Venetian language
Venetian or Venetan, is a Romance language spoken as a native language by Venetians, almost four million people in the northeast of Italy, mostly in the Veneto region of Italy, where most of the five million inhabitants can understand it, centered in and around Venice, which carries the prestige dialect. It is sometimes spoken and often well understood outside Veneto, in Trentino, Friuli, the Julian March, Istria, and some towns of Slovenia and Dalmatia by a surviving autochthonous Venetian population, and Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico by Venetians in the diaspora.
Although referred to as an Italian dialect even by its speakers, Venetian is a separate language with many local varieties. Its precise place within the Romance language family remains controversial. However, both Ethnologue and Glottolog group it into the Gallo-Italic branch.
History
Like all Italian dialects in the Romance language family, Venetian is descended from Vulgar Latin and influenced by the Italian language. Venetian is attested as a written language in the 13th century. There are also influences and parallelisms with Greek and Albanian in words such as pirón, inpiràr, caréga and fanèla.The language enjoyed substantial prestige in the days of the Republic of Venice, when it attained the status of a lingua franca in the Mediterranean Sea. Notable Venetian-language authors include the playwrights Ruzante, Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi. Following the old Italian theatre tradition, they used Venetian in their comedies as the speech of the common folk. They are ranked among the foremost Italian theatrical authors of all time, and plays by Goldoni and Gozzi are still performed today all over the world.
Other notable works in Venetian are the translations of the Iliad by Giacomo Casanova and Francesco Boaretti, the translation of the Divine Comedy by Giuseppe Cappelli and the poems of Biagio Marin. Notable too is a manuscript titled Dialogo de Cecco di Ronchitti da Bruzene in perpuosito de la stella Nuova attributed to Girolamo Spinelli, perhaps with some supervision by Galileo Galilei for scientific details.
Several VenetianItalian dictionaries are available in print and online, including those by Boerio, Contarini, Nazari and Piccio.
As a literary language, Venetian was overshadowed by Dante Alighieri's Tuscan dialect and languages of France like the Occitano-Romance languages and the langues d'oïl.
Even before the demise of the Republic, Venetian gradually ceased to be used for administrative purposes in favor of the Tuscan-derived Italian language that had been proposed and used as a vehicle for a common Italian culture, strongly supported by eminent Venetian humanists and poets, from Pietro Bembo, a crucial figure in the development of the Italian language itself, to Ugo Foscolo.
Virtually all modern Venetian speakers are diglossic with Italian. The present situation raises questions about the language's survival. Despite recent steps to recognize it, Venetian remains far below the threshold of inter-generational transfer with younger generations preferring standard Italian in many situations. The dilemma is further complicated by the ongoing large-scale arrival of immigrants, who only speak or learn standard Italian.
Venetian spread to other continents as a result of mass migration from Veneto between 1870 and 1905, and 1945 and 1960. This itself was a by-product of the 1866 Italian annexation and heavy taxations, because the latter subjected the poorest sectors of the population to the vagaries of a newly integrated, developing national industrial economy centered on north-western Italy. Tens of thousands of starving peasants and craftsmen were thrown off their lands or out of their workshops, forced to seek better fortune overseas.
Venetian migrants created large Venetian-speaking communities in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, where the language is still spoken today. Internal migrations under the Fascist regime also deported many Venetian speakers to other regions of Italy, like southern Lazio.
Currently, some firms have chosen to use Venetian language in advertising as a famous beer did some years ago. In other cases advertisements in Veneto are given a "Venetian flavour" by adding a Venetian word to standard Italian: for instance an airline used the verb xe into an Italian sentence to advertise new flights from Marco Polo Airport.
In 2007, Venetian was given recognition by the Regional Council of Veneto with regional law no. 8 of 13 April 2007 "Protection, enhancement and promotion of the linguistic and cultural heritage of Veneto". Though the law does not explicitly grant Venetian any official status, it provides for Venetian as object of protection and enhancement, as an essential component of the cultural, social, historical and civil identity of Veneto.
Geographic distribution
Venetian is spoken mainly in the Italian regions of Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia and in both Slovenia and Croatia. Smaller communities are found in Lombardy, Trentino, Emilia-Romagna, Sardinia, Lazio, and formerly in Romania.It is also spoken in North and South America by the descendants of Italian immigrants. Notable examples of this are Argentina and Brazil, particularly the city of São Paulo and the Talian dialect spoken in the Brazilian states of Espírito Santo, São Paulo, Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina.
In Mexico, the Chipilo Venetian dialect is spoken in the state of Puebla and the town of Chipilo. The town was settled by immigrants from the Veneto region, and some of their descendants have preserved the language to this day. People from Chipilo have gone on to make satellite colonies in Mexico, especially in the states of Guanajuato, Querétaro, and State of Mexico. Venetian has also survived in the state of Veracruz, where other Italian migrants have settled from the late 1800s. The people of Chipilo preserve their dialect and call it chipileño, and it has been preserved as a variant since the 19th century. The variant of Venetian spoken by the Cipiƚàn is northern Trevisàn-Feltrìn-Belumàt.
In 2009, the Brazilian city of Serafina Corrêa, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, gave Talian a joint official status alongside Portuguese. Until the middle of the 20th century, Venetian was also spoken on the Greek Island of Corfu, which had long been under the rule of the Republic of Venice. Moreover, Venetian had been adopted by a large proportion of the population of Cephalonia, one of the Ionian Islands, because the island was part of the Stato da Màr for almost three centuries.
Classification
Venetian is a Romance language and thus descends from Vulgar Latin. Its classification has always been controversial: according to Tagliavini, for example, it is one of the Italo-Dalmatian languages and most closely related to Istriot on the one hand and Tuscan–Italian on the other. Some authors include it among the Gallo-Italic languages, and according to others, it is not related to either one. However, it is important to note that both Ethnologue and Glottolog group Venetian into the Gallo-Italic languages.Although the language region is surrounded by Gallo-Italic languages, Venetian does not share some traits with these immediate neighbors. Some scholars stress Venetian's characteristic lack of Gallo-Italic traits or traits found further afield in Gallo-Romance languages or the Rhaeto-Romance languages. For example, Venetian did not undergo vowel rounding or nasalization, palatalize and, or develop rising diphthongs and, and it preserved final syllables, whereas, as in Italian, Venetian diphthongization occurs in historically open syllables. It is important to note that, on the other hand, Venetian does share some other traits with the other Gallo-Italic languages, like interrogative clitics, mandatory unstressed pronouns, the "to be behind to" verbal construction to express the continuous aspect and the absence of the absolute past tense as well as of double consonants.
Modern Venetian is not a close relative of the extinct Venetic language spoken in Veneto before Roman expansion, although both are Indo-European, and Venetic may have been an Italic language, like Latin, the ancestor of Venetian and most other languages of Italy. The earlier Venetic people gave their name to the city and region, which is why the modern language has a similar name.
Regional variants
The main regional varieties and subvarieties of Venetian language outside of Venice are:- Central, with about 1,500,000 speakers
- Eastern/Coastal
- Western
- Northern Sinistra Piave of the Province of Treviso, most of the Province of Pordenone)
- North-Central Destra Piave of the Province of Treviso,
Other noteworthy variants are:
- the variety spoken in Chioggia
- the variety spoken in the Pontine Marshes
- the variety spoken in Dalmatia
- the Talian dialect of Antônio Prado, Entre Rios, Santa Catarina and Toledo, Paraná, among other southern Brazilian cities
- the Chipilo Venetian dialect of Chipilo, Mexico
- Peripheral creole languages along the southern border
Grammar
Venetian also retained the Latin concepts of gender and number. Unlike the Gallo-Iberian languages, which form plurals by adding -s, Venetian forms plurals in a manner similar to standard Italian. Nouns and adjectives can be modified by suffixes that indicate several qualities such as size, endearment, deprecation, etc. Adjectives and articles are inflected to agree with the noun in gender and number, but it is important to mention that the suffix might be deleted because the article is the part that suggests the number. However, Italian is influencing Venetian language:
| Venetian | Veneto dialects | Italian | English |
| el gato graso | el gato graso | il gatto grasso | the fat cat |
| la gata grasa | ƚa gata grasa | la gatta grassa | the fat cat |
| i gati grasi | i gati grasi | i gatti grassi | the fat cats |
| le gate grase | ƚe gate grase | le gatte grasse | the fat cats |
In recent studies on Venetian variants in Veneto, there has been a tendency to write the so-called "evanescent L" as. While it may help novice speakers, Venetian was never written with this letter. In this article, this symbol is used only in Veneto dialects of Venetian language. It will suffice to know that in Venetian language the letter L in word-initial and intervocalic positions usually becomes a "palatal allomorph", and is barely pronounced.
No native Venetic words seem to have survived in present Venetian, but there may be some traces left in the morphology, such as the morpheme -esto/asto/isto for the past participle, which can be found in Venetic inscriptions from about 500 BC:
- Venetian: Mi a go fazesto
- Venetian Italian: Mi a go fato
- Standard Italian: Io ho fatto
Redundant subject pronouns
| Venetian | Italian | English |
| Mi a go | Io ho | I have |
| Ti te ga | Tu hai | You have |
| Venetian | Italian | English |
| Mi so | Io sono | I am |
| Ti xe | Tu sei | You are |
The Piedmontese language also has clitic subject pronouns, but the rules are somewhat different. The function of clitics is particularly visible in long sentences, which do not always have clear intonational breaks to easily tell apart vocative and imperative in sharp commands from exclamations with "shouted indicative". For instance, in Venetian the clitic el marks the indicative verb and its masculine singular subject, otherwise there is an imperative preceded by a vocative. Although some grammars regard these clitics as "redundant", they actually provide specific additional information as they mark number and gender, thus providing number-/gender- agreement between the subject and the verb, which does not necessarily show this information on its endings.
Interrogative inflection
Venetian also has a special interrogative verbal flexion used for direct questions, which also incorporates a redundant pronoun:| Venetian | Veneto dialects | Italian | English |
| Ti geristu sporco? | jèristu onto? or xèrito spazo? | eri sporco? | Were you dirty? |
| El can, gerilo sporco? | El can jèreƚo onto? or Jèreƚo onto el can ? | Il cane era sporco? | Was the dog dirty? |
| Ti te gastu domandà? | te sito domandà? | ti sei domandato? | Did you ask yourself? |
Auxiliary verbs
Reflexive tenses use the auxiliary verb avér, as in English, Scandinavian, Spanish, Romanian and Neapolitan; instead of èssar, which would be normal in Italian. The past participle is invariable, unlike Italian:| Venetian | Veneto dialects | Italian | English |
| Ti ti te ga lavà | te te à/gà/ghè lavà | ti sei lavato | You washed yourself |
| i se ga desmissià | i se gà/à svejà | si sono svegliati | They woke up |
Continuing action
Another peculiarity of the language is the use of the phrase eser drìo to indicate continuing action:| Venetian | Veneto dialects | Italian | English |
| Me pare, el xe drìo parlàr | Mé pare 'l xe drìo parlàr | Mio padre sta parlando | My father is speaking |
Another progressive form in some Venetian dialects uses the construction essar là che :
- Venetian dialect: Me pare 'l è là che 'l parla.
- English: "He wouldn't have been speaking to you".
- Venetian: No 'l saria miga sta drio parlarte a ti.
Subordinate clauses
Subordinate clauses have double introduction, as in Old English:| Venetian | Veneto dialects | Italian | English |
| Mi so de chi che ti parli | So de chi che te parli | So di chi parli | I know who you are talking about |
As in other Romance languages, the subjunctive mood is widely used in subordinate clauses.
| Venetian | Veneto dialects | Italian | English |
| Mi credeva che 'l fusse ... | Credéa/évo che 'l fusse ... | Credevo che fosse ... | I thought he was ... |
Phonology
Consonants
Some dialects of Venetian have certain sounds not present in Italian, such as the interdental voiceless fricative, often spelled with,,, or, and similar to English th in thing and thought. This sound occurs, for example, in çéna, which is pronounced the same as Castilian Spanish cena. The voiceless interdental fricative occurs in Bellunese, north-Trevisan, and in some Central Venetian rural areas around Padua, Vicenza and the mouth of the river Po.Because the pronunciation variant is more typical of older speakers and speakers living outside of major cities, it has come to be socially stigmatized, and most speakers now use or instead of. In those dialects with the pronunciation, the sound has fallen together with ordinary, and so it is not uncommon to simply write instead of or .
Similarly some dialects of Venetian also have a voiced interdental fricative, often written ; but in most dialects this sound is now pronounced either as , or more typically as ; in a few dialects the sound appears as and may therefore be written instead with the letter, as in el piande.
Some varieties of Venetian also distinguish an ordinary vs. a weakened or lenited , which in some orthographic norms is indicated with the letter ; in more conservative dialects, however, both and are merged as ordinary. In those dialects that have both types, the precise phonetic realization of depends both on its phonological environment and on the dialect of the speaker. Typical realizations in the region of Venice include a voiced velar approximant or glide , when is adjacent to back vowels, vs. a null realization when is adjacent to a front vowel.
In dialects further inland may be realized as a partially vocalised. Thus, for example, góndoƚa 'gondola' may sound like góndoea, góndola, or góndoa. In dialects having a null realization of intervocalic, although pairs of words such as scóƚa, "school" and scóa, "broom" are homophonous, they are still distinguished orthographically.
Venetian, like Spanish, does not have the geminate consonants characteristic of standard Italian, Tuscan, Neapolitan and other languages of southern Italy; thus Italian fette, palla and penna correspond to féte, baƚa, and péna in Venetian. The masculine singular noun ending, corresponding to -o/-e in Italian, is often unpronounced in Venetian after continuants, particularly in rural varieties: Italian pieno corresponds to Venetian pien, Italian altare to Venetian altar. The extent to which final vowels are deleted varies by dialect: the central–southern varieties delete vowels only after, whereas the northern variety delete vowels also after dental stops and velars; the eastern and western varieties are in between these two extremes.
The velar nasal occurs frequently in Venetian. A word-final is always velarized, which is especially obvious in the pronunciation of many local Venetian surnames that end in, such as Marin and Manin, as well as in common Venetian words such as man, piron. Moreover, Venetian always uses in consonant clusters that start with a nasal, whereas Italian only uses before velar stops: e.g. "to sing", "winter", "to anoint", "to cope with".
Speakers of Italian generally lack this sound and usually substitute a dental for final Venetian, changing for example to and to.
Vowels
An accented á can also be pronounced as . An intervocalic // can be pronounced as a sound.Prosody
While written Venetian looks similar to Italian, it sounds very different, with a distinct lilting cadence, almost musical. Compared to Italian, in Venetian syllabic rhythms are more evenly timed, accents are less marked, but on the other hand tonal modulation is much wider and melodic curves are more intricate. Stressed and unstressed syllables sound almost the same; there are no long vowels, and there is no consonant lengthening. Compare the Italian sentence "va laggiù con lui" with Venetian "va là zo co lu".Sample etymological lexicon
As a direct descent of regional spoken Latin, Venetian lexicon derives its vocabulary substantially from Latin and from Tuscan, so that most of its words are cognate with the corresponding words of Italian. Venetian includes however many words derived from other sources, and has preserved some Latin words not used to the same extent in Italian, resulting in many words that are not cognate with their equivalent words in Italian, such as:| Venetian | English | Italian | Venetian word origin | |
| uncò, 'ncò, incò, ancò, ancùo, incoi | today | oggi | from Latin + | |
| apotèca | pharmacy | farmacia | from Ancient Greek | |
| trincàr | to drink | bere | from German "to drink" | |
| armelìn | apricot | albicocca | from Latin | |
| astiàr | to bore | dare noia, seccare | from Gothic meaning "contest" | |
| bagìgi | peanuts | arachidi | from Arabic habb-ajiz | |
| becàr | to be spicy hot | essere piccante | from Italian, literally "to peck" | |
| bìgolo | spaghetti | vermicello, spaghetti | from Latin byculus | |
| bisàto, bisàta | eel | anguilla | from Latin "beast", compare also Italian, a kind of snake | |
| bìssa, bìsso | snake | serpente | from Latin bestia "beast", compare also Ital. biscia, a kind of snake | |
| bìsi | peas | piselli | related to the Italian word | |
| isarda, risardola | lizard | lucertola | from Latin, same origin as English | |
| trar via | to throw | tirare | local cognate of Italian | |
| calìgo | fog | nebbia foschia | from Latin | |
| cantón | corner/side | angolo/parte | from Latin | |
| catàr | find | trovare | from Latin *adcaptare | |
| caréga, trón | chair | sedia | from Latin and | |
| ciao | hello, goodbye | ciao | from Venetian s-ciao "slave", from Medieval Latin | |
| ciapàr | to catch, to take | prendere | from Latin | |
| co | when | quando | from Latin | |
| copàr | to kill | uccidere | from Old Italian, originally "to behead" | |
| carpéta | miniskirt | minigonna | compare English carpet | |
| còtoƚa | skirt | sottana | from Latin, "coat, dress" | |
| fanèla | T-shirt | maglietta | borrowing from Greek | |
| gòto | drinking glass | bicchiere | from Latin, "cruet" | |
| grossi | Big | grande | From German "grosse" | |
| insìa | exit | uscita | from Latin in + exita | |
| mi | I | io | from Latin me ; Italian io is derived from the Latin nominative form ego | |
| massa | too much | troppo | from Greek | |
| morsegàr, smorsegàr | to bite | mordere | derverbal derivative, from Latin morsus "bitten", compare Italian | |
| mustaci | moustaches | baffi | from Greek | |
| munìn, gato, gateo | cat | gatto | perhaps onomatopoeic, from the sound of a cat's meow | |
| meda | big sheaf | grosso covone | from messe, mietere, compare English meadow | |
| musso | donkey | asino | from Latin "horses eye binders " | |
| nòtoƚa, notol, barbastrìo, signàpoƚa | bat | pipistrello | derived from not "night" | |
| pantegàna | rat | ratto | from Slovene podgana | |
| pinciàr | beat, cheat, sexual intercourse | imbrogliare, superare in gara, amplesso | from French | |
| pirón | fork | forchetta | from Greek | |
| pisalet | dandelion | tarassaco | from French | |
| plao far | truant | marinare scuola | from German blau machen | |
| pomo/pón | apple | mela | from Latin | |
| sbregàr | to break, to shred | strappare | from Gothic , related to English to break and German | |
| schèi | money | denaro soldi | from German | |
| saltapaiusc | grasshopper | cavalletta | from "hop" + "grass" | |
| sghiràt, schirata, skirata | squirrel | scoiattolo | Related to Italian word, probably from Greek | |
| sgnapa | spirit from grapes, brandy | grappa acquavite | from German | |
| sgorlàr, scorlàr | to shake | scuotere | from Latin ex + | |
| sina | rail | rotaia | from German | |
| straco | tired | stanco | from Lombard strak | |
| strica | line, streak, stroke, strip | linea, striscia | from the proto-Germanic root *strik, related to English streak, and stroke. Example: Tirar na strica "to draw a line". | |
| strucàr | to press | premere, schiacciare | from proto-Germanic through the Gothic or Langobardic language, related to Middle English thrucchen, German , Swedish. Example: Struca un tasto / boton "Strike any key / Press any button". | |
| supiàr, subiàr, sficiàr, sifolàr | to whistle | fischiare | from Latin sub + flare, compare French | |
| tòr su | to pick up | raccogliere | from Latin | |
| técia, téia, tegia | pan | pentola | from Latin | |
| tosàt, fio | lad, boy | ragazzo | from Italian tosare, "to cut someone's hair" | |
| puto, putèƚo, puteƚeto, butèl | lad, boy | ragazzo | from Latin | |
| matelot | lad, boy | ragazzo | perhaps from French, "sailor" | |
| vaca | cow | mucca, vacca | from Latin | |
| s-ciop, s-ciòpo, s-ciopàr, s-ciopón | gun | fucile-scoppiare | from Latin | |
| troi | track path | sentiero | from Latin, "to draw, pull", compare English track | |
| zavariàr | to worry | preoccuparsi, vaneggiare | from Latin |
Spelling systems
Traditional system
Venetian does not have an official writing system, but it is traditionally written using the Latin script — sometimes with certain additional letters or diacritics. The basis for some of these conventions can be traced to Old Venetian, while others are purely modern innovations.Medieval texts, written in Old Venetian, include the letters, and to represent sounds that do not exist or have a different distribution in Italian. Specifically:
- The letter was often employed in words that nowadays have a voiced -sound ; for instance appears in words such as raxon, Croxe, caxa. The precise phonetic value of in Old Venetian texts remains unknown, however.
- The letter often appeared in words that nowadays have a varying voiced pronunciation ranging from to or or even to ; even in contemporary spelling zo "down" may represent any of or even, depending on the dialect; similarly zovena "young woman" could be any of, or, and zero "zero" could be, or.
- Likewise, was written for a voiceless sound which now varies, depending on the dialect spoken, from to to, as in for example dolçe "sweet", now, dolçeça "sweetness", now, or sperança "hope", now.
Nevertheless, in practice, most spelling conventions are the same as in Italian. In some early modern texts letter becomes limited to word-initial position, as in xe, where its use was unavoidable because Italian spelling cannot represent there. In between vowels, the distinction between and was ordinarily indicated by doubled for the former and single for the latter. For example, basa was used to represent , whereas bassa represented .
Traditionally the letter was ambiguous, having the same values as in Italian. Nevertheless, in some books the two pronunciations are sometimes distinguished by using doubled to indicate but a single for .
In more recent practice the use of to represent, both in word-initial as well as in intervocalic contexts, has become increasingly common, but no entirely uniform convention has emerged for the representation of the voiced vs. voiceless affricates, although a return to using and remains an option under consideration.
Regarding the spelling of the vowel sounds, because in Venetian, as in Italian, there is no contrast between tense and lax vowels in unstressed syllables, the orthographic grave and acute accents can be used to mark both stress and vowel quality at the same time: à, á, è, é, ò, ó, ù. Different orthographic norms prescribe slightly different rules for when stressed vowels must be written with accents or may be left unmarked, and no single system has been accepted by all speakers.
Venetian allows the consonant cluster , which is sometimes written or before i or e, and or before other vowels. Examples include s-ciarir, s-cèt, s-ciòp and s-ciao. The hyphen or apostrophe is used because the combination is conventionally used for the sound, as in Italian spelling; e.g. scèmo ; whereas before a, o and u represents : scàtoƚa, scóndar, scusàr.
Proposed systems
Recently there have been attempts to standardize and simplify the script by reusing older letters, e.g. by using for and a single for ; then one would write baxa for and basa for . Some authors have continued or resumed the use of, but only when the resulting word is not too different from the Italian orthography: in modern Venetian writings, it is then easier to find words as çima and çento, rather than força and sperança, even though all these four words display the same phonological variation in the position marked by the letter. Another recent convention is to use for the "soft" l, to allow a more unified orthography for all variants of the language. However, in spite of their theoretical advantages, these proposals have not been very successful outside of academic circles, because of regional variations in pronunciation and incompatibility with existing literature.More recently, on December 14, 2017, the Modern International Manual of Venetian Spelling has been approved by the new Commission for Spelling of 2010. It has been translated in three languages and it exemplifies and explains every single letter and every sound of the Venetian language. The graphic accentuation and punctuation systems are added as corollaries. Overall, the system has been greatly simplified from previous ones to allow both Italian and foreign speakers to learn and understand the Venetian spelling and alphabet in a more straightforward way.
The Venetian speakers of Chipilo use a system based on Spanish orthography, even though it does not contain letters for and. The American linguist Carolyn McKay proposed a writing system for that variant based entirely on the Italian alphabet. However, the system was not very popular.
Sample texts
Ruzante returning from war
The following sample, in the old dialect of Padua, comes from a play by Ruzante, titled Parlamento de Ruzante che iera vegnù de campo. The character, a peasant returning home from the war, is expressing to his friend Menato his relief at being still alive:Orbéntena, el no serae mal
star in campo per sto robare,
se 'l no foesse che el se ha pur
de gran paure. Càncaro ala roba!
A' son chialò mi, ala segura,
e squase che no a' no cherzo
esserghe gnan.
Se mi mo' no foesse mi?
E che a foesse stò amazò in campo?
E che a foesse el me spirito?
Lo sarae ben bela.
No, càncaro, spiriti no magna.
"Really, it would not be that bad
to be in the battlefield looting,
were it not that one gets also
big scares. Damn the loot!
I am right here, in safety,
and almost can't believe
I am.
And if I were not me?
And if I had been killed in battle?
And if I were my ghost?
That would be just great.
No, damn, ghosts don't eat."
Par trezentosetantasete ani
le nostre sostanse, el nostro sangue,
le nostre vite le xè sempre stàe
par Ti, S. Marco; e fedelisimi
senpre se gavemo reputà,
Ti co nu, nu co Ti,
e sempre co Ti sul mar
semo stài lustri e virtuosi.
Nisun co Ti ne gà visto scanpar,
nisun co Ti ne gà visto vinti e spaurosi!
"For three hundred and seventy seven years
our bodies, our blood
our lives have always been
for You, St. Mark; and very faithful
we have always thought ourselves,
You with us, we with You,
And always with You on the sea
we have been illustrious and virtuous.
No one has seen us with You flee,
No one has seen us with You defeated and fearful!"
Francesco Artico
The following is a contemporary text by Francesco Artico. The elderly narrator is recalling the church choir singers of his youth, who, needless to say, sang much better than those of today:Sti cantori vèci da na volta,
co i cioéa su le profezie,
in mezo al coro, davanti al restèl,
co'a ose i 'ndéa a cior volta
no so 'ndove e ghe voéa un bèl tóc
prima che i tornésse in qua
e che i rivésse in cao,
màssima se i jèra pareciàdi onti
co mezo litro de quel bon
tant par farse coràjo.
"These old singers of the past,
when they picked up the Prophecies,
in the middle of the choir, in front of the gate,
with their voice they went off
who knows where, and it was a long time
before they came back
and landed on the ground,
especially if they had been previously 'oiled'
with half a litre of the good one
just to make courage."
Venetian lexical exports to English
Many words were exported to English, either directly or via Italian or French. The list below shows some examples of imported words, with the date of first appearance in English according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.| Venetian | English | Year | Origin, notes |
| arsenal | arsenal | 1506 | Arabic دار الصناعة dār al-ṣināʻah "house of manufacture, factory" |
| articioco | artichoke | 1531 | Arabic الخرشوف al-kharshūf; simultaneously entered French as artichaut |
| balota | ballot | 1549 | ball used in Venetian elections; cf. English to "black-ball" |
| casin | casino | 1789 | "little house"; adopted in Italianized form |
| contrabando | contraband | 1529 | illegal traffic of goods |
| gazeta | gazette | 1605 | a small Venetian coin; from the price of early newssheets gazeta de la novità "a penny worth of news" |
| gheto | ghetto | 1611 | from Gheto, the area of Canaregio in Venice that became the first district confined to Jews; named after the foundry or gheto once sited there |
| gnochi | gnocchi | 1891 | lumps, bumps, gnocchi; from Germanic knokk- 'knuckle, joint' |
| gondola | gondola | 1549 | from Medieval Greek |
| laguna | lagoon | 1612 | Latin lacunam "lake" |
| lazareto | lazaret | 1611 | through French; a quarantine station for maritime travellers, ultimately from the Biblical Lazarus of Bethany, who was raised from the dead; the first one was on the island of Lazareto Vechio in Venice |
| lido | lido | 1930 | Latin litus "shore"; the name of one of the three islands enclosing the Venetian lagoon, now a beach resort |
| loto | lotto | 1778 | Germanic lot- "destiny, fate" |
| malvasìa | malmsey | 1475 | ultimately from the name μονοβασία Monemvasia, a small Greek island off the Peloponnese once owned by the Venetian Republic and a source of strong, sweet white wine from Greece and the eastern Mediterranean |
| marzapan | marzipan | 1891 | from the name for the porcelain container in which marzipan was transported, from Arabic موثبان mawthabān, or from Mataban in the Bay of Bengal where these were made |
| Montenegro | Montenegro | "black mountain"; country on the Eastern side of the Adriatic Sea | |
| Negroponte | Negroponte | "black bridge"; Greek island called Euboea or Evvia in the Aegean Sea | |
| Pantalon | pantaloon | 1590 | a character in the Commedia dell'arte |
| pestachio | pistachio | 1533 | ultimately from Middle Persian pistak |
| quarantena | quarantine | 1609 | forty day isolation period for a ship with infectious diseases like plague |
| regata | regatta | 1652 | originally "fight, contest" |
| scampi | scampi | 1930 | Greek "caterpillar", lit. "curved " |
| schiao | ciao | 1929 | cognate with Italian schiavo "slave"; used originally in Venetian to mean "your servant", "at your service"; original word pronounced "s-ciao" |
| Zani | zany | 1588 | "Johnny"; a character in the Commedia dell'arte |
| zechin | sequin | 1671 | Venetian gold ducat; from Arabic سكّة sikkah "coin, minting die" |
| ziro | giro | 1896 | "circle, turn, spin"; adopted in Italianized form; from the name of the bank Banco del Ziro or Bancoziro at Rialto |