Talk:Trastevere

Trastevere and Borgo

Pope Sixtus V did not divide Rome in fourteen Rioni. It just joined Borgo, which had a separate administration, together with the city of Rome, which at this time had thirteen Rioni. Borgo became then the fourteenth Rione. alex2006 06:11, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Pronunciation

I could not find any source for the pronunciation of the word, but the division in syllables is clear: Tra-ste-ve-re (see for a similar word), since the "s impura", that is followed by a consonant, goes always with this consonant. Alex2006 (talk) 09:42, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

Actually, the /s/ of s+C clusters is constantly searching for liberation from the C that it's trapped with. That's been happening for many centuries in numerous varieties of Romance (sketched in some detail in Sampson, Rodney. 2010. Vowel prosthesis in Romance: a diachronic study. Oxford: OUP, especially ch. 4)

And you didn't look in the obvious place: Canepari's Dizionario di proununzia ( http://www.dipionline.it/dizionario/ricerca?lemma=Trastevere ), where phonemic transcription, i.e. actual structure, is given as trasˈtevere, unequivocally implicating phonetic syllabification [trasˈteːvere] -- which, not incidentally, is what real live Italians normally do.

General-use Italian dictionaries are notoriously untrustworthy with regard to actual syllabification of the peskier consonant clusters. Usually the editors give up and adopt a policy of presenting any cluster that can begin a word as tautosyllabic, a practice common for hyphenation rules in writing, but in no way guaranteed to reflect phonemic or phonetic reality. In fact, it can and does lead to absurdities that do not reflect any speaker's actual syllabification (and are silly in writing), such as te-cni-co and o-ftal-mi-co forced by the existence of obscure terms cnidio and ftaleina. If the dictionary is a serious one, there will be some form of true confession of syllabification decisions they've made, such as the cni- ftal- problem described in the "Guida all'uso" of Dizionario italiano Sabatini Coletti (p. v, under "sillabazione"), where it's evident that Sabatini, Coletti and their crew know that they're painted (or they're painting themselves) into an unfortunate corner.

s+C is a similar case, though much less absurd on the face of it, since so many words of high frequency do begin with the cluster in Italian. However, even the least attentive beginning foreign language student soon discovers that s+C can be a special case: il prezzo, il critico but lo studente, lo sport. Why? What's going on?

As an extreme case, psicologo illustrates the principle clearly: the word "begins with" the cluster /ps/; but a large % of speakers have real difficulty in saying just [psi-] in pronouncing the word by itself, because /ps/ actually doesn't work as a syllable onset in Italian. If forced to say psicologo by itself, many speakers will insert the default vowel [i] and produce something like [pⁱsi-]. And if an immediately preceding article is called for, even that least attentive foreign student might understand that lo, uno are preferable to il, un, as the vowel attracts the far more natural syllabification lop-si-co-lo-go in real speech, freeing /p/ from the unnatural syllabic marriage /.ps/.

Turns out that it's not accidental that studente, sport, etc. also want lo, uno if an article precedes immediately, precisely because the tautosyllabic marriage s+C, while not nearly as miserable as the the union of p+s, is still not a happy one. Lo studente frees the trapped /s/ to join the preceding vowel for much more satisfactory syllabification: los-tu-den-te. It's the same principle that still can produce in [i]Svizzera for some speakers, that churned out fossilized per iscritto, that blocked FĔSTA from becoming *fiesta in Italian (dipththongization of stressed Ĕ possible in open syllable FĔRU > fie.ro, but blocked in closed syllable fes.ta), and other phenomena both in Italian and in wider Romance (e.g. s+C is still a live trigger for a preceding vowel in Spanish).

A very clear description that word-internal s+C is heterosyllabic is presented here, section 4: http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/sibilanti_(Enciclopedia-dell%27Italiano)/ Note that even Bertinetto is frustrated by word-initial s+C; it's a miserable unloved onset, yet it does exist phonetically as onset IFF no preceding vowel is present to help it split up. Word-internally it's clear though: /Vs.C/, i.e. tras-te-ve-re (in fact, more than a few Italians can have trouble if you demand that they syllabify *tra-stevere, and will insert a very brief pause to break up their natural syllable tras).

What to do? Take the word of the consensus of experts, of phoneticians and phonologists who have examined these phenomena in depth and know their craft, such as this?

"la situazione di /s/: in contesto preconsonantico, la sequenza /s/+ C (consonante) è eterosillabica, i due segmenti appartengono cioè a sillabe diverse. La sibilante chiude la sillaba, poiché rende breve la vocale che la precede e pertanto funge da coda, laddove l’altra consonante costituisce l’attacco della sillaba seguente. L’eterosillabicità di /s/ preconsonantica si apprezza sia all’interno di parola (rospo → ros.po, astro → as.tro, esca → es.ca), che in posizione iniziale (lo sposo > los.po.so)"

Or choose to ignore reality and knowingly misinform readers with phonetic transcription that conflicts with all relevant principles of Italian phonology, and willfully misreports the actual phonetics? --47.32.20.133 (talk) 18:50, 15 July 2018 (UTC)