Tuscan Gorgia - History

History

The Tuscan gorgia arose perhaps as late as the Middle Ages, as a natural phonetic phenomenon, much like the consonant voicing that affected Northern Italian dialects and the rest of Western Romance (now phonemicized, e.g. /amika/ 'friend, f.' > /amiɡa/), but remained allophonic in Tuscany, as laxing or voicing generally does elsewhere in Central Italy and in Corsica.

Although it was once hypothesized that the gorgia phenomena are the continuation of similar features in the language that pre-dated Romanization of the area, Etruscan, that view is no longer held by most specialists. Instead, it is increasingly accepted as being a local form of the same consonant weakening that affects other speech in Central Italy, and extends far beyond, to Western Romance. Support for this hypothesis can be found in several facts:

• The phonetic details of Etruscan are unknown, thus it is impossible to identify their continuance.
• There is no mention of the phenomenon until the 16th century, and no trace in older writing (since the gorgia is a phonetic phenomenon, not phonemic, its appearance in writing might not be expected, but it does appear in writing in the 19th century).
• The gorgia is less evident in Lucca and does not exist in far Southern Tuscany, nor in Lazio, where Etruscan settlement was quite concentrated.
• Sociolinguistic studies in Eastern Tuscany (e.g. Cravens and Giannelli 1995, Pacini 1998) show that the gorgia competes with traditional laxing in exactly the same post-vocalic position, suggesting that the two results are phonetically different resolutions of the same phonological rule.
• The gorgia shows all the characteristics of a naturally-developed allophonic rule in its alternations with full plosives ( 'house', 'the house', '3 houses').
• Fricativization of /k t p/ is not uncommon in the languages of the world. Similar processes have happened in e.g. Proto-Germanic (which is why in Germanic languages there are words such as father, horn, tooth as opposed to Italian padre, corno, dente - see Grimm's Law), and during the development of the Hungarian language. A similar phenomenon is also observed in the Tamil language.