La Spezia-Rimini Line

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Historically, the La Spezia-Rimini Line marked a series of isoglosses that distinguished Northern Italian speech from that of Tuscany, home of the standard Italian language.

The La Spezia-Rimini Line, in the linguistics of the Romance languages, is a line that demarcates a number of important isoglosses that distinguish Romance languages east and south of the line from Romance languages north and west of it. Romance languages on the eastern half of it include standard Italian and the Eastern Romance languages (Romanian, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, Istro-Romanian), while Spanish, French, and Portuguese are representatives of the western group.

The line runs through northern Italy, from the cities of La Spezia to Rimini (some say ^{[[Citing sources citation needed]]} that the line actually runs through Massa and Senigallia, and would more accurately be called the Massa-Senigallia Line).

North and west of the line (excluding some Northern Italian varieties, such as Ligurian, which probably once had the characteristic but lost it under influence from standard Italian), the plural of nouns was drawn from the Latin accusative case, and usually ends in -s regardless of grammatical gender or declension. South and east of the line, the plurals of nouns were usually taken from the Latin nominative case, and change the vowels to form the plurals. Compare the plurals of cognate nouns in Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin:

Romanian Italian Spanish/Portuguese Latin nom. pl. Latin acc. pl. meaning

vitǎ, vite vita, vite vida, vidas vitae vitās life, lives (in Romanian, "living thing")
lup, lupi lupo, lupi lobo, lobos lupī lupōs wolf, wolves

Another isogloss that falls on the La Spezia-Rimini line deals with the voicing of certain consonants that occur between vowels. Thus, Latin focus/focum (meaning "fire") becomes fuoco in Italian, but fogo in Northern Italian dialects and fuego in Spanish. Voicing, softening, or loss of these consonants is characteristic of the western branch of Romance; their retention is characteristic of eastern Romance. Generally speaking the western Romance languages show common innovations that the eastern Romance languages tend to lack.

La Spezia-Rimini Line

References

See also

Romanian	Italian	Spanish/Portuguese	Latin nom. pl.	Latin acc. pl.	meaning

vitǎ, vite	vita, vite	vida, vidas	vitae	vitās	life, lives (in Romanian, "living thing")
lup, lupi	lupo, lupi	lobo, lobos	lupī	lupōs	wolf, wolves