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As in, the Italo-Western Romance language?
Yup, that one. Numbers are not to be trusted, but estimates are usually around 500k speakers in Brazil alone. There's also a bunch of them in Argentina, and even in Mexico (more specifically Chipilo, Puebla).
Under Brazilian territory Venetian is often called "Talian", and sometimes partially creolised with Portuguese. The name is a misnomer though, the language has little to do with the Tuscan-based standard Italian.
When you said there are about 200 other languages, I was expecting indigenous languages and maybe some Spanish, but certainly not other European languages
There are a few other colonial languages among those 200, like Eastern Pomeranian (Low German; extinct in Europe after WW2), Hunsrik (German too, but in the Franconian group). And I wouldn't be surprised if here in Paraná some Polish- or Silesian-speaking clusters survived.
Additionally, some folks down north use Kikongo (a Bantu language, brought to South America due to African slavery) as a liturgical language for their syncretic religion (candomblé).
That said the "bulk" of those 200 languages I mentioned are Amerindian languages indeed. Typically Macro-Ge and Tupi-Guarani families.
What’s the history there? Were there Italian colonies in Brazil, or a notable migration of Italians to Portuguese colonies?
Yup, immigrants. Not just in Brazil; Latin America as a whole got a lot of them in the XIX and early XX centuries, and since Italy was in a ruckus a lot of them were from Italy. Mostly Gallo-Italic speakers in a "belt" between São Paulo and Buenos Aires. Both are tendencies though, and there are plenty exceptions - São Paulo city for example got also a bunch of Calabrians and Sicilians, and as I said there were Venetians even in Mexico.
Other common groups of immigrants in LatAm were Iberians, Germans, Levantine Arabs, Japanese. But the distribution changes heavily from place to place; for example here in Paraná we got quite a few Poles and even a few Ukrainians and Lithuanians, but up south in Chubut (Argentina) there were Welsh immigrants instead.
See, this is exactly the sort of conversation I had hoped the original thread would lead to. Interesting linguistics, history, and geography. Until dessalines came in with the toxicity.
There's [email protected] for any topic involving language. [Disclaimer: I'm one of the mods there.]
That backtracks to the main subject: the community was originally in lemmy.ml. One of the reasons why I migrated it to mander.xyz was the notoriously poorly way that .ml admins enforce rules in their instance - with the straw that broke the camel's back, for me, being [email protected]. (I wasn't a mod there but I'm a weeb so...)
Now thinking, if I didn't do so, I bet that I would enter in direct conflict with dessalines and cypherpunk. What if someone wanted to talk about the Uyghur language? Or surzhyk (mixed Ukrainian/Russian) varieties? Bloody hell, even Proto-Indo-European (the Late PIE homeland is right where the war is happening now). Even mentions of lavender linguistics (i.e. how queer people use language) would become a ticking bomb.
Shameless plug to [email protected] . This sort of question is welcome there.
Latin already did a bloody mess of those suffixes:
In turn those suffixes used to mean different things:
Then French and Norman inherited this mess, and... left it alone? Then English borrowed all those suffixes. But it wasn't enough of a mess, so it kept its native -ish suffix, that means the exact same thing. That -ish is from PIE *-iskos, and likely related to Latin -cus.
There's some awareness among English speakers that "
[$adjective]istan" means roughly "country where the[$adjective]people live", so the suffix is simply removed: Afghanistan → Afghan, Tajikistan → Tajik, etc.That -istan backtracks to Classical Persian ـستان / -istān, and it forms adjectives from placenames.
In turn it comes from Proto-Indo-European too. It's from the root *steh₂- "to stand", and also a cognate of "to stand". So etymologically "
[$adjective]istan" is roughly "where the[$adjective]people stand". (inb4 I'm simplifying it.)Note that India doesn't simply have different "languages"; it has a half dozen different language families. Like, some languages of India are closer to English, Russian, Italian etc. than to other Indian languages.
That said:
Now, why did Greek erase the /h/? I have no idea. Greek usually don't do this. But Latin already borrowed the word as "India", showing no aspiration.
So, the islands were named after Felipe II of Spain. And there's that convention that royalty names are translated, so "Felipe II" ended as "Philip II" in English. And so the "Islas Filipinas" ended as "Philippine Islands".
...but then the demonym was borrowed straight from Spanish, including its spelling: filipino → Filipino.
Note that this mess is not exclusive to English. As I hinted above, Latin already had something similar; and in Portuguese for example you see the cognates of those English suffixes (-ese/-ês, -an/-ano, -ic/-ego... just no -ish).
Except that for Portuguese simply inheriting the Latin suffixes wasn't enough, you got to reborrow them too. So you end with etymological doublets like -ego (see: Galícia "Galicia" → galego "Galician") and -co (see: Áustria "Austria" → austríaco "Austrian").
Then there's cases where not even speakers agree on which suffix applies, and it's dialect-dependent; e.g. polonês/polaco (Polish), canadense/canadiano (Canadian).
Besides afegão vs. Afeganistão (Afghan vs. Afghanistan), another example of a word where the demonym is shorter than the geographical name is inglês vs. Inglaterra (English vs. England). But it's the same deal: -terra is simply -land, so people clip it off.
There's also the weird case of "brasileiro" (Brazilian), that -eiro is a profession suffix. Originally it referred to people extracting brazilwood, then the country name was backformed from that.