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Some persuasions about Venetan
1) There're many different Venetans, there isn't the Venetan. For example in Vicenza you say te magni, in Treviso te magna ; in Venice and in the medium towns of the provinces of Padova and Vicenza you say 'a scóea while in Verona, Belluno and in little villages you say la scóla...
Wrong: there are many venetan variants which share most of the features. These common venetan features are, on the contrary, very different from italian rules. For example you can say te magni, te magna, ti magna... but it's a fact that every venetan variant has the obligatory subject in the 2nd pers. sing. and in the 3rd pers. sing/plur. : this doesn't happen in italian.
Moreover, many differences between the variants are just apparent ones. They're often different pronounciations that you can represent with one orthography. For example la scóla e 'a scóea are more and more often written in the same way: la scóla with the stroken-L (polish L) that people can read in different ways.
2) But it's a fact that Vicentino-padovano-rovigotto e Veneziano (venetian) people prefer el ga parlà, la ga parlà while in Verona, Belluno and other places they use one general form l'à parlà ; the first say el xe, la xe the others l'è...: do you see that there are many different venetans?
Wrong: even in English there are some verbs with double forms: you can say you have or you've ; he is/he has or he's etc... but nobody ever said that English is not one language... And Spanish is somehow worse: you can say hablase, hablases, hablásemos... or even hablara, hablaras, habláramos (=if I spoke, you spoke, we spoke...) i.e. it has double forms in all the voices of the condithional of all regular verbs: but nobody ever said that there are two spanish languages.
3) But, sometimes, the different variants have very different words to express the same idea. For example, some say sórzxe (sórxo) while others prefer rato and other morécia (moréja) : these are not mere differences of pronunciation.
True: but this is a phenomenon you can find even in other languages: the well-known synonims. Some of them will become more frequent of others, or they'll acquire a "more polished" meaning as it happened in italian.
4) However, in despite of the differences, Venetan can be easiliy unified because a "koinè" already exists: that spoken in big/medium towns.
Attention: the Venetan spoken in medium/big town is quite unified...but it's few venetan and very italianized. In these towns people generally say chiùdeme la porta instead of the correct form sàrame la porta. The young say i sta rivando instead of the venetan form i xe drio rivar ; you can even hear i ce dixe / ce vedémo instead of the correct forms i ne dixe / se vedémo; and el se xe conprà na màchina instead of the correct form el se ga conprà na màchina... If you pay attention, on the contrary, among old people (who know little italian) and in little villages (where italian is less spoken), you can hear a more authentic and less corrupted venetan.
Thus, the venetan of medium/big towns is just an italian language "disguised" as venetan.
5) But you can't avoid the influence of Italian upon Venetan; it's natural that italian forms replace the venetan ones. It happens in other languages too, for example between Italian and English: in Italian you find more and more english words. You can't go back.
Wrong: think about it. Between Italian and English there is a natural interchange: both languages are legally recognized, used by TVs in films and confereces, they're compulsory subjects in schools (the first in Italy, the other in G.Britain). On the contrary, Venetan is not supported in this way. It doesn't have a legal standard form, it's not used by newspapers, nor it is a compulsory subject in schools and it's not used by TVs. Consequently the linguistic interchange between Italian and Venetan is not a natural interchange between two languages, but an compromised interchange in favour of Italian that enjoys the legal support of State, TVs, and school. However, many people, who think that this decline is inevitable, give up with spreading Venetan about and help its extinction: they change an effect into a cause. A vicious circle, the so-called "cat which eats its own tail".
6) Anyway, what is the importance of knowing , teaching and spreading Venetan about? Italian is more refined and polished than Venetan, while speaking Venetan is less prestigious.
Wrong: linguistic difference could derive from two causes. 1) "grammatical" causes, i.e. having different grammatical rules. 2) "lexical" causes, i.e. having the same grammatical rules, but different words to express the same idea.
Well, let's see: grammatical differences can't make a language more or less polished. For example, Italian doesn't have the compulsory subject (you say canta) still it is considered a nice language; English (and French), on the contrary, have the compulsory subject (you must say he sings, il chante) like Venetan (you say el canta) but, in despite of this, they are not less polished than Italian.
As for the lexical differences, it's the same: they don't produce difference of elegance. For example many Veneti say bicier (=glass) because they think that goto is an unrefined word: on the other hand, an legally recognized language of Europe (Catalan) use the very word got to translate italian "bicchiere" (glass). Even the adjective inbriaga/-ago, in Venetan is a usual word while its catalan equivalent embriaga/-ac is high styled. Consequently, if nearly identical words can have different "elegances" in different languages, this means that the differences of elegance are not always related to lexical differences. More: many boys are ashamed of saying verto, but in French people usually say ouvert. The verb tastar (with the ital. meaning of "assaggiare") has an english equivalent to taste... Another example is the word culo which is apparently vulgar. But in Venetan you can even say el culo de la màchina, el culo de la botilia where this word has just the meaning of back side or bottom. (this happens not only in Venetan, however: di dietro in Italian can have two meanings: a normal meaning, but even a more vulgar one: "dare un calcio nel di dietro" where di dietro=rear=ass...). It is the italian translation that often assigns only a vulgar meaning to venetan words, while in Venetan they have two meanings: one is vulgar, the other is not vulgar.
7) But Italian has a lot of words to represent modern objects and habits; they don't exist in Venetan. And, generally speaking, Italian is rich of words while Venetan isn't.
Just a question of time, will and honesty: do you really think that at the time of ancient Romans or Dante, italian dictionaries contained the word automobile (car)? It has been created when people needed it. In Venetan you can do the same thing but people prefer to use italian words because they thinks these are more polished and then they complain and say that Venetan hasn't enough words and must borrow them from Italian: "cat which eats its own tail!" Moreover, as you can see at (5), the venetan varieties often offer the possibility to choose between different synonyms for the same object: this is not a poor lexic! But the difference of Italian are considered as richness, those of Venetan are considered as symptom of non-unity.
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