Andrew Dunbar schrieb:
On 8/17/06, Sabine Cretella sabine_cretella@yahoo.it wrote:
So if it substitutes letters which are not pronounced, what are those unpronounced letters in 'o and 'a? My guess is that they are a special exception which are always written 'o and 'a perhaps historically having had an official letter. If this is the case we could say the rule is:
lo + la + le (plural form) d''e also exists
A double apostrophe occurs when contraction is made with the definite articles, these being always written with an apostrophe.
So my further questions: a) Is there a "full spelling" for 'o and 'a?
it is not used - you only find it in veeeery old texts. nowadays they only use 'o, 'a and in plural form 'e
I just found 'a, 'e, and 'o on en.wiktionary. I am going to add la, le, and lo as alternative spellings and mark them as obsolete. Would you say this is correct?
they are not alternative spellings - they are antique Neapolitan like other stuff is Old English - so they should not be combined with actual Neapolitan.
b) Are there any words besides 'o and 'a which take an apostrophe even when not part of a contraction?
yes - 'nfrumma,
'mbruglià
English Wiktionary also includes 'a = from, 'e = of, 'llustrà = to illustrate, 'ntréllece = vivaciously, 'nzularchìa = jaundice
'a = from? well it is not used here like this
when you I am from Naples = So 'e Napule.
but: consider that nap or Neapolitan officially stands for a very huge region with many varieties of the language. It is not so simple ... there is that Neapolitan that was used before Italian became the official language of this reagion and that one, with some adaptations, is the basis we use - people could well not accept this way of writing and create their own way of doing it (there is no law that determins how Neapolitan must be written) - I have some articles on nap.wikipedia that are not in standard Neapolitan, but that we explicitly allow in order to have people not get annoyed (that's why we wait so much for multilingual mediawiki ... it would then become much easier to have various versions of a language in one wikipedia - for languages like Neapolitan that makes sense).
also there it substitutes a letter - in all cases the substituted letter is a vowel (as much as I have in mind now
and there's the article ll' used in front of a vowel
sorry, but things come in mind while writing and imagining sentences - consider that I know some grammar rules, but I don't know all of them - my Neapolitan comes from everyday use when talking with people in this region. The few rules I know help me to write as correctly as possible and according to Carmine who proofreads my texts they are quite well and getting always better - during the last ones there were only some really minor changes. If we need further, more exact information I need to find out where I can get a grammar book - it is impossible to find it here where I live (that might seem strange, but it is like that).
No problem. Linguists create grammars by interviewing people who speak them and it apparently works best if these informants can't analyse their language grammatically. We're going very well so far! (-:
Well, yes, but should we do this here on the tech-list? Wouldn't it make sense to have it on the Neapolitan list or by private mail maybe including some other people that potentially know more than me about Neapolitan grammar? I mean: I compare the Neapolitan way with Italian, German, English, French - the languages where I really learnt the grammar.
Hmmm ... I was interrupted here ... I know I wanted to write something more, but do not really recall that now - sorry.
Best, Sabine Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale! http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com