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Recently I've found out a number of interesting things about certain Romance varieties, which may be surprising since they seemingly contradict the "common knowledge" surrounding the family.

Southern Romance in Mainland Italy

Glottolog classifies the "Southern Lucanian" dialect as part of Southern Romance. I don't know Italian, but one main thing I can glean from the Wikipedia articles "Dialetti dell'area arcaica calabro-lucana" and "Dialetti lucani" is that this area, known as the “Area Lausberg”, is characterized by vowel outcomes typical of Sardinian (i.e. long/short merging directly into each other, producing a five vowel system) rather than of Western or Eastern Romance. This map depicts the area in question.

Neuter in Asturian and Neapolitan

Romanian is famous for retaining the neuter gender, and as it turns out, Asturian and Neapolitan do, too [another link]. But theirs "isn't the same neuter" as Romanian's - i.e. it's not gender-switching plurals, rather, in many ways it seems to be an innovation stemming from use of the neuter demonstrative illud - basically, if the Spanish article lo had given rise to an entire gender.

Western Romance - minus the Western Romance consonant shift

Aragonese, on a word-by-word basis, though to a greater extent in the High Aragonese dialects, never underwent the voicing of Latin intervocalic voiceless stops. So they have fornica v. Spanish hormiga and lopa vs. Spanish loba, etc. This characteristic was also found in Mozarabic and also in some dialects of Gascon.

Italo-Dalmatian palatal outcomes in Norman

There is another isogloss, just north of the better-known Joret Line, north of which Norman and Picard have /tʃ/ or /ʃ/ for historical /k/ before /e/ and /i/, unlike the rest of the Gallo-Iberian languages, which have /ts/ or /s/ (or /θ/).

Does anyone have any other examples of strange or archaic features in Romance, or other well-known families, that seemingly subvert one's expectations?

Click consonants in Afro-Asiatic (Dahalo).
Tone contrasts in Indo-European (some varieties of Punjabi apparently?).
Front rounded vowels in a North American language (Hopi).
Sibilants in Australian languages (Kala Lagaw Ya, Mpakwithi Anguthimri).

The phoneme /ɬ/ in Toisanese was always strange to me. My friend's grandmother spoke this language, and although I understand neither Toisanese nor Cantonese, whenever I heard her say words with this sound, they very much stood out to me. It seems it occurs in other Yue dialects/languages as well, though.

Icelandic has a few verbs left that preserve reflexes of the ancient proto-Indo-European reduplicating past tense:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ri-verbs

I think that Icelandic is the only Germanic language that still has any reflex of reduplicating verbs, and it might even be the only language in all of IE that does.

I was surprised to find that vowel affection (a.k.a. "umlaut") is widespread in Romance varieties, particularly those of Italy. In some varieties (e.g. Campidanese), it's even been phonemicised.

In terms of retentions, distinct conjugational classes for verbs in Highest Alemmanic (e.g. Pomattertitsch ich wärfä vs ich machu).

I was also pretty excited to discover that some modern Chinese words are the result of contraction, e.g. 咱 < 自家們.

Belgian French retains the distinction between /œ̃/ as in brun and /bʁɛ̃/ as in brin. In Parisian French and often elsewhere in France these two vowels have merged completely. If you learn standard French you will likely never learn to distinguish them because the market is almost entirely dominated by Parisian language learning material. I don't distinguish them as a second language speaker and I spent a year in Belgium.

Belgian French also retains a more archaic use of dîner and souper where the former is lunch and the latter is dinner. In standard French and French French (and even Quebec) they are déjeuner and dîner, respectively. This distinction is also maintained in certain American dialects where diner can mean lunch and supper means dinner. In English these uses came from old French which maintained the difference Belgian French maintains. The Belgian (old French) distinction is Germanic in origin.

linguoboy wrote: In terms of retentions, distinct conjugational classes for verbs in Highest Alemmanic (e.g. Pomattertitsch ich wärfä vs ich machu).

I've heard this before, but haven't found much information on it outside of some brief references. Do you have any English or German sources that cover this in detail?

Also, West Frisian and Sater Frisian still maintain different weak verb conjugations (-e vs -je verbs), as well as two infinitive forms. Up until very recently (I think early 20th century) I believe North Frisian still used 1st and 2nd person dual pronoun forms (wat/onk and jat/jonk) as well as plural forms (wi/us, jam/jam) [source].

Viktor77 wrote:In standard French and French French (and even Quebec) they are déjeuner and dîner, respectively. This distinction is also maintained in certain American dialects where diner can mean lunch and supper means dinner.

I'm not quite sure what that second sentence is supposed to mean. In any case, there are American dialects of French (e.g. Missouri, Louisiana) which use dîner for the midday meal and souper for the evening meal and American dialects of English (mostly in the Southeast) which do the same with dinner and supper.

In some of those same areas, "evening" refers to the entire time after "dinner". That is, it covers what the majority of speakers would call "afternoon" as well. This is an innovation, however, since the original meaning of "evening" in English is "the time from sunset until bedtime".

Herra Ratatoskr wrote:

linguoboy wrote:In terms of retentions, distinct conjugational classes for verbs in Highest Alemmanic (e.g. Pomattertitsch ich wärfä vs ich machu).

I've heard this before, but haven't found much information on it outside of some brief references. Do you have any English or German sources that cover this in detail?

I don't. I did at one time know a native speaker of a Walser dialect and my ex (who was dating him) even tried to learn to speak it.

Herra Ratatoskr wrote:Up until very recently (I think early 20th century) I believe North Frisian still used 1st and 2nd person dual pronoun forms (wat/onk and jat/jonk) as well as plural forms (wi/us, jam/jam) [source].

You probably already know that historically dual forms of the 2P pronouns survive in most varieties of Austro-Bavarian (e.g. Dat/Acc enk) but have been generalised to the plural as well.

In the English here, dinner and supper are synonymous, but supper is seemingly older or more dialectal whereas dinner is seemingly newer and less dialectal; e.g. growing up my family used supper, but at some point I learned other people used dinner and switched to using that for the same. Now my parents seem to use both supper and dinner for the same thing.

Travis B. wrote:In the English here, dinner and supper are synonymous, but supper is older whereas dinner is newer; e.g. growing up my family used supper, but at some point I learned other people used dinner and switched to using that for the same. Now my parents seem to use both supper and dinner for the same thing.

In my case, I suspect that dinner was originally my mother's usage and supper my father's. (We grew up mostly in dinner territory, so that's what eventually won out.)

A well-known phonetic retention of North American French is [r] for /r/. It seems to be on the wane in Quebec but is very much a part of Louisiana dialect. Broad varieties of Quebecois also have [we] for /wa/ whereas in Louisiana this seems confined to particular words, e.g. soixante, voisin.

In the lexical realm, LF retains piastre for "dollar" and sou for "cent". Also char for "car", just like Québécois.

linguoboy wrote:In my case, I suspect that dinner was originally my mother's usage and supper my father's. (We grew up mostly in dinner territory, so that's what eventually won out.)

I associate supper more with my father than with my mother, and my father grew up in the very same suburb that I grew up, even though he when he was really young lived in Milwaukee itself, while my mother grew up in Kenosha. Yet I associated dinner with how people outside my immediate family spoke and as a result adopted that, just like how I adopted how other people in my suburb spoke versus how I spoke as a younger kid in very many ways. (I spoke more conservatively phonologically overall as a kid than I do now, but at the same time had some very marked innovations, like [ˈsɘɕtɕʁ̩(ː)] for sister and [ˈmɘɕtɕʁ̩(ː)] for mister.)

I pretty strictly call the evening meal supper, though I do know quite a few who call it dinner. Except Sunday dinner is always lunch for me, and there would definitely be confusion if someone said Sunday dinner with the meaning of evening meal.

Viktor77 wrote:Belgian French retains the distinction between /œ̃/ as in brun and /bʁɛ̃/ as in brin. In Parisian French and often elsewhere in France these two vowels have merged completely. If you learn standard French you will likely never learn to distinguish them because the market is almost entirely dominated by Parisian language learning material. I don't distinguish them as a second language speaker and I spent a year in Belgium.

I didn't realize they merged, because they still teach the distinction in French class. :p My French teacher was actually a native French speaker as well.

linguoboy wrote:Broad varieties of Quebecois also have [we] for /wa/

I watched a movie in québecois once, and I was initially confused that several of the actors had /wɛ/ for oui.


On the dinner vs. supper matter, I've always used them interchangeably for the evening meal.

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention was Razihi, spoken on Jabal Razih in Yemen. It, apparently, is the only surviving descendant of the Old South Arabian languages, and has considerable influence from Arabic.

linguoboy wrote:

Viktor77 wrote:In standard French and French French (and even Quebec) they are déjeuner and dîner, respectively. This distinction is also maintained in certain American dialects where diner can mean lunch and supper means dinner.

I'm not quite sure what that second sentence is supposed to mean. In any case, there are American dialects of French (e.g. Missouri, Louisiana) which use dîner for the midday meal and souper for the evening meal and American dialects of English (mostly in the Southeast) which do the same with dinner and supper.

In some of those same areas, "evening" refers to the entire time after "dinner". That is, it covers what the majority of speakers would call "afternoon" as well. This is an innovation, however, since the original meaning of "evening" in English is "the time from sunset until bedtime".

I was using American as short for American English. But anyway I didn't know Cajun French shared the old distinction of dîner and souper.

Viktor77 wrote:Belgian French retains the distinction between /œ̃/ as in brun and /bʁɛ̃/ as in brin. In Parisian French and often elsewhere in France these two vowels have merged completely. If you learn standard French you will likely never learn to distinguish them because the market is almost entirely dominated by Parisian language learning material. I don't distinguish them as a second language speaker and I spent a year in Belgium.

Belgian French also retains a more archaic use of dîner and souper where the former is lunch and the latter is dinner. In standard French and French French (and even Quebec) they are déjeuner and dîner, respectively. This distinction is also maintained in certain American dialects where diner can mean lunch and supper means dinner. In English these uses came from old French which maintained the difference Belgian French maintains. The Belgian (old French) distinction is Germanic in origin.

Quebec French is the same as Belgian French and uses "déjeuner", "dîner" and "souper". Nowadays though, you'll hear "lunch" used a lot in the spoken language instead of "dîner".

Quebec French also doesn't merge the vowels /œ̃/ and /ɛ̃/, so "brun" and "brin" remain completely distinct.

Zaarin wrote:I watched a movie in québecois once, and I was initially confused that several of the actors had /wɛ/ for oui.

/wɛ/ is spelled "ouais" in standard French and is considered a synonym/variant of "oui". Colloquial Quebec French will use it, though it's more often pronounced [wɛi]. Quebec French also has "ouin" /wɛ̃/ (variously [wãĩ], [wãẽ], [wɑ̃ɪ̃], etc.), which isn't used in European French.

Hakaku, forgive my ignorance. I assumed based on a faulty memory that QCFR was equivalent to metropolitan French here.

Hakaku wrote:

Zaarin wrote:I watched a movie in québecois once, and I was initially confused that several of the actors had /wɛ/ for oui.

/wɛ/ is spelled "ouais" in standard French and is considered a synonym/variant of "oui". Colloquial Quebec French will use it, though it's more often pronounced [wɛi]. Quebec French also has "ouin" /wɛ̃/ (variously [wãĩ], [wãẽ], [wɑ̃ɪ̃], etc.), which isn't used in European French.

I didn't know that. It sure would be helpful if they taught a few more colloquialisms in class... :p

Zaarin wrote:I didn't know that. It sure would be helpful if they taught a few more colloquialisms in class... :p

That will happen the day that schools decide to teach students how to understand IPA symbols and the basics of formal syntax.

In a way, English-based creoles break the pattern of English vowels being unlike usual European ones.

linguoboy wrote:

Herra Ratatoskr wrote:

linguoboy wrote:In terms of retentions, distinct conjugational classes for verbs in Highest Alemmanic (e.g. Pomattertitsch ich wärfä vs ich machu).

I've heard this before, but haven't found much information on it outside of some brief references. Do you have any English or German sources that cover this in detail?

I don't. I did at one time know a native speaker of a Walser dialect and my ex (who was dating him) even tried to learn to speak it.

Huh. I started google about the Walser dialect and actually found a couple decent PDFs (in German) on some of the Highest Alemannic dialects with distinct weak conjugational classes. The first one, Die Mundart der deutschen Walliser is actually pretty detailed, but also a bit old and heavier on textual description, rather than things like charts. Thankfully the other pdf, Die Mundart von Bosco Gurin, is much more chart and IPA laden, though at 16 pages it is sadly rather brief. Still they're fascinating reads, and you can glean some info from them with even basic German skills, I would imagine.

EDIT: And holy shit, wikipedia has seriously stepped up its Walser German game.

Xephyr wrote:Tone contrasts in Indo-European (some varieties of Punjabi apparently?).

All varieties of Punjabi AFAIK plus a number of neighboring Indo-Aryan (Western Pahari) languages spoken in the Himalayas. Quite a few Indo-European languages have tone/pitch-accent contrasts of some sort, though: Swedish, Norwegian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Ancient Greek, Serbo-Croatian...

mèþru wrote:In a way, English-based creoles break the pattern of English vowels being unlike usual European ones.

Could you elaborate on this?

Using /i u e o a/ rather than typical English and Scots diphthongs and tense/lax distinctions

Polabian is AFAIK the only Slavic language with front rounded vowels.