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What’s with this “Wren” thing?
The oldest extant version of the fable
we
are presenting here appeared in 1913 in the first volume of a two-volume anthology
of Low
Saxon folktales (Plattdeutsche
Volksmärchen “Low German Folktales”)
collected by Wilhelm Wisser (1843–1935). Read
more ...
Italian
Lombardy—one
of the Italian-speaking regions
with a Germanic past
Language information:
Italian is used primarily in Italy, in southern Switzerland, in San Marino,
in Corsica, and on the northeastern shore of the Adriatic Sea, as well as in
the Americas, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and many other countries,
especially throughout Western Europe.
Traditionally, Italian
is the predominant language of musical operas. Several so-called Italian dialect
groups have in
some quarters been claimed to be languages in their own right. Italian has
absorbed influences of the languages of numerous invaders, including Germanic
influences (for instance from the Goths and Langobards). Because of the importance
of Florence and other Tuscan cities during Italy’s post-Roman golden age, standard-range
Italian has been primarily based on Tuscan dialects since about the 14th century,
dialects that happen to have departed relatively little from ancestral Latin
phonology and morphology.
The closest relatives of Italian are Neapolitan-Calabrese (in the provinces of Campania and Calabria), Sicilian (in
Sicily), Corsican (in Corsica, France), Dalmatian (in Dalmatia, Croatia, recently
extinct), Istriot (on the Istrian Peninsula of Croatia, moribund), and Judeo-Italian
(used by a dwindling number of Italian Jews).
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