Spanish, Old Sicilian and others, it has been argued that Old Sardinian was alone in licensing verb-initial word order (V1) as the generalized word order, while the others had V1 only as a marked alternative. Vocabulary comparison with other Romance languages Varieties Historically, the Sardinians have always been a small-numbered population scattered across isolated cantons, sharing demographic patterns similar to the neighbouring Corsica; as a result, Sardinian developed a broad spectrum of dialects over the time. Starting from Francesco Cetti's description in the 18th century, Sardinian has been presented as a pluricentric language, being traditionally subdivided into two standardized varieties spoken by roughly half of the entire community: the dialects spoken in North-Central Sardinia, centered on the orthography known as Logudorese (su sardu logudoresu), and the dialects spoken in South-Central Sardinia, centered on another orthography called Campidanese (su sardu campidanesu). All the Sardinian dialects differ primarily in phonetics, which does not considerably hamper intelligibility; the view of there being a dialectal boundary rigidly separating the two varieties of High Sardinian has been in fact subjected to more recent research, which shows a fluid dialect continuum from the northern to the southern ends of the island. The dualist perception of the Sardinian dialects, rather than pointing to an actual isogloss, is in fact the result of a psychological adherence to the way Sardinia was administratively subvidided into a Caput Logudori (Cabu de Susu) and a Caput Calaris (Cabu de Jossu) by the Spanish. The dialects centered on the "Logudorese Sardinian model" are generally considered more conservative, with the Nuorese dialect of Sardinian (su sardu nugoresu) being deemed the most conservative of all. They have all retained the classical Latin pronunciation of the stop velars (kena versus cena, "supper"), the front middle vowels (compare Campidanese iotacism, probably from Byzantine Greek) and assimilation of close-mid vowels (cane versus cani, "dog" and gattos versus gattus, "cats"). Labio-velars become plain labials (limba versus lingua, "language" and abba versus acua, "water"). I is prosthesized before consonant clusters beginning in s (iscala versus Campidanese Sardinian scala, "stairway" and iscola versus scola, "school"). An east-west strip of villages in central Sardinia, mainly in the central part of the Province of Oristano, and central part of the Province of Nuoro, speaks a transitional group of dialects (su sardu de mesania). Examples include is limbas (the languages) and is abbas (the waters). The dialects centered on the Campidanese model, spreading