The Neuter Gender in Old Italian 🇮🇹
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- Опубліковано 27 кві 2024
- Did you know that Italian used to have a neuter gender? It's true! Old Italian had three genders: masculine, feminine, and a genus alternans that we might call the neuter, like Romanian. Discover the fascinating nature of the transitional grammar of Mediaeval Italian, and what it tells us about the development of the Romance languages.
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SOURCES:
Loporcaro et al. (2014): www.academia.edu/72531006/The...
Middei (2022):
www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j...
Treccani on the Neuter Gender in Italian:
www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/...
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Intro and outro music: Overture of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) by Mozart
00:00 Intro
00:25 Gender from Latin into Italian
03:30 Loporcaro et al. (2014)
04:46 Evidence for a 3rd Gender in Old Italian
06:57 Old Italian compared with Romanian
08:37 Examples of Neuter Plural Target Gender in Preliterary Italian
10:23 The transition from Neuter Plural to Genus Alternans
12:48 Che fico! Che ficora!
14:21 Outtakes
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You nailed romanian language and the accent was pretty good !
What about this: 1) BraccI delle gru ---> Crane arms vs 2) BracciA delle persone ---> People's arms
A lot of dialects in Southern Italy still preserve the Latin neuter, which is evident when a different article is used to indicate a countable noun and a collective noun, for example in Neapolitan there is "o" from Latin illu(m) for masculine, and the is "o‘" from Latin illud for neuter (it's different because the neuter article causes syntactic gemination, which means that the initial consonant of the following word doubles)
Super interesting 😮 in sardinian there are only fossils, like duos, duas 'two' becoming dua when said together with mizza 'thousands'
@@viperking6573Como en catalán dos, dues, portugués dois, duas y occitano dos, doas y duas.
@@juanfranciscocampoycaballero si 🤗
I'm pretty sure at this point most speakers with syntactic gemination apply it at the start of every emphasised word regardless of what precedes it
That's not true. "O" is the equivalent of "il". It's not neutral. It's masculine.
As an Italian I never thought I'd learn things about Italian from you ... 🤣. This was very interesting, I don't know why they don't teach this things in school, I'd remember much more easily a beatuful story like this than 20 "exceptions".
Grazie!
Eidem
Si vede che aveva delle lacune in grammatica.
i’m american with abruzzese relatives who absolutely say “le ficura” so it looks like that feature seems to go even further than just Lazio. if you go to L’Aquila in fig season I’m sure you’ll hear it too, I heard it constantly when i was there this summer, and not just from people who speak exclusively or majority in abruzzese. thanks for always posting the coolest stuff dude.
Coming from that part of Italy I assure you that "ficura" is really the most common way to call the figs more than "I fichi" the standard Italian version 😂
@@horos5870wow io invece non ho mai sentito dire ficura ma solo i fichi 😂
@@TommyTommy io sono della zona di confine tra Abruzzo e Marche e da noi a un certo punto dell'anno si vanno a cogliere "li ficura" 🤣🤣
"Ficura!" Che fico!
In Spanish there is the article "lo" which comes out every once in a while, and some people call it the "neuter article" because it is neither "el" (masc) nor "la" (fem), yet it is widely contested because most neuter words from Latin got absorbed into the masculine in Spanish. From what I'v read it seems previous generations of linguists considered it a neuter article, and more recent ones don't.
It's the exact same thing in Italian, only the masculine article is "il", while "lo" and "la" have the same meaning
Could you use it in an example sentence please? For learning purposes
Conceptually I almost don't consider "lo" to be an article at all, but a direct stand-in for "la cosa" in most cases.
_Lo que me interesa..._ | _La cosa que me interesa..._
_Lo gracioso es..._ | _La cosa graciosa es..._
_Lo más importante..._ | _La cosa más importante..._
But there are quite a few exceptions such as "lo ocurrido", "lo mucho", "lo antes posible", "por lo tanto" etc. which would be a lot harder to try substituting with "la cosa". It definitely is a tricky little word that trips a lot of learners up.
@@LegendoftheGalacticHero Lo importante en la vida es amar. The important thing in life is to love. It's used an awful lot but this is one of the more transparent constructions. Here it's used for "abstraction" if you will, nominalizing an adjective. Even more frequently, but more subtly, used with relative pronouns: lo que, lo cual; the gendered articles have their own similar use there too. Not every use of lo is this neuter article; an etymologically distinct "lo" is the masculine accusative pronoun that goes inseparably before the verb.
@@LegendoftheGalacticHero "Lo barato sale caro" (the cheapest option ends up being more expensive).
"Lo bueno es que tenemos salud" (the good thing is that we have health).
You can see why some believe it be a vestige of a neuter gender because, used this way, it almost always refers to a concept or idea rather than a being or thing.
Re-learning Latin has helped me so much already with Italian comprehension. I was watching a documentary on infrastructure, about the Ponte Morandi bridge collapse in Genova, with a lot of Italian interviews. But Latin also helped me immensely in that it gave me a head start over some of my peers in uni when learning German, because some of these people had no idea of grammatical gender at all, or couldn't deal with having THREE in German!
Fascinating to learn about Italian changing over time, as well!
One of the most fascinating linguistic videos I’ve seen. There’s something elegant and beautiful about the neuter plural forms in preliterary Italian… Romanian has a productive neuter gender ending “uri” which functions very similarly and bears resemblance to the “ora” form in Italian.
Thanks! That's true.
There are still 3 words in French that do this too: délice, amour, orgue. AND there is a really strange phenomenon where an adjective changes gender when in front of a noun depending on number. Because the French love to keep as many exceptions to their rules as possible :)
Learning Greek, my φιλόλογος / filólogos - Greek master once told me that in Greek there are always exceptions to the rules. For example he said that some names - nouns - _noms_ that may appear to have the normally masculine -ος endings are so old they are neuters, or even more rarely feminines. I think all languages hold exceptions to linguistical rules, but I believe Greek could nearly match French, et vous les français avec votre merveilleuse Académie Française, in being martinets to the rules we hold to using our languages. 🧿💙
It happens very frequently in the Mediterranean languages and the romantic written too.
In Italian some collective nouns have the -a ending but are treated as singular grammatically e.g. "la frutta" (fruits) and "la legna" (wood), as opposed to the ones you mentioned (le uova, le mura, le dita, le braccia, le ciglia, le labbra, etc).
p.s. I remember an old Italian poem from 13° century where it says "pull me away from these fires" like "tragemi d'este focora" and I never understood why this -ora (foco > focora) came from Latin focus > foci which is masculine. Now I understand... and of course in Romanian foc > focuri went down the same path... Thank you for explaining it.
Focora! Mi piace.
It's in the "Contrasto" by Cielo d'Alcamo, one of the first poems of "Italian" vulgar literature, Sicilian school of king Federico II. And of course this verse was despised by Dante in his "De Vulgaris Eloquentia" as low quality ("secundum quod prodit a terrigenis mediocribus") and dialectal stuff.
Frutta is right, but legna is not really the plural of "legno", "legno" is only the material ("di legno"). Even a single log of wood is "legna", like a single glass is acqua.
@@neutronalchemist3241il melo la mela ,il però la pera ,il fico la fic@
@@neutronalchemist3241 You are wrong, "legno" is a singular noun and can be the subject. For example "Pietro butta un legno nel caminetto" (Pietro throws a piece of wood into the fireplace), it is not "Pietro butta una legna nel caminetto", a correct version could be "Pietro butta della legna nel caminetto" ("della" meaning "some"), but wording this way you don't specify how many pieces he is throwing.
In my dialect (Sabin) we still say ficora for plural of fico. 'A pié d'a ficora ce nasce o ficorillo'. is a proverb we use to say something like 'like father, like son'.We say u ficu, e ficora. At least my grandmother said so, I understand the language, but I am almost unable to speak it.
Wow! Che ficu!
Same in sicilian: 'u ficu, 'i ficura. Actually, a lot of words take the ending in -ura to form the ending. For example Catu (bucket/ secchio) becomes catura!
Nel mio dialetto (nel Lazio) ma al confine con l'Abruzzo diciamo "la fícura" (il fico) e "lə fícura" (i fichi).
Thanks for an incredible video, Luke! I recall reading Lausberg’s argument that the Italian “neuter plural” le < Latin *illaec, analogically formed from haec, but the evidence you’ve amassed from Loporcaro and others has me convinced that we really are dealing with the bonafide feminine article in cases like le ciglia. I think we even have some evidence for extension in the -ora ending in Late Latin-such fascinating stuff!
That's also an important observation!
Hi Luke, i’m an Italian guy and I just want to say your work is amazing! I always asked myself about the reason Italian language ended with no neuter case considering its strict connection to Latin, and suddenly I found my answer years later my first thoughts about this topic in your video!
I really appreciate this content as much as many others in your channel. I also love this style of divulgation, walking into a context, it reminds me of Alberto Angela style (I don’t know if you know him, but probably being in Italy you sure do).
Best regards, and thanks!
Grazie mille, Luigi!
"Ciglio" - "Ciglia" ("Eyelash" - "Eyelashes") is typically one of those words that drive every Italian crazy, since we generally use the female word either for the singular and for the plural words, while technically we should probably use "Ciglie" for the plural! 😅 While "Ciglio" is practically used to indicate the edge (of a road or a of a sidewalk). 🤷♂😄
Classical Latin itself has similar remnants of older grammatical forms, such as the deponent verbs: active in sense, but passive in form, which may be remnants of an earlier middle voice, as in Ancient Greek. The semi-deponent verbs also show the alternating phenomenon, with the simple tenses being active in form whereas the perfect tenses look passive. The reflexive verbs of French look like middle voice to me. Maybe something like that will happen to American English, with Microsoft Word constantly telling us to eschew the passive. Modern languages may also have hints of the dual.
Come italiano mi stai dicendo cose che non sapevo. Fra l'altro ti seguo e ascolto anche sull'altro canale di latino, lingua che sto cercando di imparare! Bravo e grazie!
Grazie a te!
Thank you for keeping italian alive in the other parts of the world, and not only italian but latin too, My favourite language!
Grazie mille, gratias tibi valde.
Grazie a te!
i'm from the Sabina region in Lazio, and my grandma always used the term "Ficora" to name the fruit tree and the plural form of the fruit :)
Interesting, so I'm guessing that’s the way eastern romance did it. I'm learning Romanian and I always found the neuter gender interesting and challenging because there’s no way to tell which masculine nouns are neuter so you just have to learn it from memory, unless I'm missing something there and there’s a way to know it (if so I'd be glad to know)
I'm glad you're learning my language. Yeah, unfortunately the neuter nouns are something you can only learn by trial and error. There is no grammatical rule which makes it easier, it's just something you have to memorize and internalize. I guess the only rule is that the neuter noun is always masculine in the singular, and feminine in the plural, never the opposite (if that helps). It's a bit annoying for sure, but you can get away with making mistakes. Many native Romanian speakers make grammatical mistakes (like me).
Neuter nouns:
Un scaun, doua scaune
un televisor, doua televisoare
un scut, doua scuturi
un ou, doua oua
un os. doua oase
Un, două. Singular (m) plural ( f ) vs un, doi/ o, două. 😊
@@daciaromana2396 yeah, I’m trying to memorize them, fortunately they’re not annoying enough for me to stop learning Romanian 🫡
Is there no way of telling gender in Romanian just by the word ending?
@@kacperwoch4368 you can, it’s just that neuter doesn’t have its own ending so in singular is masculine but plural is feminine and you have to memorize/learn which masculine nouns are actually neuter and change the plural to feminine
The Latin neuter plural -ora ending has survived in Romanian as -uri and just like Old Italian,it has been applied to nouns that never had it originally.
Also in many southern Italian varieties it seems, and there appear to be vestiges in Spanish as well
Impressed at how well you pronounced Romanian, bravo Luke!
Mulțumesc!
There's the other thing that happens to Latin neuters like "opus" where the nominative (etc.) plural is reanalysed as a feminine singular.
True!
It is always a pleasure to learn things from such a fantastic teacher!
Thans Luke, your work is extraordinary!
Very kind!
What a cool video! Here in Florence (and throughout most of Tuscany) you can find several examples of our old neuter, especially in street names and toponomy. Some examples off the top of my head are: "campora" (meadows), "molina" (mills) and "prata" (fields). By the way, I have to say I don't think I'd ever encountered "pratora" before. Also, another common word that follows this neuter pattern is "il lenzuolo/le lenzuola" (sheets). Finally, I just wanted to add that most of these words have a masculine-based plural form with a different or specific meaning (labbri, braccî, ciglî) and that they all shift to the masculine pattern anyway when suffixes are added (ovetti, orecchioni).
Such a cool video, Luke! You always do such an awesome job breaking down the information. So interesting!
Very kind! Thanks for watching.
@@polyMATHY_Luke if you don't mind me sharing, I was actually taught something interesting about grammatical gender:
(Depending on the language) words developed from roots and endings. Each word told you what it was and what it did. Each ending had its own grammatical forms.
So, words fell into categories based on shape and grammatical forms, with pronouns to match.
As roots began to fade, each category was attached to the Actual Gender it most commonly described: the word for man is almost always masculine, the word for woman feminine, the word for something like tree is usually neuter.
So, many words that did not have a gender of their own, but followed the shape of words that did have an actual gender were treated as that gender, in order to memorize grammatical forms.
It's kind of like that life of Brian video you did: Romanus goes like Annus. They share the same conjugation patterns.
So often people speaking languages with gender will give male or female qualities to objects that have no actual gender, simply to remember the conjugation of that word - using gender as a shortcut
A fascinating group of words! Many of these examples exist in Spanish, but rather as doublets with different meanings from what developed from the cognate neuter signular descendants. 𝐏𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐨 'meadow' has 𝐩𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐚 'pasture, grassland, prairie' ; 𝐥𝐚𝐝𝐨 'side' has (via Portuguese) 𝐥𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐚 'slope, hillside, mountainside'; 𝐡𝐮𝐞𝐯𝐨 'egg' has 𝐡𝐮𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐚 'fish-roe' also 'egg-cup' (Alt. *ovaria); 𝐥𝐞ñ𝐨 'log' has 𝐥𝐞ñ𝐚 'firewood (collective)', and 𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐨 'lip' has 𝐥𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐚 'gift of gab, silver-tongue, pejor. boulderdash, B.S'. Non-neuter 𝐟𝐮𝐞𝐠𝐨 'fire' has 𝐡𝐨𝐠𝐚𝐫 'home, orig. hearth', and 𝐡𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞𝐫𝐚 'campfire, bonfire' (Alt. *focaria). 𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐨 'fig' has 𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐮𝐞𝐫𝐚 'fig-tree' (Alt. *ficaria). 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐨 'castle' has 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚 (the name of the kingdom). The fossilized plural form 𝐂𝐞𝐣𝐚 'eyelash' survives only in the feminine, while the singular form was reborrowed as 𝐜𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐨 'cilium'. Also 𝐬𝐞ñ𝐚 'indication' or 'gesture' has a learned borrowing from the latin singular, which gives 𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐨 'sign, sign of zodiac'. Interestingly, by an unrelated sound change in Spanish, there's an /r/ in the of the descendant of 3rd decl. neuters (sing. as well as plu.) ɴᴏᴍᴇɴ → 𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐛𝐫𝐞, and ᴠɪᴍᴇɴ→ 𝐦𝐢𝐦𝐛𝐫𝐞 'willow, withe, osier'. A hidden /r/ from a neuter plural exists in the final /l/ of sᴛᴇʀᴄᴜs→ 𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐨𝐥 'manure', or it could be analogy from ᴍᴀʀᴍᴏʀ→ 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐨𝐥 'marble' (another neuter). Via French came the word 𝐛𝐢𝐭á𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐚 'binnacle' & 'weblog' , ultimately from ʜᴀʙɪᴛᴀᴄᴜʟᴜᴍ. As in Italian, Spanish has only this handful in total , with possibly an additional 3-4 more examples that I may have missed. In all, these are some amazing transitional forms of archeopterygian proportions, and that's no 𝙡𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙖 !
Confusions, for ex. ladera is not a sort of neutral plural...
¡Increíble! Muchísimas gracias por esto.
Ladera, compare with Romanian latura
👏Fascinating and crystal clear as always!!!
Da appassionato di latino e di evoluzione di esso nelle lingue romanze, trovo i tuoi video sempre fighissimi. Yes "fiGhissimi and not fiChissimi" because I'm from northern Italy and I use your intreresting videos to improve my english. Grazie Luchino.
Ahah bravo. Grazie!
Fascinating! Some reflexes of latin neuter gender are still productive in certain neuter pronouns in Spanish (ello/lo
Although in sicilian we don't really have a neuter gender, a lot of words actually take a neuter ending. The reason we don't percieve them as neuter probably stems from the fact that we lack a "neuter" article, while having neuter endings. As in -u singular, -a plural (similar to italian) and -u or -a singular, -ura in the plural
that's very interesting! can you give some examples of the words ending in -ura in plural?
@@xolang of course!
"Woods": Voscu, voscura
"Bucket": Catu, Catura
"Pine tree": Pinu, Pinura
"Fig": ficu, ficura
And so on. Note that young sicilians may use an -i plural ending because of modern italian influence. Ironically, old italian almost always had a similar -ora ending as sicilian in such cases
@@esti-od1mz Thank you!
İn Romanian it is a very productive plural ending btw, and it also ends in -i. e.g. corp, corpuri.
@@xolang you’re welcome! It is stil productive in sicilian, although not as much as in the past: it was corpu- corpura in sicilian and corpo-corpora in italian!
Ever since I first learned about this phenomenon - and my Italian is rudimentary at best, but I tend to focus and get obsessed by them, I've asked myself the question: "why is this simply not called the neuter gender in Italian?"
Now I feel I finally have the answer. Thank you!
I love the bloopers at the end not to mention the amazing content as always
Thanks! The outtakes are fun to put together, glad you like to watch them.
Me too! The bloopers are so hilarious! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I just realised there is still at least a relic in modern Italian of pre-literary italian neuter. The plural of "il frutto" is not "le frutta" but "LA FRUTTA". There is also "i frutti", but it normally means "the products", not an ensemble of fruits.
It has to be noted that, the moment you number them, it becomes "cinque frutti", not "cinque frutta", but in the normal language, to number an unspecified kind of fruits is pretty rare, so "frutta" is largely prevalent.
Nice to see such a clear development of the language through logical changes. My own mothertongue Swedish must have gone through similar changes to go from the older male/female/neuter gender system to our modern neuter/non-neuter system. We also have some remnants of the old system in certain phrases, of course (remnants of old grammar is fun to spot). But unlike from old Latin to modern Italian, there's very little written in our dialect of old Norse or the subsequent Old Swedish. Runestones are awesome, but they're not exactly long form texts.
Wow!!! I absolutely love the detailed explanation. Clear as water! My students always ask me grammatical questions like “why”, and I always say I don’t know why….
Could you do a video explaining the difference between use of subjunctive in Spanish and Italian? I always found it strange that we say “credo che sia…” but “credo que es…”. I would love to know the background story for this phenomenon. Others include gender of certain nouns… il miele but la miel; il sale but la sal; l’analisi (f) but el análisis. Never understood why. Perhaps it’s related to this third gender.
Creo que es…*
That's a great question! I think this just comes down to habit, or random chance. Old English also required the subjunctive here: "iċ wēne þæt sīe..." Also true of the gender changse: arbor (f.) > albero (m.).
My thought was maybe the Spanish church found it inappropriate that faith was in subjunctive mood…
Love this! Thanks for the information
Thanks for watching!
Very cool! Thanks for sharing, Luke!
What is really amazing is that you're from US and yet masterfully explain to me something about my language/culture. Thanks from Italy
Funny thing is that in some areas of Lazio region (and in some other central areas) the dialects still use it like that, just like in Old Italian.
Fantastic video, as a Romanian I both love Italian, but especially old Italian, specifically for its neuter gender, which is what made so much of the poetry and writing from the time just speak so much more to me. I have Aphantasia (no imagination) and so wording and detail in that wording is super important to me. Im nowhere near fluent in Italian nevertheless old Italian, but it translates a little better to romanian than modern italian does, which is already very similar.
You're making me want to learn Italian now . How long has Irene been your camera 📷 person? She does a great job. Super interesting video as always
Irene volunteered to record starting from the “American speaks Latin at the Vatican” video in 2021. Her creative flare has added enormously to every video since that she has generously helped me with.
There are some examples that I can't still figure out why they developed like that, such as "arm" (i.e. braccio), singular male, and "arms" (i.e. braccia), plural female, as you correctly cited.
However we actually use the male plural name of "arm" - "braccio", that is "bracci", but only in a technical connotation context, such as the arms of a machinery, for example.
So that they could be intended as neutral words somehow. I think that might be one of the most difficult thing to understand for those who are learning Italian.
My perception is that fossil plurals in - a, as in le corna, le braccia, le ciglia etc are only ever used in a collective sense, when referring to a pair of such objects. But the masculine plural is used when referring to a plurality of "single instances" of such objects. As in "ho le ciglia lunghe" and "sui cigli delle strade", or "fritto misto con le cervella" and "i cervelli in fuga".
So yes, these collective plurals may be seen as a sort of neuter I guess. Some of the examples elude this reasoning though.
et de novo fecisti video multo bonum! luke, você tá sempre fazendo vídeos bons. Nunca para aí, tá ensinando muitos com teus vídeos!
This is Helping me Lrean Italian Soon I will Be Able to speak and Understand my Family in Italy as a Canadian Half Italian With Italian Grandparents and Italian Family Members in Italy
Thank you for your service, I noticed the badges of your army service on your coat.
Of all the languages I look into learning; English (in case you're wondering doctors say my first language is "Individual Vocalizations"), Spanish, French, German and Russian I found it strange how (apart from English) they all have a gender system (English used to but dropped in roughly 1000 years ago) and it seems confusing, granted "Individual Vocalizations" has no grammatical gender (or even much in the way of gendered language; "Mazha" and "Dazha" but that's about it) but I always wondered why do so many, or on a world scale relatively few since while only 5/6 Indo-European languages (English, Scots, Armenian, Persian, Ossetian and Afrikaans) don't use grammatical gender the mechanic is pretty rare outside of Indo-European languages with some like Hebrew and Arabic but around 3/4 of the world's languages do not.
I don't know if you've ever seen it but I read of a theory about this which suggested that when the Indo-European languages were forming (and possibly when Indo-European was a single language although if this happened is debated) there were societal roles and associations between objects and genders/biological sexes and the language was formed with those in mind, which is argued by some as support for the Indo-European Hypothesis (that being that all Indo-European languages descend from a single source which was the language of a single Indo-European people group) as well as argue for why Finland has led the way on women in positions of government since Finnish even lacks words for "he" and "she" and has only an equivalent of "they". Others have disputed this claim pointing out that there were plenty of gender norms in societies without grammatical gender and the fact that its not like those Indo-European languages which had no grammatical gender (or dropped it) became more gender equal.
Do you have any thoughts on why grammatical gender exists?
I have a whole video about it: ua-cam.com/video/3AnG3tbwlIw/v-deo.htmlsi=HhGBzT5IeERfC5pr
@@polyMATHY_Luke Thanks, this will be interesting.
The neuter form is still used in Spanish but it's limited to:
Lo bueno es que
Siempre lo hace de tal manera
Nadie lo hizo.
Etc.
When it comes to numbers:
Uno/Una/Un
Cuatro/Cuatra
Cuando/Cuan
En "nadie lo hizo" y en "siempre lo hace" funciona como un acusativo (aunque en español no existan oficialmente casos) es decir indica la función gramatical de objeto directo y sigue siendo masculino; el artículo no cambia de género.
I'm Italian and this video made me think a bit about how we think about these irregular words. I can't shake off the idea that in Italian there is a connection between an uncounted plurality (but assumed in quantity) and the feminine gender (or, better, feminine for of the word). In my head, the feminine plural indicates a pre determined number of objects. It sounds silly, maybe, but it's not different from saying one person, two persons, many people. In my head, "people" would be the female plural version of a potentially masculine singular because it indicates "one crowd", like the irregular "sheep" as plural usually indicates "a herd" (unlike different types of "sheeps"). (Obviously the "people" example is unrelated to the actual gender of the people taken into consideration). So, when you say "dito" I know it's one, but "le dita" gives a sense of "my hands". In Italian we frequently joke and say "due o tre diti" pretending to speak like babies but the sound of it is not completely foreign to our mind and it doesn't summon the idea of "hands". Another example is un uovo / le uova, where "a box/dozen/pail of eggs" comes to mind when saying "le uova". In the same way, if I say "le ginocchia" I know it's very likely to be two of them. Il labbro -> le labbra is, again, two because it's one mouth.
Again, I may be wrong, but I see some sort of connection between uncontability with assumed quantification and plural of the neuter gender.
If you refer to both thumbs, index fingers etc. the correct form is "i diti" ;)
Interesting.
Great video, Luke!
Thanks!
Thank you, this is very interesting!
I wonder if this neuter gender has also, somehow, influenced the double plurals that we have for some words (e.g. braccia/bracci, dita/diti) 🤔
Absolutely. Actually this makes Italian even more fascinating.
I'm Italian and I've studied history of the italian language. Nice video
I appreciate the footage of the Malcesine castle at 12:11! Saluti da Verona ;)
Grazie! Saluti a te e alla Fair Verona!
How interesting! Great video! :D
Thanks!
10:55 Fascinating! And with "illō", "illő", "illā" and "lupō", "pomō", "rosā" in the ablative case the similarity is even more apparent. Speaking of which, any idea how come the "illō" has become lo (which I like un sacco, by the way) in preliterary/old Italian but then became the long forgotten onset "il" again?
Good question, it would be interesting what Luke can tell us about this.
I would just add that already in an earlier video (How Latin became Italian) he explained how all Italian endings probably derive from the Latin accusative even though it may seem counter-intuitive at first sight. (To elaborate, he explains how even the plural endings can be explained with sound changes affecting the accusative - even though they seem more similar to the Latin nominative, the video is really worth a watch.)
My (probably ill-informed) theory on "il"/"lo" would be that they probably were used pretty much interchangeably (or depending on the local variety) for a long time. For example, Dante as well as Bocaccio use both (not only as articles, but also as male accusative pronouns!), and so does a lot of 19th century literature.
I think we should not forget that - especially in Italian and also in German, maybe a bit less so in English and especially French - standardization was a centuries-long process that started in the middle ages and was only really completed at the beginning of the 20th century. Even in the 19th century what would have been considered "Standard Italian" or "Standard German" covered a much broader bandwidth of variants than it does today.
@@chriflu Thank you.
That's right, the Latin to Italian video covers this. Essentially the final long -ō was always long, meaning it could be make short even in Classical Latin without changing the meaning. Once final -u lowers to -o, we have syncretism of most of the cases.
@@polyMATHY_Luke I'll watch it again, thank you!
È stato un onore per me conoscerti, Luke! (e abbastanza inaspettato)
Anche per me! Grazie per aver guardato il video.
12'41" "There are less than 20 of them". I agree, but only if you add "commonly used" at the end of the sentence. There are actually more than 20, here are the first ones that come to my mind: uovo, dito, labbro, braccio, ginocchio, ciglio, sopracciglio, orecchio, lenzuolo, muro, centinaio, migliaio, miglio, paio, riso, membro, osso, tergo, corno, granello, budello, cervello, intestino, urlo... Some of them, that's true, have two different plural forms (e.g. "corna" is used for the horns of the same animal, whereas "corni" is used for horns of different animals or for the musical instrument).
Molto interessante, grazie caro !
Grazie a te!
I am from Lucca, Tuscany. I have heard some people here saying "le ditina" ("the little fingers") - (diminutive plural of "dita" - fingers). I think that the ending -a shows that this word is not considered a feminine plural, but a neuter plural - otherwise, one would have said "le ditine". From a research in internet I can see that also some dictionaries indicate "ditina" as a possible plural.
Che fico! Grazie per aver condiviso questo.
@@polyMATHY_Luke Di nulla!
So interesting, Luke!
According to current literary sources, nowadays "le dita" refers to ALL fingers on your hands, whereas when you only focus onto specific ones, they should be referred to as "i diti".
Any recommendations on starting out how to learn Italian like a specific resource
I definitely recommend Podcast Italiano channel! Also, see the Italian by the Nature Method videos on Ayan Academy.
In fact this story of the masculine singular to female plural for body parts is even more complicated than that. Next to le orecchie, le dita, le ciglia, le braccia, the masculine versione gli orecchi, i diti, i cigli, i bracci also exist. This is the difference: the female version of the nouns are used only for the human body parts, while the masculine versions are used to indicate animal body parts or of inanimate objects (i diti del pollo, i cigli del batterio, i bracci meccanici del robot).
È vero
It's even more complicated than that. For instance, a serial killer who collects, say, only the middle fingers of his victims would collect "i diti medî" in Italian: when those parts of the body belong to different bodies, you use the regular masculine plural form anyway. Oh, and there are a number of nouns with double plural forms with slightly different meanings, e.g. "il muro => i muri (the walls of a house) or le mura (city walls, or used in the expression "le mie 4 mura")
In Salentine, while still having this mixed-gender nouns (dícitu-dícite/díciti, razzu-razze, scinucchiu-scinucchî/scinucchie for finger, arm, and kneel) we also still retain some of this endings like in capu-càpure (alongside with modern capu for head), limmu-límmure/límmule (alongside with mdrn limmi for vase), tèmpure/tèmpura/tèmpere are latin loanwords for the liturgical times (tempus) but honestly I don't know if the singular form is "tiempu" or it merged with tèmpura itself for its singular resembling form.
eventually, càpure evolved locally into capre
we do also have a "la manu" (feminine hand) and "li mani" (masculine hands)
another noun is ou/ove (egg)
5:50 In the dialect of my town (in Calabria) -ora suffix is still in use 😄!
Do those words change gender like uovo in Italian?
@@Glossologia Yes, for example “u nuru/e nurura (knot/knots) - u grupu/e grupura (hole/holes) - u surcu/e surcura (furrow/furrows). However, nowadays very few people do it (especially the very elderly) and almost everyone uses the masculine form.
@@Glossologia Also, in Calabria there’s a village called "Le Castella" (the castles) 😄
It reminds me of Romansh, in Switzerland. I didn't remember if there is this "genus alternans" as in old Italian, or those fossilized plurals in modern Italian, but in Romansh, there are two types of plural, the common one with an -s, to specific objects we're talking about, and a general plural, which reminds the "feminine-plural" on Italian, also behaving as a singular noun: il meil madir (the ripe apple), il meil ei madirs (the apple is ripe) ils meils ein madirs (the apples are ripe [these apples over the table for example]), la meila ei madira (the apple [on this season for example] are ripe). Sometimes, the general plural can even express a dual meaning: Il bratsch (the arm [the limb] ), la bratscha (two arms, or "both arms"), bratsch can also use the common plural, so ils bratschs (the arms).
Beautiful video thank you brother
Complimenti! Interessante scoprire da italiano l'antico plurale neutro in "-ora" -!
È molto interessante e un poco divertente.
thanks luke, very cool
I wonder if something similar happened in Portuguese.
I imagine it did in more antique Romance
Adding an apostil, it can be observed that in modern Italian morphology an ordinary masculine plural form in « i »may coexist with an archaic so to speak neutral plural-singular form in « a », such as for : il labbro (the lip) / le labbra or I labbri ; il corno (the horn) / le corna or i corni ; il braccio (the arm) / le braccia or I bracci ; il lenzuolo (the bedsheet ) / I lenzuoli or le lenzuola. Of course the two forms aren’t interchangeable. The « a » ending which is the more common in those examples applies to a set perceived as typically indissociable. Otherwise the « i » ending is used. So : le labbra della bocca (the lips of the mouth) / I labbri della ferita (the edges of the wound) ; le corna della mucca (the horns of the cow)/ I corni dell’altare (the horns of the altar) ; le braccia di un uomo (a man’s arms) / i bracci della croce (the arms of the cross) ; le lenzuola vanno cambiate spesso ( bedsheets should be changed often) / un venditore di lenzuoli (a bedsheets seller). Lastly, the notional unity of a set of objects as rendered by a neutral plural-singular form can be traced back to ancient greek where such a subject governed a singular verb (« ta zoa trekhei » the animals run).
this is literally the “neuter” gender in Romanian lol:)) also, Romanian preserved the neuter-specific plural ending “-uri”, coming from an older version of ”-ure”, coming from Latin “-ora”! you can really see that in words like: latin “tempus - tempora” and its Romanian descendant “timp - timpuri”.
In Spain, in the region of Asturias (at the north), we have a language/historical dialect called Asturian which also preserves the neuter gender, to a degree.
It is preserved in a very different way to what the neuter used to be, though, and instead quite close to what I think happens in Neapolitan, based on another commenter's account, not so much as a true gender, but as an uncountable form for nouns, a "mass neuter".
In Spanish the neuter article "lo" does still exist, but that's pretty much it.
For example, in Spanish "el bueno" would mean "the good one", but "lo bueno" would mean "the good/what's good". Simmilarly, the demonstratives "esto", "eso", "aquello" (and the personal pronoun "ello") are used only for uncountable or undefined things ("this", "that"...), while "éste", "ése", "aquél" (the tildes are now optional) are used for defined things ("this one", "that one"...) ("ello" is used only for verbs constructions, basically; for a noun, you'd rather use "eso").
Clarification: in Asturian we use the neuter 'article' the same way as in spanish, and neuter nouns instead get masculine or feminine articles based on their original gender (though do note how some mass nouns have the masculine gender in Asturian even when they don't in Spanish, such as "sal" ("salt")).
In Asturian, however, many masculine nouns change a bit when used in an uncountable sense ("pelu"~"pilu" (hair strand)→"pelo" (hair)), and so do adjectives ("agua cristalino", with an adjective ending in -o, where it would be -u/-os~-us for the masculine and -a/-es~-as for the feminine). (dialectal variation shown with ~; please note that Asturian itself varies a lot from place to place, with the neuter gender existing in central dialects, and being less prevalent in southern and coastal ones).
An example from Wikipedia:
una fueya seca (a dry leave)
unes fueyes seques (some dry leaves)
fueya seco (dry leaves, uncountable).
The sad thing is Asturian is basically a relic by now, with very few people actually speking it, though many words and expressions have made it into the Spanish spoken here.
As for words that change genders, there's "el arte"→"las artes", and a few words with either gender ("el/la calor", "el/la mar" (note that "the seas" is always "los mares", I don't think I've ever heard "las mares")), but that's basically it. In Asturian you also get words that have different genders depending on where in Asturias you are (this also happens in all of Spain, but only with a few words), with things getting particularly weird nearing the border with Galicia, as you enter into the Galician-Asturian "Fala" (the way they speak there).
Also, I'm unsure, but... "el sal" instead of "la sal" ("the salt") could be referring to what in Spanish would be "salitre" or something like that, because I've heard the same people use both (or maybe it's just free variation?).
Anyway, if someone actually read this, thx.
Edit: clarifications.
French also has 3 words that alternate gender: they are "amour", "délice", and "orgue" (love, delight, and organ). They are masculine in singular and feminine in plural. I don't know if there is a connection to latine neutral.
Excellent video. So would I be right in saying (if I've understood correctly) that the neuter has remained in some Italian dialects?
Traces of it seem to, perhaps somewhat more productively than standard Italian.
@@polyMATHY_Luke ok thanks! grazie mille
Very interesting video! Many thanks! 😁👍
Neutral gender is natural for any Slavic language, so nothing difficult for me to understand was in this video.
Meanwhile, I want to ask another question: how about the vocative case in modern Italian? The special vocative case is rather rare thing in modern languages, for instance it exists in my native Ukrainian and in Polish but absent in Russian. I know vocative exists in Latin but what about it in Italian?
And one more question: dual category. This ancient Indo-European feature left only a few glimpses in modern languages, more in rural dialects, like in Central Ukrainian - ruká/rútsi/rúky "hand/[two] hands/[many] hands", nogá/nózi/nógy "foot/[two] feet/[many] feet, vidró/vidrí/vídra "bucket/[two] buckets/[many] buckets". Are there any remnants of dual in Latin and Italian languages?
Greetings from Ukraine! ✌🇺🇦
Great question. Most Italians do have an optional vocative form, where the name is truncated; for example, Irene: "Irè, vieni qui!" Stefano: "Stè, come va?" It's not considered part of the standard language (thus you wouldn't expect it in truly formal contexts), but it is a fact of colloquial discourse.
Слава Україні 🔱
@@polyMATHY_LukeOh, that's new and interesting information, thanks!
Героям слава! ✌🇺🇦
I'll start using "la bagnora" from now on and no Italian will understand me 😂 Also, I like the phrase "fuggiamo quinci" I will start using that one, too.
😂😂😂😂
Old italian is not synonymous with Tuscan/Floentine. It covers a much larger area than that (virtually the whole peninsula).
That is evident by the fact that many of the neautral plural forms are still found in many of the dialects far outside of Tuscany.
For example in Calabrian and Sicilian they still say "lu focu" / "li fòcura", "lu corpu" / "li còrpura", "lu tempu" / "li tèmpura".
Also forms that are simply masculine in the modern standard Italian language have a neutral plural in those dialects as they did in old italian literature. E.g. "il castello" / "i castelli" or "il muro" and "i muri" in modern italian but older italian literature had the plural as "castella" and "mura" and we still find "castella" and "mura" in many of the southern Italian dialects (or variations of them like "castedda" in Sicilian).
This shows that the italian dialects are not separate languages but they evolved from an earlier common form of italian and that is rightfully called "old Italian", it was not specific only to Florence.
Sardinian and Friulan do not descend from this earlier version of the language and therefore they are correctly called languages in their own right.
Post upload update: Just as I watch this i notice that Luke specifically mentions "le nòmora". This form is still said in many of the Sicilian dialects; "Li nòmura". How then can anyone argue that Sicilian (or the other italiano dialects) are separate languages when they clearly have the same features from the same roots and those roots are not Latin as Luke has demonstrated but old Italian.
Well when Luke brought Romanian into the picture, he seemed to already imply that this neuter system was rather widespread in the early Middle Ages in Eastern Romance. It's interesting how Sicilian has this too in itself!
@@tylere.8436 Luke did a great job over all.. I'm not trying to say he's completely wrong.
My comment was really aimed at this growing argument I see that tries to say that every Italian dialect is it's own language derived directly from Latin, or that Italian is only as old as Dante and was then imposed on the rest of the peninsula from Florence.
Honestly my comment is not directly related to this video. But this video is the proof that argument is false because it shows that one of the key features of the dialects was there in old Italian.
It makes sense that we also see some of this neautral plural feature in Romanian since both Italian and Romanian are eastern romance languages, but there are a whole range of sound shifts and grammatical features that show Romanian is a separate branch of the Romance family tree.
@@michaelm-bs2er I can agree with that, Romance languages are so fascinating in themselves because they have complex histories. Spanish was standardized in Madrid, yet It actually had roots in northern Spain, in places like Burgos, where castles were built around during the start of reconquista - hence the alternative name: castellano. French during this time too was rather conservative in many regards and sounded like other neighboring romance languages (retaining a nominative case even), but as further sound shifts happened, this case was lost. Early Romance is something that always intrigues me. So I can agree with that assessment that Italian had roots in places other than Tuscany.
@tylere.8436 I agree and thank you also for the tid bits of info on Spanish and French. I always wondered where the name Castellano came from. That makes a lot of sense.
I've seen records of old French, mainly the Oaths of Strasbourg and you are right, it is astonishing how conservative it was in the early phase of its development.
While you're talking about old italian, it is the italoromance continuum you're referring to. Sicilian and tuscan are italoromance, which means they come closer to each other in the romance dialect continuum. Old italian, beside the fact that is a term used more by english speakers, refer more to the 12th century florentine poetry variety
You just made me realize that in Italian we say "il carcere" (the prison) masculine singular, "le carceri" feminine plural
Infatti! E il gregge le greggi
I do love the way the neuter rule for plurals got carried over into modern Italian, eg uovo in the singular, uova in the plural, just like ovum and ova
Edit: oops I wrote this before getting to the Genus Alternans section
in my hometown, Modica in Sicily, prickly pears are called ficumora, a ficumora (singular), i ficumora (plural)
cool video! what's the location? seems like a mix between Hill Valley and Traverse Town 😁
Whitehall, birthplace of the US Navy
Are there any grammar books for medieval Italian?
I don't know. Maybe someone will know.
I'm just wondering if they did keep into account that '300s 'volgare' was more a sperimental language than what the average florentine/tuscanian would have spoken, more a summary of the main dialects spoken, a way to virtually unite the peninsula, so these nouns might have been genuinely added on purpose by the great writers of the era...
Interesting thought.
That is fascinating. I think there is a bit of a misconception that Spanish only has two genders, according to the Spanish Royal Academy of 1917, Spanish has six gender: masculine, feminine, neuter, epicene, common, & ambiguous. I don't know whether this is observed today or if other reforms have been implemented. The author who wrote the book even stated that the present society had the tendency to place neuter nouns into what he considers traditional genders like masculine or feminine. But that the article lo was intended for neuter nouns, like, lo capitán, lo príncipe, but in certain expressions the neuter article is respected even if speakers don't notice like lo cortés, lo valiente.
Sure, we can come up with any number of systems.
I have not read the article of the Spanish Royal Academy of 1917, but I daresay that stating that Spanish has 6 genders is incorrect. Maybe there are six possible categories of nouns, not "genders". Let me clarify that. "epicene" just means that there the same word is used for both male and female individuals, for instance in both Italian and Spanish "persona" is used for either a man or a woman. However, the noun "persona" itself is CERTAINLY feminine, indeed you sai "una persona alta", for example, adjectives, articles and so on MUST be in the feminine gender. Could you please provide us with the bibliographic reference of that original article?
In regards to the pronunciation, how different would old italian be from ecclesiastical latin? Ie, do we know when the consonants softened?
Old Italian had the proto-Romance system of vowels:
Latin ā/a = [a]
e = [ɛ]
ē/i = [e]
ī = [i]
o = [ɔ]
ō/u = [o]
ū = [u].
Latin C and G softened to palatal [c] and [ɟ] in the 2nd century and then to [tʃ] and [dʒ] in the 3rd and 4th centuries. Some Latin speakers were already using [tʃ] and [dʒ] in the 2nd century, which is why I pronounce "cēna" as [tʃeːna] and "caelum" as [kɛːlũ]. I use the conservative Late Latin dialect. See Luke Ranieri's spreadsheet on how Latin phonology evolved. Ecclesiastical Latin was always pronounced exactly like Italian.
@@Brandon55638 Most beautiful and informative response! Thank you! I didn't know he had a spreadsheet on it.
Why neuter plurals ending in -a got absorbed in feminine gender, like "le braccia,le lenzuola, le pratora(archaic plural of )" ?
In my dialects from Apulia there some words still retaining the plural in -ora, unfortunately I can't spell them in dialect.
Probably because the Latin neuter ends in -a, and this is associated with the feminine.
Love this vid
Woahhh polymathy just liked my comment! I never knew that would happen! Che fico
How did "nomina" become "nomora"? Perhaps by analogy with other neuter plurals such as "corpora"?
Yes, and the same analogical shift happened in Romanian.
Spanish has nombres < *nominēs
I am italian and I studied latin at high school but I didn' know that neutral gender still existed inside old italian language!
I read the paper and there are some critisism (which the authors indicate themselves):
- they brought too few examples for the big assumption they made
- many examples they brought could lead to easily-explainable copy error (the writer sees a word ending in -a and changes article and adjective in -a)
- many text (mostly legal) in old italian were written in a much more latinish style, rather than in a natural language.
- the persistency and the presence of a gender in a language is something vastly visible that should appear in every text and work
- the examples brought were not exactly referring to old italian (early 1000-1100) but to 1200-1300 italian, when italian was already formed (does the name Dante tell you anything?), and in its golden age.
So how to explain those examples?
Let's rather say that in the italian and fiorentino (Florence) context there wasn't (until late 1500) a clear gramatical standard, there was a huge variability in genders, names and verbs. Italian has many many different ways to say the same thing, due to its diatopic and diachronic (but persisting) diversity. And this effect is even stronger in written language, where the writer wants to appear stilish, elegant, polished, sometimes old-fashioned et cetera.
Still nowadays you can find people in some tuscan village who will say "Le mane" instead of "Le mani", "Andorno" instead of "Andammo", "Le pera" instead of "le pere" and I could continue forever.
I'm very skeptical about the persistency of neuter in 1200 or 1300 italian. There are, of course, some latin remnants which show us how complex was the passage from latin to italian, but I think it's far more honest treating them as exceptional forms rather than traces of a still productive gender. We know that every linguistical change takes time and leaves traces, so why not interpret those (few) examples as traces of a change?
The authors addressed the majority of those issues in the paper. In any case, various Italian dialects in the south and Eastern Romance retain some version of this transitional third gender to this day. The purpose of the paper is to shed light on what we can probably agree on as fact: as Latin evolves into Romance, it goes through this stage of keeping a neuter plural but losing it in the singular, then transitioning to a genus alternans. Even if these are mere remnants in Old Italian, they still reveal this stage, and that's the main argument of the authors.
Grazie! Avendo studiato la lingua latina, pensavo ma non sapevo. Perfetto!
Grazie a te!
Grazie per il tuo lavoro culturale, sei un genio, non c'è bisogno che io traduca in inglese so che tu mi capisci
Ti capisco perfettamente, grazie per il commento.
Nella lingua veneta poi ci sono dei sostantivi neutri che invece di evolversi al maschile sono diventati femminili: la late (milk), la miele (honey), la sale (salt). Questo fenomeno però negli ultimi anni è stato praticamente cancellato dall'influsso dell'italiano/toscano.
as an italian, i always feel that our language simply changes with times and events, where if we like women a lot or create stories about them and spread them, it eventually modifes the language to include terms who are more female gender attuned. not sure how to explain, it feels like we go along with times and events in a natural way ahah. it must be sound related and how "good" it feels to the ear ahah
Grazie per il commento
When I was a child in Tuscany local peasants used to say " riempire le sacca"
Davvero? Che fico!
i find fascinating how well you pronounce the strong R, being my self spaniard i spent two years in the USA in the 80ties, an american family have dipietrantonio surname and when they told me , i pronounce it with strong R of course, and they told i was the only capable of pronounce it properly, i tried to show my american colleagues how to pronounce the strong R, it was impossible.... very few of them got near but no as well as you do...t is not that easy to pronounce ... you pronounce very well latin origin languages...
Very kind. Actually I have a video that teaches English speakers: ua-cam.com/video/5Q3eXyzGZcg/v-deo.htmlsi=xeP0fXwkB75VASxv
Se parlo cosi, si capisce? Special thanks for clarifying that mysterious Romanian link of the /-uri/ ending
Actually in Spanish we have a neutral article that we use it with adjectives. Lo bueno. Lo malo. Lo menor. To talk about all the things with this quality.
People who say English is complicated.... Need to watch this lol
Unless there is more to the story, this seems shorter to explain with Sandhi rules, rather than another grammatical gender, even if it is obviously descended from a grammatical gender.
The distinction is important, as fluent people can consider it a Sandhi rule, rather than a grammatical gender and be perfectly understood. Which inevitably means people will use it that way, especially when they are speaking automatically and defaulting to the simplest analysis.
It would just be the rule "if a word has the "inanimate" genre becomes plural, it and the article take the feminine plural inflection."
Being a Sandhi rule, it would take place before the final version of the speech 🗣/writing 📝.
I think grammar should be understood in terms of *minimum possible grammatical instruction* to *achieve fluency.* It makes for much easier learning (once you get the hang of it) and allows more consistent comparisons with other languages 📜.
Plus, it gets closer at what it actually happening in people's minds, especially if they were never formally taught their language, as their minds will probably learn the simplest possible grammar rules to speak fluently.
Sandhi does not explain the phenomenon in Old Italian.
Sandhi rules are just grammar rules that concern when multiple things are put together.
In this case, it is much simpler to explain it as a rule that there is an invisible theoretical morpheme for pluralness and a genre for "inanimate", if they are combined i.e. if a word with the inanimate genre takes the plural, then the gender is reversed.
In fact, that is almost always how people describe it when explaining the language (well with more words, but in that frame of explanation), even among people who know it is descended from the neuter gender. Because it is less instruction to achieve fluency.
Since the minimum possible instruction is all you need to be fluent, it would inevitably lead to many Old Italian speakers conceptualising their language in that way, as it is the simplest way to use it for daily life.
@@polyMATHY_Luke
I knew about this already but I would’ve never thought to see it explained by an American honestly, also one thing we’ve lost is the formal plural third person pronoun “vi” which was used with strangers, which in today’s italian has been replaced with “la”, used for both show respect to strangers and show respect to people that are more important than you, like a professor or a judge.
afaik Asturian (one of the languages of Spain) has preserved neuter but it doesn't form plurals, I recommend looking into it
Absolutely! For another video
Have you thought about going to/teaching at DLI and becoming a FAO?
I have! But I have another career now.
Something I've wanted you to address is the central Italian dialects, especially Ciociaro.
I have a video I never finished editing wih some Ciociaro.