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What’s with this “Wren” thing?
The oldest extant version of the fable
we
are presenting here appeared in 1913 in the first volume of a two-volume anthology
of Low
Saxon folktales (Plattdeutsche
Volksmärchen “Low German Folktales”)
collected by Wilhelm Wisser (1843–1935). Read
more ...
Ligurian
The
Italian town of Vernazza (Ligurian Vernassa), one of the pearls along the Ligurian Coast that reaches west from there to
Nice (Ligurian Nissa) and Monaco (Ligurian Monego) in what is now southeastern France
Language
information: Ligurian is a Romance language of the Gallo-Italian group. It is the inigenous
language of Liguria (Ligurian Ligûria, in today’s Northwestern Italy) and independent
language
among those
historically derived from Latin with the development of their own features.
It is unknown if
the Modern Ligurian language is in any way related to or influenced by the nowadays
poorly
known Ancient
Ligurian language (used in the first millennium BCE),
a language
that seems
to
have
shared features with both Celtic (specifically Gaulish) and Romance (specifically
Latin
and
the
Osco-Umbrian).
Modern
Ligurian is used mostly in Italy (Liguria, Southern Piedmont and Southwestern
Sardinia), Southeastern France, some localities in Corsica, the Principality
of Monaco (in
the Monegasque variety [Ligurian Munegascu], influenced by French,
which is official there), and certain places in which Ligurian emigrants settled,
such as in Argentina, Uruguay,
Peru,
Chile, Australia, the United States, and Canada.
The
supposed discoverer of the Americas and one
of the most famous Ligurians is Christopher Columbus (Ligurian Cristoffa
Cömbo or Cristoffa Cumbo, Italian Cristoforo Colombo, Spanish Cristóbal Colón). He was born and raised in
Genoa, though none of his
extant writings are in the Ligurian language.
Ligurian is widely known as Zenéize (meaning “Genoese”),
since the variety of the city of Genoa (Ligurian Zena, Italian Genova) has always been the most widespread and the one
with the strongest literary traditions, besides its worldwide fame as a nautical
language
in the time of the Republic of Genoa, when even people living in towns far
from the capital city called themselves Genoese.
Despite the fact that they all belong to the same linguistic branch due to their
common characteristic evolution since their origin in Latin; there are
even
within today’s Liguria
certain dialectal varieties which represent cultural treasures within the
region. It is in that context that we may define Genoese as being a dialect
of the Ligurian language, rather than a degeneration of what we know as Italian (which
is essentially Tuscan). Besides the characteristic varieties of downtown Genoa,
there are the varieties of Savona (Ligurian Sànn-a),
La Spezia (Ligurian Spèza), Ventimiglia (Ligurian Vintimille), as well as transitional varieties that are more closely related to Piedmontese.
There are dictionaries,
grammars and projects dedicated to this language, and nowadays, despite the various
spelling rules used in past centuries, the
Ligurian language now has an official orthography (grafîa ofiçiâ) developed by the Académia
Ligùstica do Brénno, which respects some aspects of traditional orthography
but also eradicates ambiguities since it represents the exact pronunciation
of each word.
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