(P.S. the reason this Babbel box has both native-level and level 2 Sicilian is because while I was born in Sicilian language territory, I've never spoken it until later in life now resulting in linguistic deficiencies for that language, to the point I absolutely wouldn't consider myself an absolute authority on its matters of correctness.)
Hello! You may call me Crunchy, Crackdown or CCC and I'm a new Wiktionary editor from the city of Gela in south east Sicily. I joined Wiktionary
- out of pity for how sorry the Sicilian entries look,
- out of pickiness for how the Italian entry lemmas are defined,
and just for the general fun of adding one's own part :P
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This user's time zone is UTC+1.
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This user is currently working on
Conceiving some good infrastructure for Sicilian.
Sicilian, Ligurian, Lombard, Neapolitan, Sardinian, Venetan, and more, are all LANGUAGES, not "Italian dialects". Saying that is clunky and misleading and I really mind this distinction.
Obligatory disclaimer. I'm not an academic, student, of any kind, I am an armchair linguist at best and I may absolutely make mistakes, for as much as I try to research my topics.
Sicilian Ad hoc Spellings
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I have compiled a
list of Sicilian ad hoc spellings (short explanation of what this means at the start of that page), which you too can contribute to. On there, I added the many different ad hoc spellings that I often see on my school class's group chat: all speakers (about a dozen at most) are Gelese dialect speakers and teenage.
Ad hoc spelling phenomenons
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Working on this list, I've noticed that there are a few broad implicit rules underlying this "ad hoc spelling system" I covered:
- Every writer has their own style:
- there are some who end words in ⟨u⟩ rather than ⟨o⟩ much more often than others (same with ⟨i⟩ and ⟨e⟩);
- there are those who use grave/acute marks more often than others;
- there are those who graphically represent "syllable inversion"/extreme vowel reduction more than others (such is the distinction between itv and itve);
- Accent marks are avoided by most, resulting in compa, professo, or very very commonly, ava. (Accent marks seem to almost never be avoided when the same speakers write in Italian, however)
- "Syllable inversion", an ordinary phenomenon in local speech, is very often graphically represented: fnenno, vre, curct to name just three.
- Pretty much every word is "Tuscanized" in that it has its final vowel being written as ⟨e⟩ or ⟨o⟩ when it would have been written, respectively, as either ⟨i⟩ or ⟨u⟩ in CS. I'm guessing this may be caused by how the native speakers perceive the vowels, as ⟨i⟩, for example, may be seen as too close to /i/, and to them ⟨e⟩ may seem to be the only good or accurate way to represent this [ɪ̙]~[ɘ̝] sound. (Alternatively, this all might be influenced by how Neapolitan song lyrics are written: a tangible example might be "Tu si a fine do munno")
- I did get a feel, however, that "hyper-Sicilian" words (like babbu or curnutu) are more likely to be written with a final ⟨u⟩ or ⟨i⟩.
- When the Italian cognate is morphologically/basically the same (e.g. danno vs dannu, mare vs mari), there is very little chance the ad hoc spelling will be spelled any different than the Italian spelling.
- Regressive vowel assimilation/metaphony very often sneaks into writing. This is the cause of mangitilla, taliete, and futtistuvu, to name a few.
- Words start with doubled letters only rarely.
- Synctatic gemination, for one, is never written down (*ca ffare would never be written).
- A word may randomly begin with a doubled letter if it's pronounced like that as a result of losing an initial vowel, e.g. 'ffrunti (from affruntàrisi) being written as ffrunti. However, 'ccattasti has been written as cattaste and never with a starting ⟨cc⟩, so this is why I said it's random. I'd be unsure if initial gemination is ever written when the word ultimately lost an /i/, like for mmucca-, which gets written as mucca-, "losing" one ⟨m⟩: muccaminchia.
- Even words that are etymologically, on their own, supposed to be pronounced with an initial geminate consonant, such as cchiù, cca, or ḍḍocu, are most commonly written with only one initial consonant, chiu, ca, drocu respectively, while the parallel ad hoc spellings with the initial consonants doubled are very uncommon.
- Precise pronunciations of clusters are, graphically, never even replicated for the overwhelming majority of clusters (especially: e.g. ⟨st⟩ which, though read as ~[ʂt], is not normally written *⟨sht⟩, and gets simply written as ⟨st⟩ instead; or also the ⟨nt⟩ in words like scantu which, though seemingly read as ~[nd̥], is written ⟨nt⟩ and never written *⟨nd⟩, which would yield, for example, *⟨scando⟩); they can however be imitated for a jocular effect: ha shtudiato.
- The ⟨mp⟩ cluster is sometimes an exception, as mbazziu has been used sometimes.
- Phonotactic assilimations during speech (e.g. geminate /v/ -> /pp/, or /n/ + /v/ = /mm/) seem to never be written.
(In the near future and in no particular order)
- Wiktionary:About Sicilian
- A uniform scn verb conjugation template
