The Evolution of Italian in 22 Words 

I'm going to be honest, if I could sum up the entire history of Italian in like two sentences, this video would not be 10 minutes long. I have also posted your award to you, but it has been redirected, as your self-imposed 5 seconds have elapsed. Thanks for watching! :D

hey i said that but its different but its the same meaning

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed. Although I am curious what kind of "problematic comments" you've encountered before.. :)

@@LexisLang mainly just stuff calling PIE European propaganda

@@kajvanveendev Ah, right. I've encountered some of that recently. A shame there's so much politicised ignorance around it, but hopefully I can help educate people a little. :D

Oh, good spot! Not even sure how that happened; it should have been copy-pasted throughout. Thanks for noticing though! :)

Aw, thank you so much! I'm just enjoying doing my thing, so just the fact that anyone follows along is marvellous. I really appreciate you watching and I hope you enjoy! I know my videos can sometimes be a little dense and opaque to non-experts. Btw, I know the feeling of falling down the rabbit hole. That article's what inspired my video. It's just such a fascinating language! :D

Grazie mille! I'm happy you enjoyed, it was a fun one to make. Hopefully my pronunciation wasn't too bad. ;)

@@LexisLang The pronunciation was very good. Bravo!

Thank you! Glad you like what I'm doing! :)

Also is there a video like this for French?

Thank you so much! I'm glad to hear you like what I'm doing! At the minute, I only have this format for Italian and German, but I do like it, so I want to do more in future and French is definitely up there. :D

@@LexisLang maybe if you do the Celtic branch you could do Gaulish? Or Scottish Gaelic? Idk... I read this book called Asterix et Obelix, and they're gaulish and I think it's cool (:

I'd do a modern one for these videos, but I'd love to look at something with Gaulish one day. Of the Celtic languages, I'd probably mainly do Welsh first, as that's what I speak some of. :)

@@LexisLang Cool! I would like to see the relations in between English or French and Welsh!

That's my native Englishiness coming over. I can do unaspirated stops, as you've seen, but it's a conscious effort and I don't always nail it. Anyway, I'm so so glad you enjoyed the video! I will do one at some point on sound change notation, but I'm glad the examples were of help! :D

Thank you! I did try to nail the vowels, particularly the /ɛ-e/ and /ɔ-o/ distinctions. I'm certainly not perfect yet, especially in regular conversation, but I'm glad I did okay here. You're very kind! :)

(Disculpame, no hablo mucho español :/ ) The three languages are quite similar. There were a few Spanish speakers in my Italian class at uni and they understood a decent amount automatically. It's perhaps heightened here because these words are all basic vocabulary items, so have stayed fairly static in their daughters. Perhaps you'd struggle more in context with all the grammatical wigglies. :)

@@LexisLang Sí, es más complicada la gramática del latín En cambio la gramática del italiano es muy similar. Dentro de las lenguas similares están también el portugues, catalán, incluso el occitano...El francés se entiende sólo un poco si está escrito, y el rumano se hace muy difícil entenderlo a pesar de la gran cantidad de léxico similar. Salut. 🙂

Quite possibly. I'm not sure on the dating, but I think 450 sounds about right for the Proto-Romance changes. :)

Any dialects you want to see in particular? :)

@@LexisLang Neapolitan, Sicilian, Tuscan, Venetian, Genoese, Romanesco, Sardinian, Piedmontese, Apulian, Emilian, Romagnolo and Lombardo.

@@LexisLang And Corscican if possible.

Yeah, modern Italian is a bit fuzzy in its descent. I've simplified it for the video, because it pretty much works. Tuscan is obviously a northern variety, so Standard Italian has much in common with the northern languages and dialects and differs more from those of the south. I should like to learn more about the southern varieties at some point. It's all rather interesting. :)

“Factually”

Every modern national language is standardized, which is the case for italian too: italian is not constructed, as it evolved gradually from older forms into the modern one. It is true that italian developed from the florentine dialect, but this not undermine a single bit the video. Italian, starting from Florence, later was adopted as a prestige language and later as a common one. The only error of this video was labelling tuscanian dialects as northerner, since Tuscany is not in the North but in the center of Italy, and they're actually closer to southern italian dialects rather than to the northern ones.

Purtroppo non credo che gli indoeuropei avevano la pizza! :P

I mean that could be a whole video of its own! Long story short, we compare the words of modern languages to help figure out what the original may have looked like. In terms of the pronunciation in this video specifically, I'm using my knowledge of this and of modern and ancient languages and the work of experts in the field to create an approximation here. Hope that's an okay explanation. :D

Ooh, good spot! The word for "son" was indeed "suHnús". "Dʰeh₁ilyos" meant "suckler", so that's what I should have glossed it as. It is the ancestor of Latin "filius", though. Glad you enjoyed! :)

@@LexisLang Very interesting. Thank you.

No problem, thank you for asking! :)

It was a typo! ;)

Oh nooo! How did that happen!? Good spot there, I've never noticed that before! ;)

Sorry @@LexisLang , is that sarcastic?

Not at all! Just thanking you for noticing a mistake! :D

Ok, cool :)

That's cool. What language do you speak to allow that? :)

@@LexisLang Romanian (eastern romance) and Spanish (western romance). I'm slowly getting into latin too. Thing is, in Spanish and Romanian there are dialects that showcase some of the same sound shifts as in the video, making it easier to catch the meaning.

Interesting! Romanian is such a fascinating language - I should like to do a profile on it at some point. The Latin will certainly help your understanding there too. :)

@@LexisLang Latin definitely helped. I wish I had a time machine and was able to learn it from the natives!

Glad you enjoyed and thank you for the feedback! /e/ is a very hard vowel for me and I know I don't always hit it. Length is also hard for me for some reason, even though my own dialect of English has it. My native long vowels are *very* long though. Hopefully you'll see some sort of improvement in future videos! Thank you for watching!

Yes, the s > z > Ø shift in Latin is very interesting! :D

There are only 22 on screen and that's all I say, so please do let me know where there's a 23rd. I've never noticed any mistakes, but there could well be one... :)

Of course I'm biased towards the Italian, as that's what the video focuses on. Fragmentation into dialects likely began very early. Proto-Romance is a single language in the same way English is. There are many different dialects, but it's still one language. For instance, the vowel shifts shown are the ones used in most Romance languages, but Sardinian merged Latin /i/ and /u/ with /i:/ and /u:/, instead of /e/ and /o/ as in most other languages. I'm explaining how PIE became Italian, so naturally I'm focusing on the varieties which became Italian. Your example of Portuguese "raiz" does actually come from *radice. The /d/ got elided and the /k/ () regularly palatalised to /d͡z/, then simplified to /z/. I assume the /e/ merged with the /k/ in palatalisation - we see the same development as Latin decem > PRom *dɛce > Prt dez. Had "raiz" descended from the Latin nominative radix (and thus PRom *radis), we would not see a /z/ word-finally, but rather an /s/, as is the case in other instances of Latin final /ks/ which didn't shift, such as in the number 6: Latin sex > Prt seis (not *seiz) and the late phrase dē ex, which became Prt dês (not *dêz). Hope I've answered your concerns, but if you have anything else, let me know! :)