A comprehension experiment for Romance speakers, what do you understand of Menorcan Catalan?

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A comprehension experiment for Romance speakers, what do you understand of Menorcan Catalan?

Postby nooj » Sat Jan 25, 2020 8:38 am

https://old.vocaroo.com/i/s013szOHJfXD

This woman is from Ciutadella, the most populated city in Menorca, one of the Balearic Islands. The main islands are Menorca, Mallorca, Eivissa, Formentera, with a couple of other tiny micro islands. About 100,000 people live on Menorca.

But she lives now in Barcelona. For that reason she mentions Hospital Clinic, this is a hospital associated with the University of Barcelona.

Apart from that, can you understand what she is talking, or more exactly, asking about?
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Re: A comprehension experiment for Romance speakers, what do you understand of Menorcan Catalan?

Postby 白田龍 » Sat Jan 25, 2020 9:43 am

I understood some segments, perhaps 50%. Not enough to get the overall meaning.
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Re: A comprehension experiment for Romance speakers, what do you understand of Menorcan Catalan?

Postby guyome » Sat Jan 25, 2020 9:46 am

I listened twice but I cannot understand much apart from the odd couple of words here and there. For reference, I have listened to some Catalan material before ( a few episodes of Plats Bruts and En guàrdia!) and my level of comprehension was much higher.
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Re: A comprehension experiment for Romance speakers, what do you understand of Menorcan Catalan?

Postby Iversen » Sat Jan 25, 2020 6:24 pm

I normally understand most of what I hear in Catalan, but I not used to listening to the Balearic dialect, and I had some problems with the first third or so of the clip provided by Nooj. However from the moment the lady stopped giggling and began to speak more coherently about the hospital Clinic I could more or less follow the speech - and the second time I listened to it I could almost also understand it. But not without some holes.

Of course my reaction on this mediocre result was to check whether this clip was particularly hard, and I did so by listening to some more clips, this time from Youtube. However most of the clips I found in Mallorquí there were songs or in other ways unfit for use - and one clip called "Climent Picornell:`és mallorquí qui té la voluntat de ser-ho`" seemed to contradict the inbuilt claim in its name already IN its name: the simple criterion for separating Balearic from 'central' Catalan and Valencià is to listen for the definite articles: the islands have s-, the continental variant l- - and as you see, there is an unbalearic "la" in "la voluntat".

I did however find a young lady named Anita who definitely had those s'es, and then I found a long interview with Joan Pons - “Es català no és sa nostra llengua mare. Balear, valencià i català són branques d’un mateix tronc” - that also had them, although they were harder to spot here. The conclusion is that you do need a moment to get accostumed to Balearic, but if you understand Barceloní or Valencià then it isn't an unsurmountable hurdle.
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Re: A comprehension experiment for Romance speakers, what do you understand of Menorcan Catalan?

Postby lingua » Sat Jan 25, 2020 8:38 pm

I listened once and felt like I should have understood it but didn't. I caught a few words that I thought I knew.
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Re: A comprehension experiment for Romance speakers, what do you understand of Menorcan Catalan?

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Sat Jan 25, 2020 8:56 pm

I understood maybe three words. I felt like I should understand much more. I would love to hear this in Castilian and regular Catalan to make sure I’m not just imagining my ability to comprehend non-French Romance languages.
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Re: A comprehension experiment for Romance speakers, what do you understand of Menorcan Catalan?

Postby nooj » Sat Jan 25, 2020 9:24 pm

Iversen wrote:
Of course my reaction on this mediocre result was to check whether this clip was particularly hard, and I did so by listening to some more clips, this time from Youtube. However most of the clips I found in Mallorquí there were songs or in other ways unfit for use - and one clip called "Climent Picornell:`és mallorquí qui té la voluntat de ser-ho`" seemed to contradict the inbuilt claim in its name already IN its name: the simple criterion for separating Balearic from 'central' Catalan and Valencià is to listen for the definite articles: the islands have s-, the continental variant l- - and as you see, there is an unbalearic "la" in "la voluntat".


First of all, thank you for that interesting clip for Climent Picornell, with whom I am in agreement when he speaks about the situation of rural Mallorca and the integration or lack thereof, of newcomers to Mallorca. I'll be sure to read his book.

IB3 is the television channel of the autonomous community of the Balearic Islands, and currently, in accordance with a largely accepted (but not uncontested) norm among Balearic journalists, newspapers and so forth, they do not use the articles salats in news reports, interviews, written articles, editorial pieces etc. This is in keeping with the literary, administrative and formal tradition of the Balearic Islands for centuries. Writers and administrative clerks have always written their works with articles literaris.

The criterion that you put there must be nuanced. The Balearic dialects have always, since the dawn of time, had two systems of definite articles, one derived from Latin ILLE, ILLA and the other from IPSUS, IPSA etc. The former, now most common among Catalan dialects and other Romance languages, is called the article literari but that name is misleading, because even in the most colloquial and ordinary of conversations in the Balearic Islands, the articles literaris are used. But for very specific purposes, which I won't go into here in detail. But just as an example, a Menorcan, an Eivissan, a Formenteran, a Mallorcan would never say *es Déu (the God), they would say el Déu.

The article salat exists on the mainland is minority situations, for example in the town of Cadaqués in Catalonia, and here in the Valencian town of Tàberna, where a special kind of Valencian is spoken due to Mallorcan immigration: thus, a Valencian dialect with article salat.

Image

The article salat was once much more general in all of the Catalan speaking lands, as proven by the numerous surviving toponyms with articles salats, e.g. Sant Llorenç Savall, Solivella etc.

And indeed in Occitania as well, as proven by the numerous surviving toponyms with articles salats in a much more generalised area than it is today. Indeed, the article salat survives today in some Occitan dialects.

Image

So the female journalist keeps to the articles literaris in accordance with the social agreement among people in her profession to use a special register of the language, but the guest Climent Picornell does not. He says very clearly, at minute 4:00: jo diria que un mallorquí és es que té sa voluntat de ser-ho.

Iversen wrote:
I did however find a young lady named Anita who definitely had those s'es, and then I found a long interview with Joan Pons - “Es català no és sa nostra llengua mare. Balear, valencià i català són branques d’un mateix tronc” - that also had them, although they were harder to spot here. The conclusion is that you do need a moment to get accostumed to Balearic, but if you understand Barceloní or Valencià then it isn't an unsurmountable hurdle.


Joan Pons is what is known in the Balearic Islands as a gonella. A gonella is a linguistic separationist, I have found that they are to a man, fervent Spanish nationalists. They claim that 'Balear', combining all of the different Balearic dialects together into one, are a separate language from Valencian or Catalan. For some reason, they're less happy to consider the thought that if Balear, Valencian and Catalan are separate languages, then so is Mexican, Argentinian and Cuban. One of the worst sins they commit in profit of a political point, apart from being linguistically incoherent, is that they mash all the different Balearic dialects together into one.

Gonelles seize upon the article salat as perhaps the key element that distinguishes their 'language' from Catalan, and so promote it beyond the boundaries of what the traditional language allows. I've written in my log about an absurdity that one gonella committed, the previous president, José Ramón Bauzá going so far as to say es bisbe (a kind of Mallorcan sausage) and not el bisbe (the Bishop of Mallorca), because of which people laughed at him. A case of trying to be more Catholic than the Pope.

The fact is that the article salat survives in the Balearic Islands as a remnant of what once existed in the mainland to a much wider degree, and that not everywhere in the Balearic Islands uses the article salat.

I've also previously written about Pollença, a town or city in Mallorca where I'm happy to say, they use their own combination of article literari and their own unique evolution of the articles:

u metge 'the doctor', but amb lo metge 'with the doctor'
l'hospital 'the hospital', but us hospitals 'the hospitals'
la cadira 'the chair', les cadires 'the chairs'

As you can see, this is a Mallorcan dialect that does not use the article salat. Here is a video showing this dialect where you can clearly hear these articles, e.g. les figues, l'aigua, u sol, u fonoll.

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Re: A comprehension experiment for Romance speakers, what do you understand of Menorcan Catalan?

Postby nooj » Sat Jan 25, 2020 10:19 pm

guyome wrote:I listened twice but I cannot understand much apart from the odd couple of words here and there. For reference, I have listened to some Catalan material before ( a few episodes of Plats Bruts and En guàrdia!) and my level of comprehension was much higher.


Maybe this will help you to better understand the audio.

Lexical

There is one expression that the speaker says that other Catalan speakers might not recognise, but from the context is quite guessable.

Però a jo me fa vessa - it is the equivalent of fer mandra in the central dialects, 'I can't be bothered'.

Phonological

Here, it actually helps if you speak a central Catalan dialect. Menorcan shares a phonological trait with most central dialects, reducing [o -> u] in unstressed positions. So the woman says [supa] for sopar 'to have dinner', like someone from say, Barcelona or Tarragona. In Mallorcan, this would not happen, and it would be [sopa].

The consonant cluster in excusa is reduced to [əscuzə], not [əkscuzə]. But this is true of colloquial speech in most dialects of Spanish.

The diphthong [əw] become pronounced [ow], so for example beure, veure are pronounced [bowɾə] and [vowɾə]. In this clip, the woman says m'heu d'ajudar, which becomes [mowdəʒuda].

Morphological

Menorcans use açò and not això (that thing, that, it). Açò is otherwise not used in eastern dialects of Catalan, but is fruitful in Valencian.

Menorcans, like the rest of the Balearic Islands, use the zero conjugation for the first person singular of their verbs, so she says jo acab de sa uni a les set, not jo acabo.


I really think that's about it that could trip someone up who already knows a central Catalan dialect.
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Re: A comprehension experiment for Romance speakers, what do you understand of Menorcan Catalan?

Postby guyome » Sat Jan 25, 2020 10:53 pm

Thanks! Your explanations and headphones helped quite a bit (but I still can't say I find the clip easy to understand).
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Re: A comprehension experiment for Romance speakers, what do you understand of Menorcan Catalan?

Postby coldrainwater » Sat Jan 25, 2020 11:41 pm

I can understand more than half the vocabulary, but definitely did not correctly parse the meaning. Perhaps more than a handful of known collocations seemed to jump out at me also, but I missed the crux of the question. I too did a stint with En guàrdia and at the time it was at least one notch more understandable than this clip. As background, probably a good half of my listening exposure from Spanish is peninsular. I rarely judge whether I can understand someone well until I have heard them talk a good 10 or 20 hours (usually referring to a new podcast in my case), enough time for me to warm up decently to their voice. With Spanish, an hour or two would or should be plenty, but a one minute sample makes it tough for me to judge accurately. I can say it would be easy to pick up knowing peninsular Spanish well.
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