this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
73 points (100.0% liked)

Ask Lemmy

26753 readers
1492 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

FYI: apparently most Opera is in Italian, then French comes in distant second, German third.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 42 points 5 months ago (4 children)

They're actually not in Italian, most famous operas predate the italian language you'd be taught in schools.

People who can speak the dialects those operas were written in are apparently now more common in the Americas than they are in Italy, as Italians who encounter self proclaimed native italian speakers from the Americas consistently complain that either they're speaking some incomprehensible other language or that they sound like someone's nona with how weirdly old fashioned they're talking.

This is actually a pretty funny phenomenon across multiple languages that have undergone standardization in the nationalist era, even including speakers of Chinese languages and Japanese, the rooted well established communities often predate standardization, and so the language "native speakers" learn in modern times can actually be incomprehensible to modern people in the place the language came from.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The same thing happened with French in Canada

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

Not just Canada, Louisiana and Missouri too, they're heavily endangered dialects but they are still documented

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

I was roughly told the same when I asked native Italians to translate an older choir song from Italy which I liked very much. To them it was mostly like some vaguely familiar sounding language with the occasional understandable word mixed in.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Yep, also the famous Funiculì, funiculà is in Neapolitan for instance.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Same for English, quite a few "American" accents are extinct British accents.

https://owlcation.com/humanities/brits-had-american-accents