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Overly Sarcastic Productions: History Hijinks, Another Dumb Italy Story Reaction

New videos of geekery, reactions, and anime content at 12:00 p.m. (Eastern Time) Monday to Saturday and live streams Sunday.

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History Hijinks: Another Dumb Italy Story

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[Jake]

I take the Machiavelli thing as less "here's what you should do if you're a monster", and more "this is what monsters do disguised as a guide for being a monster"

[TheEmperorGulcasa]

Blue's review of Machiavelli is quite interesting and explains his stance on the guy. Definitely worth watching.

[nelleneulmer]

19:12 Vembis is a joke name he made for Venice like the name Flormes for Florence when he made the first “Dumb Italy stories” video (which is in their History Hijinx section/playlist, something you should DEFINITELY check out) as a way to cope with not being able to go on an Italian vacation he had planed for years because of COVID.

[cerberus]

So of course, this video and the reaction to it were both an absolute delight for me. So, as a history and linguistics nerd, allow me to weigh in on the general process of national language formation!

To summarize heavily, the default inclination of every language is to diversify across whatever region its spoken in. People in some specific town or village will start using a word a different way, or have some quirk of pronunciation that becomes commonplace there, and once enough of these accumulate you start seeing regional dialects. The longer this continues, the more hyper-specific these dialects can get, though this also depends on how frequently people travel around. In ye olden days, you could probably figure out the exact village someone was from by their dialect or at least get down to the specific county. Nowadays, regular travel has made things a bit more mixed and blurred, but we still see the active formation of dialects for broad regions. Anyway, over time these dialects get less and less mutually intelligible. You start getting situations where a dialect is perfectly understandable to all the other dialects neighboring it, but is completely unintelligible to one on the opposite side of the country (or whatever region the language group exists in). So at what point do we start calling these separate languages?

This is not a simple question at all, and on a realistic level, mutual intelligibility is one of the less important factors. Oftentimes what we consider to be two separate languages are the result of feelings of ethnic or nationalistic inclination. One excellent example would be Serbian and Croatian, which most linguists happily call two dialects of a single united language, but needless to say the Serbs and Croats despise that very notion for obvious reasons. We also could talk about the North Germanic languages of Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish, which have a high degree of intelligibility between them. Portuguese and Spanish are another example. Realistically, Portuguese and Spanish are pretty mutually intelligible, at least as much as Catalan, Aragonese, Leonese, Galician, etc are to Spanish- and yes, all those languages are still around. But while Portugal and Spain are separate countries today, there was a considerable span of time where they were united under one crown. Partly the reason why this is no longer the case and we consider Portuguese a separate language is because of the nationalist sympathies within Portugal that persisted across that whole period. However, another even more important reason is literature.

See, one of the most important factors in deciding what will be considered a language is the existence of a central canon, a core corpus of writings, books, etc that collectively set a standard for that language's future writings. One of the best things you can do to get your local dialect to stop being considered a dialect of one language and start being considered a separate language is just to start writing and publishing in your local speech. Most national languages are based on literature that came out of a specific city, written in that city's local language. For standard Italian, its Tuscany (sort of). For French, Paris. For English, London- sort of. For Portuguese, Lisbon, and for Spain, Castile. (For most of these, there's a big asterisk of extra details you could dive into, but that's the short version of it.)

On a related note, this is also why there's a debate over whether or not Scots should be considered its own language, because in the Middle Ages there *was* a large body of literature written in Scots rather than in the more southerly varieties of English, which largely were either coming out of or copying the styles of London. After unification, Scottish writing fell out of fashion, and has only come back relatively recently as a conscientious effort to preserve Scottish identity. But, needless to say, that's a whole debate to have some other time.

[HBHaga]

There are a bunch of different ways you can come at Blue's side of OSP. His history pieces are generally quite good. His History Hijinks series is hilarious. His History Makers series covers a lot of poets, writers, philosophers, and historical figures. You've already looked at the Pope Fights. And then there are the Dumb History Stories that he throws in from time to time.

I would personally suggest his pieces on The Plague, his piece on Sappho of Lesbos, the on-air nervous breakdown of trying to keep the Ptolemy line straight (I didn't know we had that many Cleopatrae before we got to the famous one), and his Roman and English history series.

[CommissarMitch]

When he gets the name of Venice in Venetian it is a huge mood as a bilingual person.

[The-Lazy-Dane]

3:31 have you ever heard of the norman conquest? When a norman(which is essentially norsemen mixed with frenchmen, though the norman language was almost entirely free from nordic influences and was just a regionally dialect of french) duke invaded england ala King William the conqueror.
Edit: Also, for much of post roman history french was the langauge for diplomacy and nobility. If I remember correctly, it was the napoelonic wars that stopped french from being the langauge of prestige like english is today.

[Rainears]

You will love the History Hijinks, the playlist this video is in. Additionally, his video on Thebes fits into the History Hijinks' format. There's also his History Makers, which focuses on famous people that influenced either the field of Historical Study as a whole, or just influenced the history of a certain area (Alcibiades fits in this playlist despite being made long before the playlist came to be). His actual history videos of areas tends to go for broad strokes (obviously, it's History Summarized), and Blue doesn't care for Big Man History, which he explains in his video on England. I always recommend people go with the History Hijinks, as it's those kinds of stories that get me interested in history and remind me that people have always been people, with all that that entails.

[trentonbuchert]

Have you tried out Red’s Trope Talks videos? The depth she goes into about various tropes has inspired parts of my own stories more than once.

[jkosch]

Even more context: something about how Italy became a united nation (I wrote on the same discord server as the one about the Italian language):
Oh my, this would be a very long one if we cover the whole process.
The very short version is: Italy as a united nation is pretty young (and unlike Germany they didn't have a loose confederacy under a common king and emperor before Napoleon). The Kingdom of Italy that is forerunner to the modern republic was declared in 1861 and only covered all of what is now Italy by 1871.
However, there is long history before that. I'll cut a lot of it short in this answer, but basically unlike Germany Italy as a term and idea of common cultural sphere came from Italy and dates back to Antiquity during the period of Rome's early rise to power [500-200 BCE]. Rome had Italy as it's own administrative unit (not a Province for a long time). During the Late of the Roman Empire and at it's downfall Germans tribes (chiefly among them the Ostrogoths and then Langobards in Northern Italy after the Fall) entered and founded their own kingdoms. The Southern tip early on changed hands between Byzantines and Muslim conquerors. The Langobard part became part of Francia under Charlemagne but later split off again [we went over that part in a previous post I had made about the origin of Germany and France]. The idea of an emperor requiring investiture by the pope did also elevate the popes position of power and they could establish (and forge their way to ...) their own papal states headed by the church [but often still with local nobles] in Central Italy.
There were a few smaller Kingdoms in the South [and parts often belonged to larger entities like a Norman state or the Crown of Aragon [part of Spain], but a lot of Italy turned into city states, often led by oligarchies, sometimes as Republics [like for example Venice or Florence before the Medici power-grab]. Telling the whole story would take very long, but basically even though there people with the dream of uniting Italy in the Renaissance [like Caesare Borgia and Nicolo Machiavelli] and events like the invasion of King Charles VIII of France to settle a succession crisis in the Kingdom of Naples and the Fallout of the Reformation started by Martin Luther did lead to a (slightly) more common identity as Italians, Italy remained a complicated mess of rivaling and sometimes prospering states until the Napoleonic Wars.
In 1796 Napoleon started a conquest of Italian states but was kicked out by the end of 1799. When Napoleon became head of state he invaded again and this time he made the North part of Italy first a Republic with him as president [for like 3 years] and then into a first “Kingdom of Italy” (1805-1814) with him as king. When Napoleon was defeated and the Congress of Vienna basically decided to roll things back to the status quo before Napoleon [with some differences like Venice now being under Austrian control, and the House of Savoy (an originally Alpine Noble line that at that time had the kingdom of Sardina did get the North West that was under stronger French influence before] in 1815 they left behind a renewed idea of Italian unity. Groups like the secret Society Carbonari that were founded in resistance to Napoleon remained and gave rise to other such movement like the Young Italians under Giuseppe Garibaldi.
In 1848 they tried a first war of Independence, but like most revolutionary efforts that year all over Europe it was beaten back. A Second Italian War of Independence that started in 1859, now aided by France, however was successful. After taking Lombardy they took over the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily in 1860 and Garibaldi did strike a deal with Victor Emmanuel II, king of Sardina, to make him king of a united Italy as a constitutional monarchy. This did upset Republicans among the revolutionaries. The capital was moved from Turin to Florence. 5 years after the kingdom of Italy had been declared Victor Emmanuel II saw that Austro-Hungary was weakened by it's war with Prussia and they allied with Prussia so they could take the rest of the North [Venice and all] in the Third Italian War of Independence. When France was occupied fighting Prussia in 1870 the Kingdom of Italy did take over the papal states and made Rome the capital. This was first time all of Italy was united since the Roman Era.

[galaxa]

I like that Blue started by thinking French butchered Italian and that's why English sounds different, and he was right that English got their names from French, but then he found out ITALIAN butchered the name first. It's not even English OR French were trying to be accurate, they just HAPPENED to start from a more correct starting point than some other exonyms. Lots of weird exonyms are because people asked the wrong questions or misunderstood the answers (calling this group of people Greek because they thought this one city was the name of their whole culture instead of just one small part, for example).

[The-Lazy-Dane]

7:11 I mean, yeah? Wales for example comes from a germanic word for foreigners, Egypt comes from aegypt(or something like that) which is greek, pre-roman egyptians called their home for Khemet (something like black soil, aka the fertile soil from the Nile) and Wallachia over in Romania comes from Vlach, which also comes from the same word as welsh and wales. Persia for example comes from greek for Farsi, a people/langauge/region in west-south Iran

[Phyrior]

It's okay, Airier. Stereotypes exist for a reason, no judgement.

[The-Lazy-Dane]

The reason why english often has placenames in italy be closer to latin is because of how they entered english, which was via french and latin. About a good 40% of english comes from latin, and almost all names for countries, places and cities in western europe in english comes from latin. For example, Germany comes from latin Germania.

[jkosch]

For additional context a little explanation I wrote two years ago on a discord server after being asked about the development of the Italian language:
OK, so first of all, much like Japanese, Italian is more like a collection of (mostly) mutually intelligible sister languages. The Standard Italian is largely based on the Tuscan versions (much like Standard Japanese is largely based on the Tokyo dialect).
Those Italian languages/dialects were not artificially created but naturally developed from vulgar Latin (the type of Latin and its dialects that was spoken by the common folk o the streets, not the posh speech of the highly educated folk. The shift from what we understand and vulgar Latin to vernacular Italian started in the 5th century with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and by the 9th century something more like the vernacular versions of Italian had emerged. But it took Dante Alighieri and his works (Especially the Divine Comedy) in the 14th century to really create a kind of standard. Dante was writing in his native Florentine, one dialect of the Tuscan branch of Italian. His works became so widespread that they basically shaped all Italian languages/dialects to a degree, making them more similar once more.
In the Renaissance Italian became the language of legal documents and in the courts. At this time a discourse started that did not end until shortly after the unification of Italy: what should a standard for good (Italian) language be? Some argued for adherence to the classics deeming even Dante's old Florentine to "flat" and unlyrical, Florentines and people from nearby wanted to use the contemporary Florentine languages arguing that it was directly descended from Dante's language, some argued the mixture of Roman and Tuscan dialects that had become the version mostly used in the Vatican should be the new standard and some wanted each local vernacular to weigh in on forging a new standard. What ended up being used was version of old Florentine as used by Dante with a lot of local influences. In the 19th century shortly before and during unification it was once again a work of literature that set a new standard. The historical novel (king place in 17th century Milan )'I Promessi Sposi' by Alessandro Manzoni in it's second edition became widespread and set a new standard they people used as point of reference.

[HBHaga]

I really hope Blue does a History Makers vid about the Brothers Grimm at some point. More linguistic goodness there.

[nomingyu]

Well, you mentioned Machiavelli in the video. Blue actually did a five minute video on The Prince awhile back. So maybe that and a few others of similar length?

[Rosie-Redstar]

12:44 While I can't tell you how much they differ (non-speaker), I do know that sometimes they get a separate dub of cartoons. Granted that knowledge comes from my occasional rabbit hole of trying to compare songs from cartoons across multiple languages.

[ShahroozSmith]

I'm sorry, but he brought up how it's supposed to be Venezia instead of Venice and it reminded me of this.
"You know Paris, France? In English, they pronounce it 'Paris, ' but everyone else pronounces it without the 's' sound, like the French do. But with Venezia, everyone pronounces it in the English way, 'Venice.' Like _The Merchant of Venice_ and _Death in Venice..._ WHY, THOUGH?! Why isn't the title _Death in Venezia_ ?! ARE YOU FRIGGIN' MOCKING ME?! It takes place in Italy, so use the Italian word, damn it! THIS SH*T PISSES ME OFF!" -- Ghiaccio, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Vento Aurero.

[LarsisLP]

11:20 as much as us europeans like to make fun of the US, it is actually a comparatively old country, in terms of "how long has it existed as a sovereign state with the type of government we know today".

Not even counting the fact, that many european countries had their govermental structure overhauled and were essentially reformed during the 20th century, following the world wars or the cold war, a lot of what we understand to be European countries have not existed in the current unified form for that long before.
Sure, people might have been living there for centuries if not millenia, and they might have collectively refered to themself as "german", "Italian" and shared some history and culture etc..., but that does not mean they already were countries in a way we know them nowadays.

All in all, having existed as a sovereign state with a stable government for almost 250 years now, the US really is older than most European countries. (again, in terms of how long has it existed as a unified nation.)