Venice and Venetian language
Venice
Venice (Italian: Venezia [veˈnɛttsja],[1] Venetian: Venexia [veˈnɛsja]; (Latin: Venetia)) is a city in northeast Italy sited on a group of 118 small islands separated by canals and linked by bridges.[2] It is located in the marshy Venetian Lagoon which stretches along the shoreline between the mouths of the Po and the Piave Rivers. Venice is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks.[2] The city in its entirety is listed as a World Heritage Site, along with its lagoon.[2]
Venice is the capital of the Veneto region. In 2009, there were 270,098 people residing in Venice's comune (the population estimate of 272,000 inhabitants includes the population of the whole Comune of Venezia; around 60,000[3] in the historic city of Venice (Centro storico); 176,000 in Terraferma (the Mainland), mostly in the large frazioni of Mestre and Marghera; 31,000 live on other islands in the lagoon). Together with Padua and Treviso, the city is included in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area (PATREVE), with a total population of 1,600,000. PATREVE is only a statistical metropolitan area without degree of autonomy.
The name is derived from the ancient Veneti people who inhabited the region by the 10th century BC.[4][5] The city historically was the capital of the Venetian Republic. Venice has been known as the "La Dominante", "Serenissima", "Queen of the Adriatic", "City of Water", "City of Masks", "City of Bridges", "The Floating City", and "City of Canals". Luigi Barzini described it in The New York Times as "undoubtedly the most beautiful city built by man".[6] Venice has also been described by the Times Online as being one of Europe's most romantic cities.[7]
The Republic of Venice was a major maritime power during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and a staging area for the Crusades and the Battle of Lepanto, as well as a very important center of commerce (especially silk, grain, and spice) and art in the 13th century up to the end of the 17th century. This made Venice a wealthy city throughout most of its history.[8] It is also known for its several important artistic movements, especially the Renaissance period. Venice has played an important role in the history of symphonic and operatic music, and it is the birthplace of Antonio Vivaldi.
Venetian language
Venetian or Venetan is a Romance language spoken as a native language by over two million people,[6] mostly in the Veneto region of Italy, where of five million inhabitants almost all can understand it. It is sometimes spoken and often well understood outside Veneto, in Trentino, Friuli, Venezia Giulia, Istria, and some towns of Dalmatia, totalling 6–7 million speakers. The language is called vèneto or vènet in Venetian, veneto in Italian; the variant spoken in Venice is called venexiàn/venesiàn or veneziano, respectively. Although referred to as an Italian dialect (Ven diałeto, It dialetto) even by its speakers, it is in fact a separate language, not a variety or derivative of Italian. Instead, Venetian differs both in grammar, phonetics, and vocabulary. It is usually classified as a Western Romance language, a branch of Romance to which Italian does not belong. Some authors include it among the Gallo-Italic languages,[7] but by most authors, it is treated as separate. Typologically, Venetian has little in common with the Gallo-Italic languages of northwestern Italy, but shows some affinity to nearby Istriot.
Venetian is not closely related to Venetic, an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken in the Veneto region until about the 1st century BCE.
Venetian proverb
@ Amor novo va e vien, amor veccio se mantien.
Idiomatic translation: Of soup and love the first is the best.
Notes
Venice
[1]^ Il Nuovo DOP
[2]^ a b c UNESCO: Venice and its Lagoon, accessed:17 April 2012
[3]^ Mara Rumiz, Venice Demographics Official Mock funeral for Venice's 'death'
[4]^ "Online Etymology Dictionary". Retrieved 11 June 2010.
[5]^ Richard Stephen Charnock (1859). Local etymology: a derivative dictionary of geographical names. Houlston and Wright. p. 288.
[6]^ Barzini, Luigi (30 May 1982). "The Most Beautiful and Wonderful City In The World – The". New York Times. Retrieved 28 March 2009.
[7]^ Bleach, Stephen; Schofield, Brian; Crump, Vincent (17 June 2007). "Europes most romantic city breaks". The Times (London). Retrieved 27 May 2010.
[8]^ "Venetian Music of the Renaissance". Vanderbilt.edu. 11 October 1998. Retrieved 22 April 2010.[dead link]
Venetian language
[6]^ Ethnologue.
[7]^ Haller, Hermann W. (1999). International The other Italy: the literary canon in dialect. Toronto.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_language
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Venetian_proverbs