Tuscan and Etruscan: The problem of linguistic substratum influence in central Italy 9781487599867

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
Introduction
1. Sources of information about the gorgia and attempts to explain its origin
2. The gorgia toscana today
3. On the attribution of the gorgia toscana to Etruscan substratum influence
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO ROMANCE SERIES

Citation preview

Tuscan &? Etruscan The Italian spoken in most of Tuscany is characterized by a number of peculiar pronunciations which for over half a century Romance scholars have explained by a theory of linguistic substratum influence. This theory postulates that present-day Tuscan pronunciation is a survival of the 'foreign accent' with which the ancient Etruscans must have spoken Latin when Rome first began to extend its power and language over the rest of Italy. Professor Izzo has undertaken a new and thorough investigation of modern Tuscan pronunciation, disproving this hypothesis and providing a definitive conclusion to the debate. He delineates clearly the errors in reasoning of those who trace the Tuscan pronunciation to an Etruscan influence, and presents his conclusions objectively. This study will interest Romance linguists, especially historians of the Italian language; but it will also interest historical linguists in general, for by disproving one of the most plausible and best-documented cases of alleged substratum influence, it casts doubt on many other cases where such influence has been claimed with little evidence. HERBERT j. izzo is associate professor in the department of linguistics of the University of Calgary

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Tuscan Etruscan The problem of linguistic substratum influence in central Italy

HERBERT J. IZZO

University of Toronto Press

©University of Toronto Press 1972 Manufactured in the United States of America for University of Toronto Press, Toronto and Buffalo ISBK 0-8020-5249-5 Microfiche ISBN 0-8020-0090-8 LC 78-163823

University of Toronto Romance Series 20

Preface

The present work is not the book I expected to write when I began to collect data in Florence a decade ago. At that time my intention was to make a synchronie-descriptive study. I wanted to discover exactly where (in both the geographical and the phonotactical senses) the voiceless occlusives of Italian were aspirated. Although it seemed obvious that such data might be important for the question of the possible substratum origin of the supposed aspiration, I did not expect to deal with the substratum problem from other points of view except incidentally. But just as my field work convinced me that many discussions of the substratum hypothesis were vitiated by inaccurate descriptive information, so further examination of the literature convinced me that unwarranted assumptions had been made about two other important aspects of the problem because investigators had failed to examine at first hand the sources of evidence for and against the existence of the gorgia sounds in previous centuries and had failed to consider much of the evidence relevant to Etruscan phonology. Hence what was to be the principal subject of this work became merely one - the shortest one - of its three chapters. Chapter I, which was at first intended to be a brief critical survey of the many papers supporting and opposing the substratum hypothesis, is now devoted chiefly to analysis of works which give, or could be expected to give, information about Tuscan pronunciation before the twentieth century. The final chapter attempts a reappraisal of the substratum hypothesis ab initia, incorporating the data presented in the two preceding chapters, questioning basic assumptions that have been made in respect to the hypothesis, and setting forth evidence concerning Etruscan phonology which has not previously been taken into consideration. I hope that I have solved a minor problem of Romance linguistics and not merely added another item to its already overlong bibliography. It would be impossible to acknowledge all my debts of gratitude, from peasants in Tuscany to librarians in California; but certain

VI PREFACE

special debts cannot go unacknowledged. First of all I must thank Ernst Pulgram, who first suggested to me the study of the gorgia, who proposed my name for an ACLS grant, and who read all of two earlier versions of the work and made many helpful suggestions. I am grateful to Alphonse Juilland for certain suggestions, but more for his encouragement. Waldo Sweet and Jean Wilson both helped improve the manuscript, especially by persuading me to eliminate dozens of superfluous ('extremely superfluous') qualifiers. I thank the American Council of Learned Societies for a Grant for Advanced Studies in Linguistics, and Stanford University for funds which made it possible for me to make a second visit to Italy. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the help of my former wife, Suzanne, née McLaughlin, who copied notes, prepared maps, and typed two drafts of the manuscript. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities Research Council of Canada, using funds provided by the Canada Council, and with the help of the Publications Fund of the University of Toronto Press. I acknowledge this assistance with sincere thanks. HI

Contents

Preface / v Introduction / 3 I Sources of information about the gorgia and attempts to explain its origin / 5 2 The gorgia toscana today / 82 3 On the attribution of the gorgia toscana to Etruscan substratum influence / 109 Definitions / 109 The hypotheses of Etruscan origin of the gorgia / 110 Rejection of the h-hypothesis 110 Examination of the aspirate-hypothesis / 112

Conclusions / 173 Notes / 177 Bibliography / 214 Index / 231

VIII CONTENTS

MAPS 1 Italy / 7 2 Tuscany / 9 3 Points in Tuscany reported in the Sprach-und Sachadas Italiens und der Südschweiz (AIS) / 83 4 Points reported in Giacomelli 1958 and points investigated for this study in 1960 and 1963 / 88 5 Present territorial extension of the gorgia features / 99 6 Territory occupied by the Etruscans immediately prior to their Romanization / 128 Sample data sheet / 86

Tuscan & Etruscan

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Introduction

Since the time of our first secure evidence on the matter, namely, the beginning of the sixteenth century, intervocalic /k/ has been pronounced as a velar or glottal fricative or spirant in at least some parts of central and northern Tuscany.1 Not later than the beginning of the nineteenth century the intervocalic /t/ of certain verbal morphemes was replaced by /k/ in popular Florentine, so that in effect the /t/ of these forms also became a velar or glottal spirant. Italians unfriendly to Florentine have applied the pejorative term gorgia 'throat,' or gorgia fiorentina, and now commonly gorgia toscana to this spirant or to the pronunciation in which it occurs`.2 When, only in the last few decades, spirantization of /-p-/ and /-t-/ began to come to the attention of some Italianists, the term gorgia was extended, illogically enough, to include the spirantization of all the intervocalic voiceless stops. In a part of eastern Tuscany, mostly where intervocalic /p, t/ are not spirantized, intervocalic /k/ is generally elided in popular speech.3 This elision is also called gorgia, probably because a spirant was actually used there in past centuries, but possibly only because it has been assumed that [h] must necessarily have existed as an intermediate stage in the passage from [k] to zero.4 Italian linguists have used, and most, evidently heedless of the present internationally accepted meanings of the terms, continue to use, aspirazione, aspirate, etc. to describe all these Tuscan peculiarities. In some cases they mean thereby spirantization in general, in other cases only pronunciation of /-k-/ as [h]; but in certain instances it is unclear what is meant (and, in fact, sometimes the suspicion arises that the terms are used without any precise phonetic significance). Non-Italian linguists, overlooking the fact that the present technical sense of aspiration (and its synonyms in other languages) is relatively recent (cf. NED and Littré s.v.) have not suspected that aspirazione, even in the sixteenth century, could have meant anything but aspiration.5 Some non-Italian linguists have observed the spirants, usually

4 TUSCAN AND ETRUSCAN

in Florence; but in general either they have assumed that the supposed aspirates have developed into spirants only in the focal area of the gorgia (e.g., Hall 1949), or they have considered that there is so little difference between aspirates and spirants that it is unnecessary to distinguish between them (e.g., von Wartburg 1950). Hence, inside Italy gorgia toscana usually means the use of a velar spirant (but called 'c aspíralo') for intervocalic /k/, but often also the use of labial and dental spirants (also called aspirate) for intervocalic /p/ and /t/ and the elision of intervocalic /k/; but outside Italy gorgia toscana has come to mean, through misunderstanding of the Italian terms, a supposed aspiration of intervocalic voiceless stops and, to those who are personally familiar with Tuscan pronunciation, an alleged further development of aspirates to spirants in only a part of the area in which the aspirates are supposed to occur. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was suggested by Carl Ludwig Fernow (1808, 267) that Tuscan [x] or [h] was probably a survival from Etruscan. Fernow's suggestion was repeated without comment by Ludwig Blanc (1844, 628) and Friedrich Diez (1856, 328). In 1883 Heinrich Nissen (to whom all commentators from Merlo 1927 through Geissendôrfer 1964 have erroneously attributed the invention of the hypothesis) alluded rather vaguely to Etruscan origin of the 'aspirirte Aussprache der Toscaner (gorgia)...' (494) ; and the following year Hugo Schuchardt (1884, 11-14) dealt with the hypothesis at some length, referring Florentine /-p-/ and /-t-/ as well as /-k-/ to Etruscan, and, for the first time referring them to specific Etruscan letters. Since Schuchardt, the hypothesis of Etruscan substratum origin of the gorgia has become a familiar topic of Romance linguistics. In all, approximately loo discussions of the hypothesis or references to it have appeared in print (twenty of them within the last decade) ; and, although Vidos (1959, 265) is guilty of some exaggeration in saying that the hypothesis has attained almost universal acceptance, it has, in fact, been favoured by a considerable majority of those who have expressed an opinion.

1 Sources of information about the gorgia and attempts to explain its origin

The earliest work in which one might reasonably hope to find a reference to the gorgia, if it had then existed, is Dante's De vulgari eloquentia. Some scholars (especially Rohlfs and Hall, less emphatically Pulgram) have considered Dante's failure to mention even spirantized /-k-/, the best known and most widespread feature of the gorgia, as a fairly strong indication that the gorgia did not yet exist in Dante's time. Certain others (Merlo, Bolelli, Weinrich) have attempted to show reasons why Dante would not have mentioned the gorgia even though it had already existed for many centuries (as they believe it had). A survey of the purpose and content of the pertinent part of De vulgari eloquentia (1.10-21) would tend to confirm the opinion that Dante would have pointed out the gorgia for censure if he had been aware of it. He lists fourteen main dialectal types in Italy, saying that each of these has sub-types and sub-subtypes, so that the total number of varieties reaches thousands. Allegedly seeking a language suitable for high literary expression for the whole of Italy, Dante examines the speech of the principal areas or cities, including five cities of Tuscany, one by one, and finds none of them acceptable. The 'illustrious vernacular' that is sought must be a language 'constructed out of all the dialects, preserving a core of common features and discarding local peculiarities' (Pulgram 1958, 54, my emphasis). The gorgia is of course a local peculiarity and so should have been mentioned for that reason alone. To this we may add the consideration that the work was written in the early years of Dante's exile when he was brimming with rancour toward Tuscany as a whole and toward Florence in particular. Merlo (1933, 12) explained Dante's failure to mention the gorgia by saying that Dante compared the Tuscan vernaculars only with each other and therefore could not speak of what was common to all of them. This explanation explains nothing for it is doubly mistaken. First, it is not true that the Tuscan vernaculars are considered only with relation to each other; nor would such a procedure have furthered Dante's

6 TUSCAN AND ETRUSCAN

purpose, which was to show why each dialect is unworthy of being considered the 'illustrious vernacular.' Second, among the Tuscan cities mentioned is Arezzo, which according to all known evidence has never had the gorgia, and which therefore would have given Dante occasion to mention the gorgia of the others.1 Weinrich (1959, 113) objects that Dante would not even have been aware of the gorgia because one becomes aware of the features of one's own pronunciation only through the study of other languages. While the principle is, of course, correct enough, it has little to do with the case of Dante. Even without making inferences from the content of his works it can be established that he knew French and Provençal, that he had travelled widely in Italy, that he probably was in Bologna in 1287, in Rome in 1302, and that he certainly had been living in north Italy (Verona, Bologna) for at least two years by the time De vulgari eloquentia was composed (Grandgent 1933, xiv-xv, xxvii). If Dante had had the gorgia we can be confident that he would have been made aware of it by his non-Tuscan interlocutors, especially by speakers of French, for whom at that time the use of [x] or [h] for /k/ would presumably have been as obvious as the same substitution now is to a speaker of modern English, German, or Spanish. But Weinrich also objects that if Dante had had the gorgia he would not have condemned it : 'Man tadelt jedoch ungern was man sich selber nicht abgewôhnen kann.' (113) I do not know on what basis Weinrich makes for the fourteenth century an assumption that is manifestly false today. I have personally heard speakers of English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese condemn as incorrect pronunciations or forms that they themselves use regularly in their normal speech. Linguistic field workers have long known that they will get much incorrect information if they rely on informants' statements about their speech instead of observing it for themselves. In 1717 the Sienese Gigli (cf. below pp. 30-2) seems to provide a specific refutation of Weinrich's argument by condemning spirantized /-k-/ vigorously at one point, yet admitting at another point that he himself uses it. Yet it is quite true that the absence of a reference to the gorgia in the De vulgari eloquentia is of little significance. Pulgram's stricture (1958, 341) that 'such arguments ex silentio are not very telling' contains the really significant objection. Not, however, because all arguments ex silentio are in principle weak or meaningless, as the sentence would seem to imply. The significance of a silence is entirely dependent upon the probability that the thing in question would have been mentioned in a given context had that thing existed. Contrary to what a concise

1 Italy

8 TUSCAN AND ETRUSCAN

summary of the De vulgari eloquentia would lead one to believe, the probability that the gorgia should have been mentioned in it is extremely low - not because Dante compared the Tuscan dialects only with each other, not because he could not have heard the gorgia, nor because he would not have wanted to censure a feature of his own speech, but because he says little about pronunciation in the entire work. If, as some have remarked, Dante's linguistics is surprisingly good for his time, there is a vast difference between that time and the turn of the sixteenth century, when our first useful descriptions of modern languages begin to appear. To say that Dante considers the main dialectal types of Italy one by one, pointing out why none is worthy of becoming the supra-regional literary language, invites one to believe that he gives much linguistic information, whereas in reality his comments are chiefly vague general condemnations, as often of the speakers as of the dialects : the Apulians speak in a hideous manner, Romans use a jargon as ugly and stinking as their manners and customs, other dialects are too harsh, too smooth, etc. There is little specific information about any dialect, and what scant material there is on pronunciation is only of the sort that Dante could readily express orthographically. Most of the short section on the Tuscan dialects (the first two-thirds of 1.3, scarcely 100 words) is a general condemnation of Tuscan and of the Tuscans' madness in thinking themselves the possessors of the 'illustrious vernacular.' The only real linguistic information offered is in the form of five short utterances supposedly in the vernaculars of the five cities of Florence, Pisa, Lucca, Siena, and Arezzo, without any comment about why Dante finds them ugly. Dante's silence on the gorgia, then, is one silence among many. Since the gorgia could perhaps have been elegant in Dante's time as easily as it could have been plebeian, there is little reason to think it should have been mentioned when dozens of other Tuscan and Florentine idiosyncracies were not. The absence of a reference to the gorgia in the De vulgari eloquentia can, I think, be considered a possible hint, but nothing more than a hint, that the features now known as the gorgia did not yet exist at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The first definite attestation of the Tuscan aspirazione now known is in the Polito (1525) of the important Sienese philologist Claudio Tolomei (1492-1557 ?).2 Unfortunately the passage in question is ambiguous, as is a similar passage in Tolomei's De le lettere (1547), although both are, I believe, clear enough to disallow at least some of the interpretations

2 Tuscany

IO TUSCAN AND ETRUSCAN

that have been made. The passage in the Polito (lya-b in the 1525 éd., 28a-b in the 1531 éd., from which I quote) reads: le rególe de l'aspiratione nel toscano idioma, sonó cosí certe & cosí breui, che ... l'huomo le puo fácilmente sapere+ ... Dico dunque che qualunque sillaba incomincia da +c+ o da +g+ ... quella sillaba, fuori di duo [sic] casi sempre è aspirata, & nessuna altra in tutta la toscana lingua è aspirata, si corne fuoco, luogo, aliaga, vaghi, piaghe, agevole, placido, & altri con questi+ Perche in tutte queste sillabe se li da vn poco di flato maggiore, che l'ingrassa e che l'aspira+ Da questa regola dissi togliersene via dui [sic] casi+ II primo è, non esser questo vero nel principio de le dizioni, come sarebbe, cañe, contó, cura, chino, gallo, gola, ghinazano, guglielmo [sic], ne li quali no si truoua l'aspiratione+ L'altro è quâdo inanzi, a queste tai lettere, vi fosse consonante, e nô vocale come è in fianco, forche, spargo, punge, piâge et altri luoghi come questi, de quali nissuno [sic] è che s'aspiri+ And in De le lettere (121a-b) : Le lettere che s'aspirano in voce sono due, c una, l'altra o : in tal guisa che ogni sillaba, che incomincia da queste due lettere è aspirata; fuor che in due casi: l'uno è quando innanzi a queste due lettere v'è consonante, non vocale; perché allora non s'aspira: che se bene, fuoco, luogo, vago, cagione, ragione, bacio, cacio, lago, seco, meco, agevole, lego e altri simili s'aspirano; quando poi dico, franco, vengo, porco, largo, vareo, tenghi, e altri pari a questi, non si proferiscono aspirati; havendo dinanzi a quelle due lettere la consonante. L'altro è che questa aspirazione ha luogo nel corso de le parole; ma quando è fatto posamento, e si ripiglia il parlare da queste due lettere, allor non s'aspira mai + onde s'io dico, Caro sguardo, Gente nuova, come [sic] Dio, Gola bella non si proferisce mai aspirato. The first problem is, what does Tolomei mean by aspirato? The 'little bit of extra breath' could mean a puff of air following the release of a stop, aspirating it in the modern sense; but the examples make this interpretation virtually impossible. Postvocalic c and g followed by ; or e (as in Tolomei's examples placido, bacio, cacio and agevole, cagione, ragione) had represented [i] and [z] for a century or more (cf. Castellani 1952, 29-34). It is as difficult to believe that Tolomei could have meant that Tuscan had aspirated fricatives, as it is to believe that Tuscan could have had an aspirated voiced velar stop in luogo, etc. But one cannot justifiably accept only so much of Tolomei as seems to support one's arguments and reject all the rest as mistaken (as has been done). Italian linguists who have referred to Tolomei have assumed without hesitation that by 'aspiration' he meant spirantization, simply because (as has already been stated but not yet demonstrated) the term has long been used with this meaning in Italian. Perhaps these linguists

Tolomei il have been wrong to make such an assumption unquestioningly, but it can be said at once that at least for /k/ all the evidence confirms their assumption. Not only do we know that intervocalic /k/ is a spirant in Modern Tuscan but we have clear testimony from three other sources within the next half century, the first in 1535, that intervocalic /k/ was a fricative or a spirant. It would seem that Tolomei must have meant that intervocalic /g, 2, g/ were also spirants, since /-Ê-/ and /-g-/ assuredly were. But certain questions still remain. Why did Tolomei choose to say that these sounds were 'aspirated' instead of describing them with some other term? Why did he say that no other letters are 'aspirated' when, in fact, Tuscan had other voiced and voiceless fricatives? Why did he speak of the 'aspirates' as having a 'little extra breath' ? Can it be correct that intervocalic /g/ was a fricative in sixteenth-century Tuscan? It is not difficult to answer the first three questions. Like practically all Italian scholars of the time, Tolomei knew Classical Greek in Byzantine Greek pronunciation. Phi, theta, and chi were called 'aspirates' but were pronounced as fricatives. This is no doubt why Tolomei called the Tuscan fricatives 'aspirates.' The 'little extra breath' probably came from a Greek or Roman grammarian, 8 and Tolomei may well have believed that it actually described adequately the fricatives he pronounced. Certainly it is true that more breath is expelled during the pronunciation of a fricative than during the pronunciation of a stop. As for Tolomei's implicit exclusion of/f, v, s, z, £§/ from the class of 'aspirates,' we may consider that just as for each of the Greek aspirates there was a corresponding homorganic non-aspirate, so Tuscan [k] and [x], [£] and [§], [g] and [z] constituted homorganic occlusive-vs-continuant pairs, whose members were, moreover, bound to be associated with each other both because they were represented by the same symbols and because they were in regular allophonic (or, as I believe, morphophonemic) alternation. The alternating pairs must have seemed analogous to the Greek aspirate-vs-non-aspirate pairs whereas the fricatives that had no corresponding stops did not merit Tolomei's attention or at least did not seem to be in the same category.4 If this explanation is correct - and the work of Giorgio Bartoli (cf. below, pp. 22-4) supports it-Tolomei as much as says that intervocalic /p/ and /t/ were not fricatives or spirants in his day rather than merely being silent on the matter as has been alleged; for neither 'nessuna altra in tutta la Toscana lingua è aspirata' nor 'le lettere che s'aspirano in voce sono due' is silence. If the explanation is incorrect,

12 TUSCAN AND ETRUSCAN

Tolomei still remains an expressed, not a silent, testimony that /p, t/ were not 'aspirated' even though we do not then know what aspirations means other than that only intervocalic c and g had it. The problem of 'aspirated' /g/ is not easily resolved. It seems clear, however, that words like vago were not merely added inadvertently to examples really intended only to illustrate the [g] ~ [z] alternation; for examples of /g/ appear in both works, presumably written years apart. In fact, examples of 'aspirated' /g/ are twice as numerous as any of the rest (eight examples of 'aspirated' /g/ to four examples of 'aspirated' /k/, four examples of 'aspirated' /g/, and three examples of 'aspirated' /£/, in the two works together) and there are only three examples of 'non-aspirated' /g/ to nine of 'non-aspirated' /g/. Moreover, if we assumed that /g/ was accidentally brought in with the [|] ~ [2] alternation only because it happens to be spelled with the same letter, we should have to admit that likewise /k/ could have come into the discussion merely because it happens to be written with the same letter as /£/. But then Tolomei's works could not be said to constitute a definite attestation of spirantized /k/ although we know that that pronunciation must have existed in his time. We are left with three possibilities, among which I do not find any that is thoroughly convincing nor any that is clearly to be eliminated as impossible: Tolomei was mistaken about Tuscan intervocalic /g/; he was correct; he was right about his own Sienese speech, but what he said did not apply to all Tuscan, or at least not to Florentine. It is somewhat difficult to believe that Tuscan could have had a [y] sufficiently different from [g] for Tolomei (who does not give evidence of having an especially fine ear) to have remarked it when other and better orthoepists failed to note it and modern pronunciation does not clearly confirm it. Yet it is much easier to imagine that a native speaker might err in overlooking a feature like this than in inventing it where it did not exist. We could, however, suppose that a compulsion to find orthographic-phonetic symmetry made Tolomei convince himself that his intervocalic /g/ (which, no doubt then as now, was much more weakly articulated than postconsonantal /g/) was as clearly a fricative as his intervocalic /k/, just as some modern American linguists have, partly in the interest of phonemic symmetry, been able to persuade themselves of the existence of postvocalic /h/ in English.6 D'Ovidio 1894, 86-7 wondered whether Tolomei might have been misled by the occurrence of gh for g in earlier texts. The suggestion appears plausible for two reasons : Italian grammarians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often used the word aspirazione as the name

Tolomei 13 of the letter h, and they spoke of ch and gh (to indicate /k/ and /g/ before i or ¿) as c and g with the aspirazione-f Tolomei himself wrote (240), 'non manca chi scriua luogho & pocho per mostrar quel fiato, ch'aspira l'ultime sillabe loro.' But D'Ovidio himself doubted, and, I think, rightly, that Tolomei could have made such an elementary error. Tolomei emphasized the conditions under which the 'aspiration' occurs. If he found luogho and pocho in old texts, he must also have found boscho, anchara, porgho, etc. and realized that the use of ch and gh for c and g was in no way related to intervocalic position (cf. Monaci 1955, 596). Moreover, the 'aspiration' of /-£-/ and /-§-/ can scarcely be referred to the use of h because, then as now, ch and gh represented /k/and/g/. Reasons for believing that Tuscan may have had the [7] to which Tolomei seems to refer are not entirely lacking. References to a fricative pronunciation of intervocalic /g/ in Tuscan do appear occasionally in later works, and there are apparently sporadic cases of elision of intervocalic /g/ and of its replacement by /v/ in certain Tuscan dialects.7 But some of the references to [7] are vague and ambiguous, and others appear to stem from the same desire for symmetry that may have motivated Tolomei, while the sporadic elisions of /g/ may perhaps be explained as due to borrowing from other dialects.8 If in describing a fricative /g/ Tolomei was accurate as regards Sienese, and if his statements are not confirmed by other sixteenthcentury orthoepists only because such a sound did not occur in Florentine, it is possible that Sienese has since changed under the influence of Florentine in this respect as it has demonstrably in others.9 D'Ovidio pointed out that the next reference to 'aspirated' /g/ occurred in the work of another Sienese, Girolamo Gigli. But Gigli attributes the sound to Florentine, not Sienese. Moreover, I think it is almost certain that Gigli's information, or misinformation, about 'aspirated' /g/ was derived directly from Tolomei. (See below, pp. 32-3.) One final positive observation, however, can be made on Tolomei. He clearly does not censure the pronunciation he describes. On the contrary, he seems to recommend it to his reader. In De le lettere he appears to be speaking of his own pronunciation. If it was indeed his own pronunciation that he described, his fellow citizens also apparently did not find his 'aspirates' censurable; for when the world's first chair of Italian was created in Siena, Tolomei was elected to occupy it. Our next notice of the gorgia comes in 1535 as a reference to 'tutta la pronuntia Toscana moderna prolata con uno elemento hebreo chiamato

14 TUSCAN AND ETRUSCAN

he, a noi negato affatto' in theRimario (i68b) of the Neapolitan mathematician Benedetto del Falco (dates unknown). 10 It would seem sufficient to see in this only a confirmation of the assumption that the 'aspiration' of c mentioned by Tolomei must, in the case of /k/, have been spirantization and not aspiration, neither seeing in the 'moderna' an evidence that the gorgia was then an innovation in Tuscan, nor in the 'tutta' an evidence that the gorgia was already in use all over Tuscany and hence could not be spreading from some centre, nor, in fact, attaching much importance to del Falco's failure to provide confirmation of Tolomei's 'aspirated' /g/ or to say anything about the existence of a [] or a [6], The reference is brief and vague and gives us no assurance that del Falco knew much about Tuscan pronunciation or, in spite of his mentioning other Hebrew letters, that he knew much Hebrew. He does not give the restrictions on the occurrence of the Tuscan spirant sound. In fact, he does not even indicate of which Italian phoneme it is the Tuscan realization. But Weinrich 1958, 112, thinks that the fact that del Falco makes his comparison with Hebrew indicates that del Falco possessed a thorough understanding of Tuscan phonology, because Hebrew has alternation of stops and spirants (which some Semiticists still call aspirates - cf. Lefevre 1945,11) similar to the alternations of modern Tuscan.11 If Weinrich's supposition were correct, one would be entitled (contrary to Weinrich's own insistence - cf. below, p. 17) to see in del Falco's failure to mention Hebrew feh (the 'aspirated' variant of peh, pronounced [f] - cf. Schramm 1964, 17) and thav (the 'aspirated' variant of tav, pronounced [0], [s], or [t] according to various traditions of Hebrew pronunciation — cf. Schramm 1964, 19-20) some indication that Tuscan /-p-, -t-/ were not spirants in the early sixteenth century. But the fact that del Falco makes his comparison with heh, which is not the 'aspirated' variant of any other letter and whose value is, moreover, less similar to the contemporary Tuscan pronunciation of /-k-/ than that of khaph, which is an 'aspirated' variant, shows that Weinrich's supposition is unfounded. Hence del Falco's silence on Tuscan p and / is not significant. It is to be noted that del Falco's sentence implies no censure of the gorgia. In 1540 another allusion to Tuscan 'aspirated' c occurs in the Di causis linguae latinae, called the earliest grammar of Latin on scientific principles, by Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558). In reality Scaliger tells us little about Tuscan pronunciation, but it seems necessary to deal with his comments at some length in order to be able to discard certain misapprehensions.

del Falco, Scaliger 15 Before presenting the passages that seem most pertinent to our subject, I should like to point out that the passages quoted here form part of a section of approximately twenty pages devoted to the pronunciation of Latin, not of Italian, and that not only in the small part of material I quote but throughout the section, Scaliger directs many of his comments toward the correction of errors of Latin pronunciation committed by speakers of various European languages, not exclusively, nor even especially, toward the correction of the errors made by Tuscans. (In fact, the Galli seem to be corrected far more often than the Tusci — which is understandable.) The allusion to Tuscan 'aspiration' occurs, naturally, in the paragraph in which the pronunciation of Latin c is treated: Multo diuersior usus est ipsius c, idque non solum in diuersis nationibus, sed etiam ipsa in Italia. Ac sane idem esse nostrum c, quod Graecorum sit K, iam receptum est: explosaque eorum sententia, qui aliter autumarent. Tantoq; magis Scauri Grammatici, qui putarit nomina, in quibus A, secunda esset statim sede, per K, scribenda esse; sic: Kalendae, Karus. ... Quin Kappa nomen maius est, quàm quanta sit haec potestas, ad quam arctare conatur ipsum. Alii ita censuare, Graecis tantum uocibus attribuendam, qui aequè falsi sunt. Etenim id si uerum esset, etiam Chremetem, per x, Graecum scriberent. Quod sola aspiratione ab ipso K distat. Nulla igitur ratio est. Ipsius ergo sonus c, cum sit idem cum sonó ipsius K, cauendum nobis maxime est, ne addatur aspiratio (id quod Thuscorum non pauci faciunt : sed ii frequentius, qui Arnum Flumen accolunt) sed siccissime est pronunciandum, non mucrone, sed latiore parte linguae adducta ad palatum atque astricta, ut quam tenuissimus quamque expeditissimus sonus transabeat. Galli turpissime per sibilum edunt: ut non discernas, Cellam ne, an Sellam, audias. Germani nostrates non tarn crasso sibilo: at Germani Belgae, & Hispani, non aliter, quam Galli Circumpadani, et Veneti & Flaminii, Si Ligures, sibilo tenuissimo, & balbo. [17-18] 'Aspiration' is spoken of again in the passage on d, in which Scaliger attempts articulatory descriptions of [o, t, 6] : D, tam Graeci, quam Vascones, atque etiam Arabes aspiratius pronunciant, subdita scilicet dentibus lingua. ... Huic affinis est T, pertinacius appulsa lingua. At Graeci cum his coniuncta 9, non ut Galli proférant, excito de gutture spiritu crassiore, sed Graeci ipsi interposito suauiore flatu, subiecta lingua laxiore spatio dentibus, quam in D. [19] All of chapter 11 is devoted to the problem, 'An T, semper eodem sit sonó,' i.e., whether / followed by i plus another vowel ought to be pronounced as [t] or as a sibilant or affricate. Nowhere is there an allusion to Tuscan 'aspirated' /: Eius, vt diximus, sonus sit appulsa lingua ad radices dentium superiorum: quem sonum apud Graecos receptum est variare cùm sequitur N, vt ANTÍÍNINOS.

16 TUSCAN AND ETRUSCAN

emollitur enim atque accedit ad D, nostrum. ... Sic etiam non tarn plenè efferatur, quum sequitur ipsum L, Atlas. Ergo quum non semper eodem sono usui sit, quaesitum est, quum praecedit vocalem I, atque hanc alia sequitur vocalis, an rectè côsuetudo teneat, vt aut Galli per integrum sibilum, aut Itali per dimidiatum edant: ut in exemplis, lustitia, Amicitia. Igitur qui mutari contendunt, nituntur consuetudine, ac praeterea Grammaticorum autoritate. ... Contra aliqui ita sentiunt, usum nunc minimi esse & precii, & auctoritatis, multáque minime integra haberi. [23]

Finally, in chapter 15, 'Utrum F, sit muta, an semiuocalis,' 'aspiration' is attributed to [f] : Ad haec, Graecis idem est *, quod nobis F : sed * apud illos muta est : igitur & apud nos F ... Postremo F, pro p, & aspiratione accipitur, vt olim Phuga, Phama: at P, muta est : igitur & F. [32]

On the basis of the first passage alone, but especially in view of the larger context mentioned above, it seems clear that Scaliger rejects Tuscan 'aspirated' c not as bad Tuscan, as it has been affirmed, but as bad Latin pronunciation. 12 1 see in the passage no implication that the sound is considered objectionable per se. It is entirely possible that Scaliger may have thought Tuscan speech execrable, but we are not entitled to such an inference on the basis of what he says here. It appears that Scaliger rejects Tuscan pronunciation of Latin c with 'aspiration' as being similar or identical to Greek chi, whereas the proper Latin value is that of Greek kappa. A second fact to be noted is that Scaliger's 'aspirates' are unquestionably spirants. (Although a portion of the first passage may at first sight seem to conflict with this affirmation and in fact to indicate that Scaliger must have heard a real aspirate rather than a spirant for Tuscan /-k-/, it is seen that the passage corroborates the affirmation as soon as it is realized that, as the other passages show, the Greek pronunciation known to Scaliger, and his contemporaries, was that of the Byzantine tradition. In that pronunciation phi, theta, and chi were spirants rather than the aspirates that are now assumed for Classical Greek.) Third, although the passages cited do not literally disprove Weinrich's statement (1958, 112) that no exact phonetic descriptions are to be expected in the sixteenth century, they and others in the book do disprove the intention of that statement by showing that meaningful approximate descriptions can at least sometimes be found. Fourth, Scaliger's description of Greek theta in particular indicates that the author was acquainted with the sound [8] and that he was able to describe it adequately. Fifth, Scaliger's discussion of the pronunciation of Latin / reminds us

Giambullari 17 that not only Latin /k/ but also Latin /t/ had undergone 'palatalization* in certain phonetic environments in the Romance languages. The third, fourth, and fifth points seem to me to indicate that, at least in regard to [0], Weinrich was mistaken when he explained the absence of sixteenth-century allusions to Tuscan 'aspirates' other than be] by alleging that authors of the sixteenth century would have been unable to describe the sounds (a view also maintained by other scholars whose theories require early origin of all the Tuscan 'aspirates') and by declaring that 'aspirated' /-k-/ was noticed early only because 'man schon vorher eine Kategorie dafur [hatte, denn] der Buchstabe c [war] schon seit spàtlateinischer Zeit Gegenstand besonderer Aufmerksamkeit wegen des Palatalisierungsprozesses.' (1958, 112) Rather, it must be admitted that Scaliger failed to mention Tuscan [6] (and perhaps also Tuscan [$], since he showed elsewhere in the book, e.g., 17, that he was able to describe labial consonants comprehensibly and since he raised the question whether Latin p is always to be given the same pronunciation [24]) either merely by chance, because he did not know of it, even though it existed in his time, or because it did not yet exist. Since Scaliger made a great show of his knowledge of Italian regional pronunciation (cf. especially his discussion of g, 19), it would seem that the third possibility must be considered at least as probable as the first two. The Florentine Piero Francesco Giambullari (1495-1555) produced two or, if Piero Fiorelli's suspicions (1956, 177-210) are correct, three works on Tuscan that would seem to be of interest to our theme but in fact enlighten us very little. The first (which, before Fiorelli's article, had been attributed to Cosimo Bartoli rather than to Giambullari) is an essay called 'Osservazioni per la pronunzia florentina' prefacing (6-38) Marsilio Ficino's translation Sopra lo Amore o ver Convito di Platane (Florence, 1544). Like many a work since, this one attempts to instruct non-Tuscans in Florentine pronunciation by telling them about the differences between open and close e and o and voiced and voiceless s and z, and presents special symbols to indicate orthographically those distinctions, which are still not symbolized by official orthography. The pertinence of this essay - and there are many others like it, which will not be mentioned individually13 - is that its author felt no need for a special symbol to represent intervocalic /k/. Then, as now, Florentines found the traditional writing system to be entirely adequate in its representation of/k/, for the alternation of the stop and the spirant was and is automatic and unconscious for the native speaker. I stress this fact

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because it has sometimes been forgotten in the search for orthographic evidence of the gorgia in pre-sixteenth-century documents. Giambullari's dialogue Origine délia lingua florentina, published five years later, is a curious work that attempts to show that Tuscan is not descended from Latin but is a sister language to Hebrew. One would expect that Giambullari might have brought in Florentine [x] and, if it existed at that time, Florentine [0] as evidence of the relationship; but the gorgia sounds are not mentioned. The phonological similarities alleged are that Hebrew, like Tuscan, has the 'sc sound (as in uscio) and two j's (i.e., /s/ and /z/), two z's (i.e., /ts/ and /dz/), two