pietro butta della legna nel caminetto" ("della" meaning "some"), but wording this way you don't specify how many pieces he is throwing.
In my dialect (Sabin) we still say ficora for plural of fico. 'A pié d'a ficora ce nasce o ficorillo'. is a proverb we use to say something like 'like father, like son'.We say u ficu, e ficora. At least my grandmother said so, I understand the language, but I am almost unable to speak it.
Wow! Che ficu!
Same in sicilian: 'u ficu, 'i ficura. Actually, a lot of words take the ending in -ura to form the ending. For example Catu (bucket/ secchio) becomes catura!
Nel mio dialetto (nel Lazio) ma al confine con l'Abruzzo diciamo "la fícura" (il fico) e "lə fícura" (i fichi).
Thanks for an incredible video, Luke! I recall reading Lausberg’s argument that the Italian “neuter plural” le < Latin *illaec, analogically formed from haec, but the evidence you’ve amassed from Loporcaro and others has me convinced that we really are dealing with the bonafide feminine article in cases like le ciglia. I think we even have some evidence for extension in the -ora ending in Late Latin-such fascinating stuff!
That's also an important observation!
Hi Luke, i’m an Italian guy and I just want to say your work is amazing! I always asked myself about the reason Italian language ended with no neuter case considering its strict connection to Latin, and suddenly I found my answer years later my first thoughts about this topic in your video!
I really appreciate this content as much as many others in your channel. I also love this style of divulgation, walking into a context, it reminds me of Alberto Angela style (I don’t know if you know him, but probably being in Italy you sure do).
Best regards, and thanks!
Grazie mille, Luigi!
"Ciglio" - "Ciglia" ("Eyelash" - "Eyelashes") is typically one of those words that drive every Italian crazy, since we generally use the female word either for the singular and for the plural words, while technically we should probably use "Ciglie" for the plural! 😅 While "Ciglio" is practically used to indicate the edge (of a road or a of a sidewalk). 🤷♂😄
Come italiano mi stai dicendo cose che non sapevo. Fra l'altro ti seguo e ascolto anche sull'altro canale di latino, lingua che sto cercando di imparare! Bravo e grazie!
Grazie a te!
Fascinating! Some reflexes of latin neuter gender are still productive in certain neuter pronouns in Spanish (ello/lo
Thank you for keeping italian alive in the other parts of the world, and not only italian but latin too, My favourite language!
Grazie mille, gratias tibi valde.
Grazie a te!
Classical Latin itself has similar remnants of older grammatical forms, such as the deponent verbs: active in sense, but passive in form, which may be remnants of an earlier middle voice, as in Ancient Greek. The semi-deponent verbs also show the alternating phenomenon, with the simple tenses being active in form whereas the perfect tenses look passive. The reflexive verbs of French look like middle voice to me. Maybe something like that will happen to American English, with Microsoft Word constantly telling us to eschew the passive. Modern languages may also have hints of the dual.
i'm from the Sabina region in Lazio, and my grandma always used the term "Ficora" to name the fruit tree and the plural form of the fruit :)
Da appassionato di latino e di evoluzione di esso nelle lingue romanze, trovo i tuoi video sempre fighissimi. Yes "fiGhissimi and not fiChissimi" because I'm from northern Italy and I use your intreresting videos to improve my english. Grazie Luchino.
Ahah bravo. Grazie!
Ever since I first learned about this phenomenon - and my Italian is rudimentary at best, but I tend to focus and get obsessed by them, I've asked myself the question: "why is this simply not called the neuter gender in Italian?"
Now I feel I finally have the answer. Thank you!
The Latin neuter plural -ora ending has survived in Romanian as -uri and just like Old Italian,it has been applied to nouns that never had it originally.
Also in many southern Italian varieties it seems, and there appear to be vestiges in Spanish as well
What a cool video! Here in Florence (and throughout most of Tuscany) you can find several examples of our old neuter, especially in street names and toponomy. Some examples off the top of my head are: "campora" (meadows), "molina" (mills) and "prata" (fields). By the way, I have to say I don't think I'd ever encountered "pratora" before. Also, another common word that follows this neuter pattern is "il lenzuolo/le lenzuola" (sheets). Finally, I just wanted to add that most of these words have a masculine-based plural form with a different or specific meaning (labbri, braccî, ciglî) and that they all shift to the masculine pattern anyway when suffixes are added (ovetti, orecchioni).
Impressed at how well you pronounced Romanian, bravo Luke!
Mulțumesc!
Although in sicilian we don't really have a neuter gender, a lot of words actually take a neuter ending. The reason we don't percieve them as neuter probably stems from the fact that we lack a "neuter" article, while having neuter endings. As in -u singular, -a plural (similar to italian) and -u or -a singular, -ura in the plural
that's very interesting! can you give some examples of the words ending in -ura in plural?
@@xolang of course!
"Woods": Voscu, voscura
"Bucket": Catu, Catura
"Pine tree": Pinu, Pinura
"Fig": ficu, ficura
And so on. Note that young sicilians may use an -i plural ending because of modern italian influence. Ironically, old italian almost always had a similar -ora ending as sicilian in such cases
@@esti-od1mz Thank you!
İn Romanian it is a very productive plural ending btw, and it also ends in -i. e.g. corp, corpuri.
@@xolang you’re welcome! It is stil productive in sicilian, although not as much as in the past: it was corpu- corpura in sicilian and corpo-corpora in italian!
There's the other thing that happens to Latin neuters like "opus" where the nominative (etc.) plural is reanalysed as a feminine singular.
True!
I just realised there is still at least a relic in modern Italian of pre-literary italian neuter. The plural of "il frutto" is not "le frutta" but "LA FRUTTA". There is also "i frutti", but it normally means "the products", not an ensemble of fruits.
It has to be noted that, the moment you number them, it becomes "cinque frutti", not "cinque frutta", but in the normal language, to number an unspecified kind of fruits is pretty rare, so "frutta" is largely prevalent.
A fascinating group of words! Many of these examples exist in Spanish, but rather as doublets with different meanings from what developed from the cognate neuter signular descendants. 𝐏𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐨 'meadow' has 𝐩𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐚 'pasture, grassland, prairie' ; 𝐥𝐚𝐝𝐨 'side' has (via Portuguese) 𝐥𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐚 'slope, hillside, mountainside'; 𝐡𝐮𝐞𝐯𝐨 'egg' has 𝐡𝐮𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐚 'fish-roe' also 'egg-cup' (Alt. *ovaria); 𝐥𝐞ñ𝐨 'log' has 𝐥𝐞ñ𝐚 'firewood (collective)', and 𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐨 'lip' has 𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐚 'gift of gab, silver-tongue, pejor. boulderdash, B.S'. Non-neuter 𝐟𝐮𝐞𝐠𝐨 'fire' has 𝐡𝐨𝐠𝐚𝐫 'home, orig. hearth', and 𝐡𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞𝐫𝐚 'campfire, bonfire' (Alt. *focaria). 𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐨 'fig' has 𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐮𝐞𝐫𝐚 'fig-tree' (Alt. *ficaria). 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐨 'castle' has 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚 (the name of the kingdom). The fossilized plural form 𝐂𝐞𝐣𝐚 'eyelash' survives only in the feminine, while the singular form was reborrowed as 𝐜𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐨 'cilium'. Also 𝐬𝐞ñ𝐚 'indication' or 'gesture' has a learned borrowing from the latin singular, which gives 𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐨 'sign, sign of zodiac'. Interestingly, by an unrelated sound change in Spanish, there's an /r/ in the of the descendant of 3rd decl. neuters (sing. as well as plu.) ɴᴏᴍᴇɴ → 𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐛𝐫𝐞, and ᴠɪᴍᴇɴ→ 𝐦𝐢𝐦𝐛𝐫𝐞 'willow, withe, osier'. A hidden /r/ from a neuter plural exists in the final /l/ of sᴛᴇʀᴄᴜs→ 𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐨𝐥 'manure', or it could be analogy from ᴍᴀʀᴍᴏʀ→ 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐨𝐥 'marble' (another neuter). Via French came the word 𝐛𝐢𝐭á𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐚 'binnacle' & 'weblog' , ultimately from ʜᴀʙɪᴛᴀᴄᴜʟᴜᴍ. As in Italian, Spanish has only this handful in total , with possibly an additional 3-4 more examples that I may have missed. In all, these are some amazing transitional forms of archeopterygian proportions, and that's no 𝙡𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙖 !
Confusions, for ex. ladera is not a sort of neutral plural...
¡Increíble! Muchísimas gracias por esto.
Ladera, compare with Romanian latura
Interesting, so I'm guessing that’s the way eastern romance did it. I'm learning Romanian and I always found the neuter gender interesting and challenging because there’s no way to tell which masculine nouns are neuter so you just have to learn it from memory, unless I'm missing something there and there’s a way to know it (if so I'd be glad to know)
I'm glad you're learning my language. Yeah, unfortunately the neuter nouns are something you can only learn by trial and error. There is no grammatical rule which makes it easier, it's just something you have to memorize and internalize. I guess the only rule is that the neuter noun is always masculine in the singular, and feminine in the plural, never the opposite (if that helps). It's a bit annoying for sure, but you can get away with making mistakes. Many native Romanian speakers make grammatical mistakes (like me).
Neuter nouns:
Un scaun, doua scaune
un televisor, doua televisoare
un scut, doua scuturi
un ou, doua oua
un os. doua oase
Un, două. Singular (m) plural ( f ) vs un, doi/ o, două. 😊
@@daciaromana2396 yeah, I’m trying to memorize them, fortunately they’re not annoying enough for me to stop learning Romanian 🫡
Is there no way of telling gender in Romanian just by the word ending?
@@kacperwoch4368 you can, it’s just that neuter doesn’t have its own ending so in singular is masculine but plural is feminine and you have to memorize/learn which masculine nouns are actually neuter and change the plural to feminine
It is always a pleasure to learn things from such a fantastic teacher!
Thans Luke, your work is extraordinary!
Very kind!
What is really amazing is that you're from US and yet masterfully explain to me something about my language/culture. Thanks from Italy
12'41" "There are less than 20 of them". I agree, but only if you add "commonly used" at the end of the sentence. There are actually more than 20, here are the first ones that come to my mind: uovo, dito, labbro, braccio, ginocchio, ciglio, sopracciglio, orecchio, lenzuolo, muro, centinaio, migliaio, miglio, paio, riso, membro, osso, tergo, corno, granello, budello, cervello, intestino, urlo... Some of them, that's true, have two different plural forms (e.g. "corna" is used for the horns of the same animal, whereas "corni" is used for horns of different animals or for the musical instrument).
Wow!!! I absolutely love the detailed explanation. Clear as water! My students always ask me grammatical questions like “why”, and I always say I don’t know why….
Could you do a video explaining the difference between use of subjunctive in Spanish and Italian? I always found it strange that we say “credo che sia…” but “credo que es…”. I would love to know the background story for this phenomenon. Others include gender of certain nouns… il miele but la miel; il sale but la sal; l’analisi (f) but el análisis. Never understood why. Perhaps it’s related to this third gender.
Creo que es…*
That's a great question! I think this just comes down to habit, or random chance. Old English also required the subjunctive here: "iċ wēne þæt sīe..." Also true of the gender changse: arbor (f.) > albero (m.).
My thought was maybe the Spanish church found it inappropriate that faith was in subjunctive mood…
I'm Italian and this video made me think a bit about how we think about these irregular words. I can't shake off the idea that in Italian there is a connection between an uncounted plurality (but assumed in quantity) and the feminine gender (or, better, feminine for of the word). In my head, the feminine plural indicates a pre determined number of objects. It sounds silly, maybe, but it's not different from saying one person, two persons, many people. In my head, "people" would be the female plural version of a potentially masculine singular because it indicates "one crowd", like the irregular "sheep" as plural usually indicates "a herd" (unlike different types of "sheeps"). (Obviously the "people" example is unrelated to the actual gender of the people taken into consideration). So, when you say "dito" I know it's one, but "le dita" gives a sense of "my hands". In Italian we frequently joke and say "due o tre diti" pretending to speak like babies but the sound of it is not completely foreign to our mind and it doesn't summon the idea of "hands". Another example is un uovo / le uova, where "a box/dozen/pail of eggs" comes to mind when saying "le uova". In the same way, if I say "le ginocchia" I know it's very likely to be two of them. Il labbro -> le labbra is, again, two because it's one mouth.
Again, I may be wrong, but I see some sort of connection between uncontability with assumed quantification and plural of the neuter gender.
If you refer to both thumbs, index fingers etc. the correct form is "i diti" ;)
Interesting.
Nice to see such a clear development of the language through logical changes. My own mothertongue Swedish must have gone through similar changes to go from the older male/female/neuter gender system to our modern neuter/non-neuter system. We also have some remnants of the old system in certain phrases, of course (remnants of old grammar is fun to spot). But unlike from old Latin to modern Italian, there's very little written in our dialect of old Norse or the subsequent Old Swedish. Runestones are awesome, but they're not exactly long form texts.
Such a cool video, Luke! You always do such an awesome job breaking down the information. So interesting!
Very kind! Thanks for watching.
@@polyMATHY_Luke if you don't mind me sharing, I was actually taught something interesting about grammatical gender:
(Depending on the language) words developed from roots and endings. Each word told you what it was and what it did. Each ending had its own grammatical forms.
So, words fell into categories based on shape and grammatical forms, with pronouns to match.
As roots began to fade, each category was attached to the Actual Gender it most commonly described: the word for man is almost always masculine, the word for woman feminine, the word for something like tree is usually neuter.
So, many words that did not have a gender of their own, but followed the shape of words that did have an actual gender were treated as that gender, in order to memorize grammatical forms.
It's kind of like that life of Brian video you did: Romanus goes like Annus. They share the same conjugation patterns.
So often people speaking languages with gender will give male or female qualities to objects that have no actual gender, simply to remember the conjugation of that word - using gender as a shortcut
I'm Italian and I've studied history of the italian language. Nice video
Fantastic video, as a Romanian I both love Italian, but especially old Italian, specifically for its neuter gender, which is what made so much of the poetry and writing from the time just speak so much more to me. I have Aphantasia (no imagination) and so wording and detail in that wording is super important to me. Im nowhere near fluent in Italian nevertheless old Italian, but it translates a little better to romanian than modern italian does, which is already very similar.
Funny thing is that in some areas of Lazio region (and in some other central areas) the dialects still use it like that, just like in Old Italian.
You just made me realize that in Italian we say "il carcere" (the prison) masculine singular, "le carceri" feminine plural
Infatti! E il gregge le greggi
this is literally the “neuter” gender in Romanian lol:)) also, Romanian preserved the neuter-specific plural ending “-uri”, coming from an older version of ”-ure”, coming from Latin “-ora”! you can really see that in words like: latin “tempus - tempora” and its Romanian descendant “timp - timpuri”.
et de novo fecisti video multo bonum! luke, você tá sempre fazendo vídeos bons. Nunca para aí, tá ensinando muitos com teus vídeos!
I am italian and I studied latin at high school but I didn' know that neutral gender still existed inside old italian language!
There are some examples that I can't still figure out why they developed like that, such as "arm" (i.e. braccio), singular male, and "arms" (i.e. braccia), plural female, as you correctly cited.
However we actually use the male plural name of "arm" - "braccio", that is "bracci", but only in a technical connotation context, such as the arms of a machinery, for example.
So that they could be intended as neutral words somehow. I think that might be one of the most difficult thing to understand for those who are learning Italian.
My perception is that fossil plurals in - a, as in le corna, le braccia, le ciglia etc are only ever used in a collective sense, when referring to a pair of such objects. But the masculine plural is used when referring to a plurality of "single instances" of such objects. As in "ho le ciglia lunghe" and "sui cigli delle strade", or "fritto misto con le cervella" and "i cervelli in fuga".
So yes, these collective plurals may be seen as a sort of neuter I guess. Some of the examples elude this reasoning though.
It is "dito" and "dita" as long as they are your fingers.. A collection of fingers with multiple owners is "diti"
The neuter form is still used in Spanish but it's limited to:
Lo bueno es que
Siempre lo hace de tal manera
Nadie lo hizo.
Etc.
When it comes to numbers:
Uno/Una/Un
Cuatro/Cuatra
Cuando/Cuan
En "nadie lo hizo" y en "siempre lo hace" funciona como un acusativo (aunque en español no existan oficialmente casos) es decir indica la función gramatical de objeto directo y sigue siendo masculino; el artículo no cambia de género.
Nella lingua veneta poi ci sono dei sostantivi neutri che invece di evolversi al maschile sono diventati femminili: la late (milk), la miele (honey), la sale (salt). Questo fenomeno però negli ultimi anni è stato praticamente cancellato dall'influsso dell'italiano/toscano.
I am from Lucca, Tuscany. I have heard some people here saying "le ditina" ("the little fingers") - (diminutive plural of "dita" - fingers). I think that the ending -a shows that this word is not considered a feminine plural, but a neuter plural - otherwise, one would have said "le ditine". From a research in internet I can see that also some dictionaries indicate "ditina" as a possible plural.
Che fico! Grazie per aver condiviso questo.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Di nulla!
È stato un onore per me conoscerti, Luke! (e abbastanza inaspettato)
Anche per me! Grazie per aver guardato il video.
In fact this story of the masculine singular to female plural for body parts is even more complicated than that. Next to le orecchie, le dita, le ciglia, le braccia, the masculine versione gli orecchi, i diti, i cigli, i bracci also exist. This is the difference: the female version of the nouns are used only for the human body parts, while the masculine versions are used to indicate animal body parts or of inanimate objects (i diti del pollo, i cigli del batterio, i bracci meccanici del robot).
È vero
It's even more complicated than that. For instance, a serial killer who collects, say, only the middle fingers of his victims would collect "i diti medî" in Italian: when those parts of the body belong to different bodies, you use the regular masculine plural form anyway. Oh, and there are a number of nouns with double plural forms with slightly different meanings, e.g. "il muro => i muri (the walls of a house) or le mura (city walls, or used in the expression "le mie 4 mura")
as an italian, i always feel that our language simply changes with times and events, where if we like women a lot or create stories about them and spread them, it eventually modifes the language to include terms who are more female gender attuned. not sure how to explain, it feels like we go along with times and events in a natural way ahah. it must be sound related and how "good" it feels to the ear ahah
Grazie per il commento
I'm just wondering if they did keep into account that '300s 'volgare' was more a sperimental language than what the average florentine/tuscanian would have spoken, more a summary of the main dialects spoken, a way to virtually unite the peninsula, so these nouns might have been genuinely added on purpose by the great writers of the era...
Interesting thought.
In Salentine, while still having this mixed-gender nouns (dícitu-dícite/díciti, razzu-razze, scinucchiu-scinucchî/scinucchie for finger, arm, and kneel) we also still retain some of this endings like in capu-càpure (alongside with modern capu for head), limmu-límmure/límmule (alongside with mdrn limmi for vase), tèmpure/tèmpura/tèmpere are latin loanwords for the liturgical times (tempus) but honestly I don't know if the singular form is "tiempu" or it merged with tèmpura itself for its singular resembling form.
eventually, càpure evolved locally into capre
we do also have a "la manu" (feminine hand) and "li mani" (masculine hands)
another noun is ou/ove (egg)
I love the bloopers at the end not to mention the amazing content as always
Thanks! The outtakes are fun to put together, glad you like to watch them.
Me too! The bloopers are so hilarious! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
This is Helping me Lrean Italian Soon I will Be Able to speak and Understand my Family in Italy as a Canadian Half Italian With Italian Grandparents and Italian Family Members in Italy
French also has 3 words that alternate gender: they are "amour", "délice", and "orgue" (love, delight, and organ). They are masculine in singular and feminine in plural. I don't know if there is a connection to latine neutral.
Old italian is not synonymous with Tuscan/Floentine. It covers a much larger area than that (virtually the whole peninsula).
That is evident by the fact that many of the neautral plural forms are still found in many of the dialects far outside of Tuscany.
For example in Calabrian and Sicilian they still say "lu focu" / "li fòcura", "lu corpu" / "li còrpura", "lu tempu" / "li tèmpura".
Also forms that are simply masculine in the modern standard Italian language have a neutral plural in those dialects as they did in old italian literature. E.g. "il castello" / "i castelli" or "il muro" and "i muri" in modern italian but older italian literature had the plural as "castella" and "mura" and we still find "castella" and "mura" in many of the southern Italian dialects (or variations of them like "castedda" in Sicilian).
This shows that the italian dialects are not separate languages but they evolved from an earlier common form of italian and that is rightfully called "old Italian", it was not specific only to Florence.
Sardinian and Friulan do not descend from this earlier version of the language and therefore they are correctly called languages in their own right.
Post upload update: Just as I watch this i notice that Luke specifically mentions "le nòmora". This form is still said in many of the Sicilian dialects; "Li nòmura". How then can anyone argue that Sicilian (or the other italiano dialects) are separate languages when they clearly have the same features from the same roots and those roots are not Latin as Luke has demonstrated but old Italian.
Well when Luke brought Romanian into the picture, he seemed to already imply that this neuter system was rather widespread in the early Middle Ages in Eastern Romance. It's interesting how Sicilian has this too in itself!
@@tylere.8436 Luke did a great job over all.. I'm not trying to say he's completely wrong.
My comment was really aimed at this growing argument I see that tries to say that every Italian dialect is it's own language derived directly from Latin, or that Italian is only as old as Dante and was then imposed on the rest of the peninsula from Florence.
Honestly my comment is not directly related to this video. But this video is the proof that argument is false because it shows that one of the key features of the dialects was there in old Italian.
It makes sense that we also see some of this neautral plural feature in Romanian since both Italian and Romanian are eastern romance languages, but there are a whole range of sound shifts and grammatical features that show Romanian is a separate branch of the Romance family tree.
@@michaelm-bs2er I can agree with that, Romance languages are so fascinating in themselves because they have complex histories. Spanish was standardized in Madrid, yet It actually had roots in northern Spain, in places like Burgos, where castles were built around during the start of reconquista - hence the alternative name: castellano. French during this time too was rather conservative in many regards and sounded like other neighboring romance languages (retaining a nominative case even), but as further sound shifts happened, this case was lost. Early Romance is something that always intrigues me. So I can agree with that assessment that Italian had roots in places other than Tuscany.
@tylere.8436 I agree and thank you also for the tid bits of info on Spanish and French. I always wondered where the name Castellano came from. That makes a lot of sense.
I've seen records of old French, mainly the Oaths of Strasbourg and you are right, it is astonishing how conservative it was in the early phase of its development.
While you're talking about old italian, it is the italoromance continuum you're referring to. Sicilian and tuscan are italoromance, which means they come closer to each other in the romance dialect continuum. Old italian, beside the fact that is a term used more by english speakers, refer more to the 12th century florentine poetry variety
5:50 In the dialect of my town (in Calabria) -ora suffix is still in use 😄!
Do those words change gender like uovo in Italian?
@@Glossologia Yes, for example “u nuru/e nurura (knot/knots) - u grupu/e grupura (hole/holes) - u surcu/e surcura (furrow/furrows). However, nowadays very few people do it (especially the very elderly) and almost everyone uses the masculine form.
@@Glossologia Also, in Calabria there’s a village called "Le Castella" (the castles) 😄
It reminds me of Romansh, in Switzerland. I didn't remember if there is this "genus alternans" as in old Italian, or those fossilized plurals in modern Italian, but in Romansh, there are two types of plural, the common one with an -s, to specific objects we're talking about, and a general plural, which reminds the "feminine-plural" on Italian, also behaving as a singular noun: il meil madir (the ripe apple), il meil ei madirs (the apple is ripe) ils meils ein madirs (the apples are ripe [these apples over the table for example]), la meila ei madira (the apple [on this season for example] are ripe). Sometimes, the general plural can even express a dual meaning: Il bratsch (the arm [the limb] ), la bratscha (two arms, or "both arms"), bratsch can also use the common plural, so ils bratschs (the arms).
I'll start using "la bagnora" from now on and no Italian will understand me 😂 Also, I like the phrase "fuggiamo quinci" I will start using that one, too.
😂😂😂😂
Complimenti! Interessante scoprire da italiano l'antico plurale neutro in "-ora" -!
È molto interessante e un poco divertente.
So interesting, Luke!
According to current literary sources, nowadays "le dita" refers to ALL fingers on your hands, whereas when you only focus onto specific ones, they should be referred to as "i diti".
Actually in Spanish we have a neutral article that we use it with adjectives. Lo bueno. Lo malo. Lo menor. To talk about all the things with this quality.
👏Fascinating and crystal clear as always!!!
People who say English is complicated.... Need to watch this lol
Thank you, this is very interesting!
I wonder if this neuter gender has also, somehow, influenced the double plurals that we have for some words (e.g. braccia/bracci, dita/diti) 🤔
Absolutely. Actually this makes Italian even more fascinating.
I do love the way the neuter rule for plurals got carried over into modern Italian, eg uovo in the singular, uova in the plural, just like ovum and ova
Edit: oops I wrote this before getting to the Genus Alternans section
.... and then there is Frutto, basically the equivalent of a grammatical Platypus- or rather, Ornitorinco: il Frutto, la Frutta, i Frutti, le Frutta.
On an unrelated note, when you said "fico" while mentioning masculine and feminine genders, I was expecting your video to take a more pecoreccio turn.
Keep it up, Maestro, and greetings from Northern Italy (where, by the by, we say "figo".)
Grazie per il tuo lavoro culturale, sei un genio, non c'è bisogno che io traduca in inglese so che tu mi capisci
Ti capisco perfettamente, grazie per il commento.
In my dialect, Calabrian (don't call it Sicilian as was invented in Wikipedia), gender is grammatically present only in singular, while it's lost in plural, except for the words that keep the gender in the root, like fìmmana = woman. The plural form hasvthe same article (i) and endings for both genders (usually -i, sometimes -a). The gender still exists, but only in the mind of the speaker:
A muntagna - i muntagni
A gatta, u gattu -> i gatti
A lupa, u lupu -> i lupa
But if gender is in the root, it's kept, but only in the root:
A fimmana, u masculu -> i fimmani, i masculi
U gadu, a gadina -> i gadi, i gadini
When I was a child in Tuscany local peasants used to say " riempire le sacca"
Davvero? Che fico!
Beautiful video thank you brother
Very cool! Thanks for sharing, Luke!
Thank you for your service, I noticed the badges of your army service on your coat.
Of all the languages I look into learning; English (in case you're wondering doctors say my first language is "Individual Vocalizations"), Spanish, French, German and Russian I found it strange how (apart from English) they all have a gender system (English used to but dropped in roughly 1000 years ago) and it seems confusing, granted "Individual Vocalizations" has no grammatical gender (or even much in the way of gendered language; "Mazha" and "Dazha" but that's about it) but I always wondered why do so many, or on a world scale relatively few since while only 5/6 Indo-European languages (English, Scots, Armenian, Persian, Ossetian and Afrikaans) don't use grammatical gender the mechanic is pretty rare outside of Indo-European languages with some like Hebrew and Arabic but around 3/4 of the world's languages do not.
I don't know if you've ever seen it but I read of a theory about this which suggested that when the Indo-European languages were forming (and possibly when Indo-European was a single language although if this happened is debated) there were societal roles and associations between objects and genders/biological sexes and the language was formed with those in mind, which is argued by some as support for the Indo-European Hypothesis (that being that all Indo-European languages descend from a single source which was the language of a single Indo-European people group) as well as argue for why Finland has led the way on women in positions of government since Finnish even lacks words for "he" and "she" and has only an equivalent of "they". Others have disputed this claim pointing out that there were plenty of gender norms in societies without grammatical gender and the fact that its not like those Indo-European languages which had no grammatical gender (or dropped it) became more gender equal.
Do you have any thoughts on why grammatical gender exists?
I have a whole video about it: th-cam.com/video/3AnG3tbwlIw/w-d-xo.htmlsi=HhGBzT5IeERfC5pr
@@polyMATHY_Luke Thanks, this will be interesting.
You're making me want to learn Italian now . How long has Irene been your camera 📷 person? She does a great job. Super interesting video as always
Irene volunteered to record starting from the “American speaks Latin at the Vatican” video in 2021. Her creative flare has added enormously to every video since that she has generously helped me with.
i find fascinating how well you pronounce the strong R, being my self spaniard i spent two years in the USA in the 80ties, an american family have dipietrantonio surname and when they told me , i pronounce it with strong R of course, and they told i was the only capable of pronounce it properly, i tried to show my american colleagues how to pronounce the strong R, it was impossible.... very few of them got near but no as well as you do...t is not that easy to pronounce ... you pronounce very well latin origin languages...
Very kind. Actually I have a video that teaches English speakers: th-cam.com/video/5Q3eXyzGZcg/w-d-xo.htmlsi=xeP0fXwkB75VASxv
10:55 Fascinating! And with "illō", "illő", "illā" and "lupō", "pomō", "rosā" in the ablative case the similarity is even more apparent. Speaking of which, any idea how come the "illō" has become lo (which I like un sacco, by the way) in preliterary/old Italian but then became the long forgotten onset "il" again?
Good question, it would be interesting what Luke can tell us about this.
I would just add that already in an earlier video (How Latin became Italian) he explained how all Italian endings probably derive from the Latin accusative even though it may seem counter-intuitive at first sight. (To elaborate, he explains how even the plural endings can be explained with sound changes affecting the accusative - even though they seem more similar to the Latin nominative, the video is really worth a watch.)
My (probably ill-informed) theory on "il"/"lo" would be that they probably were used pretty much interchangeably (or depending on the local variety) for a long time. For example, Dante as well as Bocaccio use both (not only as articles, but also as male accusative pronouns!), and so does a lot of 19th century literature.
I think we should not forget that - especially in Italian and also in German, maybe a bit less so in English and especially French - standardization was a centuries-long process that started in the middle ages and was only really completed at the beginning of the 20th century. Even in the 19th century what would have been considered "Standard Italian" or "Standard German" covered a much broader bandwidth of variants than it does today.
@@chriflu Thank you.
That's right, the Latin to Italian video covers this. Essentially the final long -ō was always long, meaning it could be make short even in Classical Latin without changing the meaning. Once final -u lowers to -o, we have syncretism of most of the cases.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I'll watch it again, thank you!
Romanian word for ear (''ureche'') is, as in Latin (''auris'', diminutive: ''auricula''), of feminine gender, unlike Old Italian (''urecchio'') and partially Modern Italian (''orecchio'') which are of masculine, not neuter gender.
•Latin: f. auris > diminutive: f. auricula ~> ōricula > syncopic form: ōricla > Megleno-Romanian: f. ureacľă, Istro-Romanian: f. urecľe, Romanian: f. urechie/ureche (''ear'').
•Romanian: f.sing. ureche, f.plur. urechi.
•Old Italian: m.sing. urecchio, m.plur. urecchi (e.g. ''...co paurosi urecchi'', 1557).
•Modern Italian: m.sing. orecchio, m.plur. orecchi~f.plur. orecchie.
Allora, caro Luke, qui hai reso felice anche un ex italianista come me! 😀 Non so come ringraziarti per questa perla!
Grazie a te!
Romanian still has the third gender,🇷🇴👋🏻
Yep. But while our neuter gender did evolve from the Latin neuter gender, it no longer functions as a separate gender like in Latin where neuter nouns had their own singular and plural markings. Instead the Romanian neuter gender alternates between masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. @8:00
@@daciaromana2396 You are very much right
@@daciaromana2396 And romanian still has this ending of neuter plural -uri for many words like tren (train) -> trenuri (trains), which was, for my Romanian teacher, the same as -ore in Latin, and it seems we have almost the same thing in old italian (cf. 5:20 lo prato -> le pratora, lo nom -> le nomora).
@@daciaromana2396so as in italian, but you romanians consider it a third gender while we italians consider these words as exceptions
@@esti-od1mz If we had less than 20 or so, they would be exceptions. As it stands there are way too many neuter nouns to just be an exception :D
I love watching outtakes while looking for my name in the credits. ;)
I’m really glad! I started doing the outtakes since I think it’s right for viewers to see the names of my patrons.
OMFG ITS THE GUY FROM LATIN CLASS. I didn’t learn anything but en vinum vertas. And lingua latina 😂
The problem with the neuter gender in Latin was that already then the distribution of masculine, neuter and feminine names seemed to be casual, there's no reason for gladius to be masculine, clavis to be feminine and saxum to be neuter, so every romance language ended up simplifying it in two genders.
That is fascinating. I think there is a bit of a misconception that Spanish only has two genders, according to the Spanish Royal Academy of 1917, Spanish has six gender: masculine, feminine, neuter, epicene, common, & ambiguous. I don't know whether this is observed today or if other reforms have been implemented. The author who wrote the book even stated that the present society had the tendency to place neuter nouns into what he considers traditional genders like masculine or feminine. But that the article lo was intended for neuter nouns, like, lo capitán, lo príncipe, but in certain expressions the neuter article is respected even if speakers don't notice like lo cortés, lo valiente.
Sure, we can come up with any number of systems.
I have not read the article of the Spanish Royal Academy of 1917, but I daresay that stating that Spanish has 6 genders is incorrect. Maybe there are six possible categories of nouns, not "genders". Let me clarify that. "epicene" just means that there the same word is used for both male and female individuals, for instance in both Italian and Spanish "persona" is used for either a man or a woman. However, the noun "persona" itself is CERTAINLY feminine, indeed you sai "una persona alta", for example, adjectives, articles and so on MUST be in the feminine gender. Could you please provide us with the bibliographic reference of that original article?
Still for Dante (and for Boccaccio also) the plural of "castello" was "castella", but already with the plural feminine article "le castella". " ’l conte Ugolino aveva voce d’aver tradita te de le castella" "Count Ugolino was said to have betrayed you of the castles" Inferno, Canto XXXIII
I think one important factor to keep in mind is that languages/dialects in the Middle Ages were not really codified (because the only "proper" and codified language was Latin) and I don't think they were formally studied and taught. They were simply the way that common people (il volgo) talked in their everyday lives. Hence, I'm sure there were tons of variants and exceptions. Think of how differently people speak and write today (often incorrectly), in spite of a decade of formal education and strict rules of grammar (that you can always double-check if in doubt).
Absolutely. I mention this in the video.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Ahh great... sorry I missed it
C'è anche la forma plurale maschile di queste parole che, di solito, indica un concetto diverso, es.: il braccio, le braccia del corpo umano, i bracci del lampadario; l'osso, le ossa del cane (lo scheletro del cane), gli ossi del cane (quelli che il cane rosicchia); il muro, le mura della città, i muri della stanza ecc.
In Spain, in the region of Asturias (at the north), we have a language/historical dialect called Asturian which also preserves the neuter gender, to a degree.
It is preserved in a very different way to what the neuter used to be, though, and instead quite close to what I think happens in Neapolitan, based on another commenter's account, not so much as a true gender, but as an uncountable form for nouns, a "mass neuter".
In Spanish the neuter article "lo" does still exist, but that's pretty much it.
For example, in Spanish "el bueno" would mean "the good one", but "lo bueno" would mean "the good/what's good". Simmilarly, the demonstratives "esto", "eso", "aquello" (and the personal pronoun "ello") are used only for uncountable or undefined things ("this", "that"...), while "éste", "ése", "aquél" (the tildes are now optional) are used for defined things ("this one", "that one"...) ("ello" is used only for verbs constructions, basically; for a noun, you'd rather use "eso").
Clarification: in Asturian we use the neuter 'article' the same way as in spanish, and neuter nouns instead get masculine or feminine articles based on their original gender (though do note how some mass nouns have the masculine gender in Asturian even when they don't in Spanish, such as "sal" ("salt")).
In Asturian, however, many masculine nouns change a bit when used in an uncountable sense ("pelu"~"pilu" (hair strand)→"pelo" (hair)), and so do adjectives ("agua cristalino", with an adjective ending in -o, where it would be -u/-os~-us for the masculine and -a/-es~-as for the feminine). (dialectal variation shown with ~; please note that Asturian itself varies a lot from place to place, with the neuter gender existing in central dialects, and being less prevalent in southern and coastal ones).
An example from Wikipedia:
una fueya seca (a dry leave)
unes fueyes seques (some dry leaves)
fueya seco (dry leaves, uncountable).
The sad thing is Asturian is basically a relic by now, with very few people actually speking it, though many words and expressions have made it into the Spanish spoken here.
As for words that change genders, there's "el arte"→"las artes", and a few words with either gender ("el/la calor", "el/la mar" (note that "the seas" is always "los mares", I don't think I've ever heard "las mares")), but that's basically it. In Asturian you also get words that have different genders depending on where in Asturias you are (this also happens in all of Spain, but only with a few words), with things getting particularly weird nearing the border with Galicia, as you enter into the Galician-Asturian "Fala" (the way they speak there).
Also, I'm unsure, but... "el sal" instead of "la sal" ("the salt") could be referring to what in Spanish would be "salitre" or something like that, because I've heard the same people use both (or maybe it's just free variation?).
Anyway, if someone actually read this, thx.
Edit: clarifications.
In modern Italian, the plural of braccio is "braccia" referring to a human body parts and "bracci" for tools and all the limbs of those fabricated objects.
Osso ( bone) becomes "ossa" for human bones and "ossi" for animal bones.
Thank you for your beautiful channel.
Well, I'm studying russian. But I've booked a trip to Paraguay so I may need to improve my little to no spanish skills. And I'm into health sciences college which implies that a lot of the technical terms come from latin. YET, Luke publishes a video about OLD ITALIAN and for some reason I can't just not watch it... as if I had nothing more important to study in terms of languages....
oh well. I actually understand 50%~ish of italian since I'm brazilian and I guess that helps?
Il dito / Le dita... It's just crazy.
But you will learn that it's even crazier when you say "Il dito" - "I diti" only when you refer only to plural fingers at a pair... I diti indici= Index fingers... I diti mignoli= small toes.
This analysis is fascinating, and yet it doesn't fully safisfy me. Calling those examples from a short period of the early history of Italian "a third gender", "intermediate cases", "exceptions" or "genus alternans" is, in my humble opinion, more a matter of personal choices than an accurate description of reality. Some of the examples you mentioned, for instance, may easily be considered as analogies. You mention "dito" (Latin "digitus"), and said that the plural "dita" has no reason to be like that, etimologically; and yet, since many other parts of the body (braccio, labbro, orecchio, ginocchio...) follow that pattern, it is easy to accept that the word "finger" simply ended up following a more common pattern, conveniently. Another thing to remember is that many Italian words may change gender, EVEN IN CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN, for no apparent reason. For instance, this is very common with alterative suffixes, e.g. "la maglia => il maglione" (but I could give you hundreds of examples). More in general, we should never forget that grammars are normally written CENTURIES after the birth of a language, trying to make sanse and establish an order out of the innumerable inconsistencies, contradictions and unexplained phenomena which can only be reconstructed on the basis of a limited number of written texts whose authors (in many cases anonymous) have already long passed away. So, when Loporcaro and Faraoni analyzed ancient Italian, they proposed a model which best accounted, in their opinion, for the available documentation, and I take my hat off; however, I believe that denomination or considering the "third gender" a fixed characteristic of Italian at that stage is, in my opinion, a bit too simplistic
Thanks for the comment. I don't think they mean it as fixed either, and I say that too in the video.
You are absolutely right. They are actually "ambigeneric" nouns because their singular forms are masculine and their plural forms are feminine.
In Romanian, many borrowed neologisms entered as neutral. It's interesting why.
Avionul - avioanele, trenul - trenurile, camionul - camioanele, laboratorul - laboratoarele, recipientul - recipientele, spitalul - spitalele etc.
I wonder how many of these rules had been actually forced by 19th century linguists of Romance languages countries; in Italy specifically by the post unification linguists.
They seem to be descriptivist here, given how frequently the Old Italian phenomena continue to flourish in central and southern Italy.
I daresay that the rules (I'd rather say "statistical tendencies") mentioned in this video were not touched at all in the 19th century: they had already long disappeared by then. In the 19th century many choices were made after the unification of Italy, because they needed to codify the way Italian would be taught in schools, so for instance they decided what the plural of "ciliegia" was or if it was correct to say "è piovuto" or "ha piovuto", and a number of other little rules which we are generally taught in elementary school and which we invariably forget by middle school
9:38
This text is literally written in Sicilian. We speak still this way nowadays. In Old Sicilian it should be like this:
li ditta casteḍḍa
pi chiḍḍi mura
nti li letta
li rina
li sacca
nti li casteḍḍa
Adding an apostil, it can be observed that in modern Italian morphology an ordinary masculine plural form in « i »may coexist with an archaic so to speak neutral plural-singular form in « a », such as for : il labbro (the lip) / le labbra or I labbri ; il corno (the horn) / le corna or i corni ; il braccio (the arm) / le braccia or I bracci ; il lenzuolo (the bedsheet ) / I lenzuoli or le lenzuola. Of course the two forms aren’t interchangeable. The « a » ending which is the more common in those examples applies to a set perceived as typically indissociable. Otherwise the « i » ending is used. So : le labbra della bocca (the lips of the mouth) / I labbri della ferita (the edges of the wound) ; le corna della mucca (the horns of the cow)/ I corni dell’altare (the horns of the altar) ; le braccia di un uomo (a man’s arms) / i bracci della croce (the arms of the cross) ; le lenzuola vanno cambiate spesso ( bedsheets should be changed often) / un venditore di lenzuoli (a bedsheets seller). Lastly, the notional unity of a set of objects as rendered by a neutral plural-singular form can be traced back to ancient greek where such a subject governed a singular verb (« ta zoa trekhei » the animals run).
I knew about this already but I would’ve never thought to see it explained by an American honestly, also one thing we’ve lost is the formal plural third person pronoun “vi” which was used with strangers, which in today’s italian has been replaced with “la”, used for both show respect to strangers and show respect to people that are more important than you, like a professor or a judge.
Portuguese is also a major latin language as is the 5th most spoken language in the world above italian and french
a última flor do lácio.
I beg your pardon, but it's currently the 6th most spoken language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi and Bengalese
@@nicolanobili2113 india population is the only one growing on the list… still the second most spoken romance language
@thiagoracca Oh, certainly. When we want to make a classification of the most spoken languages, we should always specify a few general conditions, since the list may slightly vary depending on how you make the calculations. Nobody doubts that Portuguese is a major language. However, why did you say that only the population of India is growing on that list? The Chinese-speaking population is also growing (though less quickly) and so are the numbers of Spanish and English speakers
@@nicolanobili2113 actually most off the west is dwelling because birthrates and this is true for italian, portuguese, english… but this is another discussion
German currently has a neuter gender for the word "girl" - Mädchen (because of the diminutive suffix "-chen") which in most other languages would be considered feminine.
Even Old English for woman "wīf" is neuter.
You'll certain similarities in neuter gender in Romanian.
It. uovo/uova - Ro. ou/ouă (o becomes a in plural)
It. capo/capi - Ro. cap/capete (added -ete in plural like the adding of -ora in old Italian)
cap/capete is irregular, inherited from Latin caput/capita, so -ete is not an ending for plural but just the final -e
perfect!@@adrian.farcas
I'm Italian and I had no idea we had a neutre gender. Thanks for the video!