Reconstruction talk:Lombardic

RFD discussion: October 2016
Is this not just OHG? It certainly looks like it. —CodeCat 20:49, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Did you mean to post this at rfm? Or maybe rfdo? Chuck Entz (talk) 15:58, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
 * OHG is Old High German, for those who don't know. And the Reconstruction: namespace actually automatically comes here not to WT:RFDO as they are considered 'entries'. Renard Migrant (talk) 16:07, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
 * I suppose what's nominated for deletion is the contents of CAT:Lombardic lemmas. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 17:54, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
 * There's many badly formatted entries that are missing from that category. —CodeCat 18:02, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
 * All pages starting Reconstruction:Lombardic/ are now in CAT:Lombardic lemmas. Is Lombardic attested at all, or is it solely reconstructed? —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 20:27, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
 * I don't know. What I do know is that the reconstructions look suspiciously indistinguishable from Old High German. Moreover, they're missing some of the characteristic Upper German sound changes like b > p. —CodeCat 20:29, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
 * And there's still more being added, which are missing the category. As our primary language classifier, what is your stance on this? Should Lombardic be merged into OHG? —CodeCat 22:39, 23 October 2016 (UTC)


 * @Angr: a number of isolated main-namespace-worthy words and names are attested in inscriptions and in Latin texts. The language is also thought to be the ancestor of many Italian words, including pairs like banca and panca borrowed before and after the b/p sound change, which means an etymology code would be useful if we retire the languge code.
 * @CodeCat: scholars are divided on the matter. Some do consider it a dialect of Old High German, but others emphasize that records are too fragmentary to be certain whether the language was part of that continuum. There are differences between OHG and the Lombardic reconstructions which I see, e.g. OHG scina vs Lombardic *skinko, OHG wanga vs Lombardic *wankja (both reconstructions found in Ti Alkire, Carol Rosen, Romance Languages: A Historical Introduction). It is not even certain that Lombardic experienced the entirety of the High German consonant shift. A conservative approach would probably keep it separate. - -sche (discuss) 01:13, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
 * All of that can be explained away by other means. *skinko is simply a different word belonging to a particular outlier dialect, nothing really special going on there. *wankja is just *wangja with the g > k change, and the j is preserved because it's an earlier form. Likewise, not all of the consonant shift was experienced because of the early date. The Lombardic runic attestations still have þ, for example, but so do early OHG texts in general. —CodeCat 01:29, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Full Italian dictionaries always distinguish the origins of Germanic borrowings because they came in distinct phases. For example, bindolo, eribanno and grinfia are from OHG while spalto, guancia and atticciato are from Longobardic/Lombardic.  (Sorry that we don't have entries for all of these words; I have not worked on Italian much here.)  Excluding modern languages, Lombardic is probably the most significant Germanic influence on Italian; probably 2% of the word families are from Lombardic, whereas it will be very significantly less than 1% for Gothic or (direct) OHG, and perhaps just over 1% for Franconian/Frankish.  We distinguish English borrowings from Old Danish from those from Old Norse for similar reasons.  Perhaps I misunderstand what you are proposing, but it would be inappropriate to relabel Lombardic borrowings as OHG borrowings on the basis of a phonetic argument. Isomorphyc (talk) 18:34, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
 * But phonetics is one main method by which linguists distinguish languages, though they call them isoglosses. From what I can tell, there is no isogloss separating OHG from Lombardic. The only difference I see is that Lombardic is simply older, and thus lacks some of the features that later appear in OHG, but that just makes it an early dialect of OHG and not an entirely separate language. —CodeCat 18:40, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Can we pretend they are different Ausbau languages, if phonological data do not exist to distinguish them as Abstand languages? This is a very common situation, and they do have different ISO codes.  The political and chronological information in the Italian etymologies is too conventional and to important to obscure for this reason.  Can we at a minimum recategorise Lombardic as West Germanic, or possibly even add a level to the hierarchy within West Germanic? Isomorphyc (talk) 19:02, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia also considers it an OHG dialect. I see no reason to treat them separately. Convention is not a good enough reason. —CodeCat 19:05, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
 * According to Wikipaedia, Swedish and Norwegian would be considered dialects if one were to use purely linguistic criteria. This is why the concept of Ausbau and Abstand langauges is relevant.  It is regarded in Italy as a language associated with the Kingdom of the Lombards, and even if you cannot find phonetic differences, you will easily find proper names, including place names, were are not words in other Germanic languages.  This is more-or-less the criterion which separates the modern Scandinavian languages.  The distinction is political but to ignore it would make certain Italian etymologies unacceptably confusing. Isomorphyc (talk) 19:25, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Not necessarily; we could still treat Lombardic as an etymology-only variety of OHG, like Vulgar, Late, and Medieval Latin are etymology-only varieties of Latin. That way if any Lombardic words mentioned in Italian etymologies happen to be attested in OHG, we wouldn't need reconstruction pages for them. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 20:19, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks, . Is this okay with you, ?  I wouldn't object.  Any attested Lombardic words can just have .  Isomorphyc (talk) 21:02, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
 * That's fine. —CodeCat 21:05, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
 * I made a small list of apparently attested Lombardic words, and have made some changes at Module:etymology languages/data, at zacchera, and at zahar, since zahar seems to be attested (I haven't marked Reconstruction:Lombardic/zahar for deletion yet since this is a prototype). If this seems generally liked, I can do this for all of the Lombardic entries.  In that case, it would be possible for somebody to remove the m["lng"] = (...) statement from Module:languages/data3/l.  Thank you all for your attention to this; I do this the present arrangement is an unmitigated improvement. Isomorphyc (talk) 02:32, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
 * "lng" is no longer a regular language at Module:languages/data3/l, but only an etymology-only language at Module:etymology languages/data. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 13:00, 25 October 2016 (UTC)


 * Just so I don't make the same mistake again, what does the right-arrow which you added to the Italian descendent line mean in milzi? Thanks, Isomorphyc (talk) 16:05, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
 * We tend to put arrows in descendant lists to indicate borrowings, though I wouldn't call it a mistake to omit the arrow. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:30, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I'm willing to go with the convention if this has already been discussed, but I wouldn't normally consider these as borrowings.  Old Italian is often dated as anything prior to St Francis, Dante, or the Accademia della Crusca (i.e., prior to 1200-1600).  Hence, OHG and Lombardic influences are inherited from Old Italian.  Absent that somewhat unnecessary level of granularity, I think it is better to use .  Ultimately, the pre-Renaissance Germanic borrowings are integral parts of the Italian language.  Many Italians will not be aware they are not Latin.  Isomorphyc (talk) 16:46, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Edit: Either way, I acknowledge the arrow makes sense in the ancestor entry; my question is about which template to use in the Italian etymology. Isomorphyc (talk) 16:54, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
 * The thing is, we don't treat Old Italian as a separate language from Italian; it's an etymology-only variant of Italian. So if the Old Italian is spelled differently, we could say the modern Italian word is inherited from the Old Italian word (which will have its own ==Italian== entry), which in turn is a borrowing from the Lombardic word; but if the Old Italian is spelled the same as the modern Italian, it won't have a separate entry, so we basically are left with no other option than to call the modern Italian word a borrowing from Lombardic. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 18:18, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the explanation; I agree this is a reasonably acceptable convention. Isomorphyc (talk) 20:34, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Actually, you can't. The templates throw an error if you try to inherit a term from a variety of the same language. By design. —CodeCat 20:41, 25 October 2016 (UTC)