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Neogrammarians and Neolinguists: Ital. giorno.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

G. Bonfante
G. Bonfante*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

In Romania, xxxix (1910), 451, Salvioni bitterly attacked Bàrtoli because the latter had dared to assert that Italian giorno is of French origin. One of Bàrtoli's arguments—and precisely that very one which aroused Salvioni's wrath—was that some regions of Southern Italy have the form yuornu (with a uo) which is not what one would expect should the word represent there Lat. diurnum. Entirely misunderstanding Bàrtoli's neolinguistic theories, Salvioni writes with the typical dogmatic style of the Neogrammarians:

Può parere veramente strano—deve però insieme rallegrare come una prova che la verità s'impone malgrado tutto e tutti [!]—può parere strano, dico, che si chedano delle armi alia fonetica in uno scritto nel quale ostentatamente s'afferma non esservi “esempi normali,” cioè non esservi norme fonetiche. Ma colla dialettica sua il Bàrtoli se la veda lui. Qui si vuol solo objettare, poiché il Bàrtoli ricorre per juorno [that is yuorno] alla Francia settentrionale, che si dovrebbe pur dire perché l'antico francese jρr(n) non sia stato adottato con quella vocale che quasi s'imponeva, cioè coll'ρ, che poi, per effetto della metafonesi, diveniva u.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 59 , Issue 4-Part1 , December 1944 , pp. 877 - 881
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1944

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References

1 About the supposed examples of Lat. diurnum “day” given in the Thesaurus, v (1641), 58 ff., see Bàrtoli, Introduzione, p. 34, §17.

Italian giorno is of course perfectly “normal” from the point of view of the “phonetic law:” Ital. (that is Tuscan) ṕ <Lat. ŭ; for the initial gi (pronounce dž) cf. oggi<hodie, raggio < radium,:giuso (and giú) <deorsum; r, n, and final o are also quite “regular.”

2 The forms yuorni, yuorni and the like are diffused over the whole of Southern Italy (including Abruzzi and Campania) and Sicily; cf. AIS., maps 336; 1265.

3 As a matter of fact Salvioni misquotes Bàrtoli, who mentions the form giorno, not juornu, as being late; but the fact remains essentially the same.

4 With a strange lack of logic, Salvioni himself adds on the same page: “Del resto non manca jumo [that is yurno] al Mezzogiorno”; and he gives a series of good examples (which are now multiplied by the AIS.). But that is exactly the form which, Salvioni says, would be expected according to Bàrtoli's theory, and which Bàrtoli should have mentioned, as it seems. Salvioni, in other words, brings water to Bàrtoli's mill, as the Italians say!

On yurnu, see now Ringeson, loc. cit., and AIS., 336; 738; 1265.

In the first line of Salvioni's note, read Miscellanea Hortis 893 and 902, instead of 193.

5 Subsequently Bàrtoli used again—and properly so—the word giorno, as a typical example of the neo-linguistic method, in his basic book Introduzione alla neolinguistica, Principt —Scopi—Metodi (Geneva, 1925), (BAR., Serie ii, vol. 12), pp. 55 ff. (cf. also 106). The history of this word also synthethizes two other fundamental principles of the neolinguistic school, viz., the importance of linguistic prestige and the close interdependence of language and literature; cf. in effect Spitzer, Studies in Philology, xxxvii (1940), 578: “Pourquoi les troubadours ont-ils introduit [in Provençal] ce septentrionalisme [jorn instead of dia]? […] Ce sera l'hégémonie littéraire et culturelle de la France du Nord qui expliquera ces phénomènes lexicographiques.—[…] Ce [giorno] sera donc en italien un provençalisme. […] Le mot est venu en Italie, non par immigration lente, ni par le chemin Provence—Italie du Nord—Toscane, mais par un bond direct Provence—Toscane: par la littérature.”

Gröber, in the generation of the neogrammarians, chose It. giǫrno (<diurnum) as the first example of an “Erbwort” (as opposed to the “Lehnwort” diacono<diaconus) because it followed the “phonetic law” (ALL. I [1884], 204).

Among the contemporary neo-grammarians we can classify e. g. L. Bloomfield; cf. his book Language? Chapter 20, especially pp. 352 ff.

6 It is well known that diphthongisation also exists in literary Italian, but under different conditions (in an open syllable); literary Italian has therefore o where Southern dialects have uo (porco: pworku, grosso: grwossu) and vice versa (Ut. It. buona: South. bona).

6a Cf. now AIS., point 771, maps 19 and 20.

7 I have also checked the edition of the Vita di Cola di Rienzo by A. M. Ghisalberti (Florence: Olschki, 1928); but according to Merlo, Italia dialettale, v (1929), 181 even this edition is not very important from the linguistic point of view (nor is this its aim; cf. n. 3 to p. xvii), and contains moreover, only a part of the Historiae romanae fragmenta.

8 The usual word in this text seems to be die, dia, plur. Hi: so 333 four times, 421.

9 On this date, see e.g. Castellani, Archivio della R. società romana di storia patria, XLIII (1920), 123, 128 f.; XLIV (1921), 37 ff., 59; A. M. Ghisalberti, La vita di Cola di Rιenzo (Florence, 1928), pp.xvii; lxii ff. On the dialect, see Ghisalberti, pp. li ff. (especially lix ff.).

10 Cf. also M. Pelaez, “Visioni di S. Francesca Romana,” Archivio etc., XV (1892), 265, who cites abisuogno.

In another Roman text, E. Monaci found uoi for o (=Lat. out); cf. Archivio, xxxviii (1915), 590. See also Rendic. Lincei (1892), 1, 95.

A similar case of Southern Italian ie for Lat. ē is for example Apulian siryenu=Lat. serênum (AIS., map 374, point 739; cf. points 791, 922, 923, 985); cf. also lyésina etc. in Sicily (map 208) for Italian (Tuscan) lésina (Germanic *alísna) and see Bàrtoli, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, lxvi (1915), 167 n. 7.

11 It is a very characteristic fact, and a proof of the difficulty even the greatest scholars have in assimilating new methods, that Meyer-Lübke himself, who in his Einführung 3(1920), §91 asserted and gave proofs for the French origin of Tuscan giçrno, relapses into the old idea in his Romanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch 3 (1935!) where he draws Ital. giorno from diurnum (see s.u.), without further comment!

Cf. also Spitzer, Revue de dialectologie romane, Vi (1914–5), 337 f.; Bàrtoli, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, lxvi (1915), 167, n. 7; Archivio glottologico italiano, xxi (1927), 15 f., 57, n. 26; Kritische Jahresberichte xii (1909–10), 116, n. 17; Terracini, Atene e Roma, N.S., ii (1921), 110; Gilliéron et Roques, Revue de philologie française, xxii (1908), 268 ff.; xxiv (1910), 39 ff. ( = Etudes de géographie linguistique [1912], p. 85); Von Wartburg, s.u.u. dies, diurnum; O. Bloch, Gamillscheg s.v. jour.