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- A Mediterranean Language
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- Sicilian Vernacular Poetry
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- What’s Siculish?
Though its origin is still somewhat debated, most linguistic scholarship traces Sicilian to a group of languages spoken originally by the peoples who populated the island up to some 700 years a.D., not all of them, possibly, of Hindu-European origin; the Sicani, originally from Iberia, the Elimi from Libya, and the Siculi, from mainland Italy. Many...
An estimated 5 million inhabitants of Sicily speak Sicilian (plus another 2 million estimated Sicilians around the world); but in truth Sicilian, or languages considered to be derived or influenced by Sicilian, are spoken in parts of southern Italy such as Reggio Calabria, southern Puglia, and even parts of Corsica and Sardegna, whose indigenous la...
Sicilian became known in literary circles for a form of vernacular poetry at the court of Frederick II, king of Sicily and Holy Roman Emperor, in the early 1200s, developed, perhaps, by troubadours who had escaped from France (hence the Provençal). That Sicilian vernacular, strongly influenced by high Latin (because of the troubadours), was recogni...
Sicilian is replete with words and names of places from every language brought to the island by its invaders. For example, of Arabic origin, sciàbaca or sciabachèju, a fishing net, fromsabaka; Marsala, the Sicilian port, from Marsa Allāh, Allah's port. A maìdda is a wood container used to mix flour (from màida, or table); mischinu means "poor littl...
So, how does this ancient language sound? While some words sound much like Italian, others do not at all (though Sicilian spelling of words is, like Italian, essentially phonetic). Depending on the place, articles are shortened, consonants doubled. For example, b'sturns most normally into v's: 1. la botte (the barrel) sounds ‘a vutti 2. la barca (t...
Sicilian spoken by Italian immigrants living in the United States (or the Sicilianization of English) is called Siculish: English-Sicilian terms such as carrufor car, for example. It is a hybrid of terms coined by Sicilian immigrants to make English their own. If you are interested in taking a look at some literary Sicilian writing, check out Giova...
Mar 2, 2012 · Apuleius, a Sicilian writer of the second century A.D., calls the Sicilian Trilingual, because they could speak three languages: Greek, Punic and Latin. Later, with the Arab occupation, another language came into the mix with the others.
Oct 2, 2015 · Linguistic experts put Sicilian in what is known as the Italiano meridionale-estremo language group along with the Greek influenced Calabrian dialects of Southern Italy. Further proof that Sicilian is indeed a language is the fact that is has at least eleven regional dialects.
Therefore, the so-called Siculish came from the crossroad of Sicilian and American language: it is a hybrid reminiscent of Anglo-American for vocabulary, but adapted to local spelling and phonetics. In addition to the well-known names of some “revisited” cities, such as “Nova Jorca” and “Brucculinu” for New York and Brooklyn, there ...
Jul 14, 2020 · These languages have been modernized from what was known as Vulgar Latin (the native tongue of the ancient Roman Empires), and are commonly referred to as Romance languages. Greek dialects and their derivatives were mainly spoken in Sicily in the bygone eras. Enter the arrival of Octavian of the Roman Empire in Circa 36 BC.
Jan 5, 2020 · Sicilianu – Dialect or Language? Though some have thought or referred to the Sicilian language as a dialect of Italian and it has at times been called that, in recent years it has again been properly recognized as a language, unique in its own right, with a combination of rich and varied influences going back to ancient times.
