La Sicilia nell’Italia dialettale di Giulio Bertoni. I tratti fonetici

In 1916, Bertoni published his essay Italia dialettale in addition to the fundamental studies of Diez, Meyer-Lübke, D’Ovidio and, of course, Ascoli, on which Bertoni builds his geolinguistic reference framework. In that year a series of essays, specifically dedicated to some phonetic aspects of the Sicilian dialect, had already been written by German linguists on one hand and Sicilian folklorists on the other. The only Sicilian linguist at that time was Giacomo De Gregorio whose Saggio di fonetica siciliana (1890) appears among the bibliographic references of Bertoni’s work along with that of Heinrich Schneegans (Laute und Lautentwickelung des sicilianischen Dialects) published in 1888. This contribution discusses Bertoni’s treatment of the information he draws from the two bibliographic sources he quoted, apropos of the phonetic aspects, which more than any other aspects have determined the placement of the Sicilian varieties within the framework of Italian dialects. In particular, it is noted that in the work of 1916 ― particularly appreciated for the considerations made on the principles and methods of geolinguistics as well as for the accurate examination of some dialectal areas ― Bertoni does not go into the merits of some aspects of the internal variation within Sicilian linguistics, even if documented in his bibliographic sources. In particular, he disregards those aspects of tonic vocalism (the treatment of Ĕ and Ŏ) on which Giorgio Piccitto based his classification of the Sicilian varieties in 1951. In other contributions along the way on the question of Sicilian pentavocalism (lastly in his Profilo linguistico dell’Italia 1940), Bertoni expressed, instead, different hypotheses regarding the reasons of the closure of ẹ in i and ọ in u. Also with regard to consonant order, the author of Italia dialettale contemplates some internal variants in Sicily but does not always take into account the information available from his bibliographic sources, and particularly from De Gregorio’s essay. The hypothesis is that Bertoni neglects some data ― and moreover any related explanations ― offered by De Gregorio concerning variation, both of vocalism and consonantism, because the Sicilian scholar had become unreliable having firmly supported the Emilian origin of the Gallo-Italic varieties of the Island.