A Venetic Sound Change * Michael Weiss 1. The Piave river is located in northeast Italy in the regions of Friuli-Venezia Giulia and the Veneto in the area once occupied by the ancient Veneti. The river is now known in Italy as il Piave (masc.) but this gender is a recent and strange innovation. After the great victory of the Italian forces over the Austrians in the second battle of the Piave from the 15–23 of June, 1918, the poet and political adventurer Gabriele D’Annunzio decided that “il fiume sacro” deserved a more heroic masculine gender and insisted that what had hitherto been la Piave should henceforth be il Piave and people followed his lead. 1 The feminine gender survives in the dialects and can be traced back at least to the 9 th century (Diplomata Caroli Magni DD Karol. 1, D 177, p. 238, l. 40 sicut Limana currit in Plauem et Plauis currit usque locum, ubi Theba defluit in ipsam) and is confirmed by the diminutive Plauicella, the name of a canal diverted from the Plauis (Diplomata Ottonis III, DD reg. imp. Germ. 2.2, D 165, p. 578, l. 4), mod. Piavesella. 2 The ancient form of the name is Plauis. The earliest attestation is in Venantius Fortunatus, Carm. Praef. 1. 21 3 (ca. 530–600): (1) praesertim quod ego impos de Rauenna progrediens Padum, Atesim, Brintam, Plauem, Liquentiam, Teliamentumque tranans. . . aut equitando aut dormi- tando conscripserim “Especially because I, a dilettante, starting out from Ravenna, swimming across the Po, the Adige, the Brenta, the Piave, the Livenza and the Tagliamento wrote while on horseback or sleeping. . . ” This attestation is followed in the next century by references in the Rauennatis Anonymi Cosmographia 4.36 (ca. 700): (2) In prouincia autem quam praediximus Venetiarum pertinente ex Italia sunt diuersa flumina, inter cetera quae dicuntur Retron [quod Redenouo dicebatur], Astago, Brinta, Sile, Liguentia, Plaue, Taliamentum. * Mark Hale might be deeply uninterested in this bit of trivia, but I am sure it would have benefited from his incisive criticism, if he had heard it. I would like to thank Miloje Despić, Jay Jasanoff, Alexander Nikolaev, Alan Nussbaum, Alexis Manaster Ramer, and Draga Zec for information and advice. 1 This change was helped along by the popular song La leggenda del Piave. See Marzo Magno 2010: 17. 2 Dante (Par. 9.27) has fixed the gender ∼ declension mismatch by making the form a feminine a -stem, Piava. For the development of the intervocalic velar before front vowel in Venetian see Rohlfs 1966: 290–1. 3 The preface was written after 576. See Brennan 1985: 56.