In the last speech the glottologist Daniele Vitali, who is preparing a book for goWare, reviewed the “language question” describing how from the Divine Comedy we arrived at today's Italian. To better understand the period and place of birth of the national language, however, we need to look towards De vulgari eloquentia and even before that, to the factual situation from which Dante started. It is here that Vitali takes us to the relationship between Italian and Tuscan which is at the origin of our language.
Here is what Vitali writes.
. . .
The language of oc and the language of oil
When we study De vulgari eloquentia at school, it is explained to us that Dante was aware of the common descent between the language of oc, the language of oil and the language of yes. While it seems obvious to all Italian schoolchildren what the language of yes would be, the teachers specify that the langue d'oïl corresponds toOld French, whose literature begins with the chansons de geste in the second half of the XNUMXth century, while the langue d'oc is the Provencal, whose literature is even earlier: flourishing in particular in the XNUMXth century and then in the XNUMXth, it gave us the theme ofcourtly love who would soon also inspire the poets of the north of the Iberian Peninsula and Italy.
From "lingua d'oc", where "oc" is precisely the word used to say "yes", comes the more correct Occitan term. In fact, Provençal would be just one of the dialects of this language, now almost erased from French but which was once spoken, albeit without a unified form, in almost all of southern France, that is, from an Alpine strip of Piedmontese territory to the Ocean Atlantic, including Marseille, Toulouse and Bordeaux.
The function of Occitan poetry
The function of the Occitan poetry with its troubadours it was fundamental for European culture: this is the first time in which literature is written in a language other than Latin, setting an example that would be followed over time by the other emerging Romance languages. After the lingua d'oc, in fact, it was the turn of the lingua d'oïl (ancestor word of today's oui), and then that of yes.
But before moving on to Italy I would like to point out, in a spirit of service, that oïl is pronounced /'ɔj/, not /o'il/ as they tell us at school, and much less /'wal/ as I heard some time ago: it is true that fois, moi, roi are pronounced /'fwa, 'mwa, 'ʀwa/, but the term oïl had a different history compared to the phonetic process that led to today's /wa/, and in fact the umlaut on the i (also later than Dante, who wrote “oil”) serves precisely to indicate a value different from that of the digraph oi.
The Sicilian poetic school
We are in the first half of the thirteenth century, and he is at the head of the Kingdom of Sicily Frederick II of Swabia, who is also at the head of the Holy Roman German Empire. The arts flourished at the court of Palermo: we owe it to the Sicilian School the first opera production in the vernacular in Italy, and it was love poetry, following the example of the Provençal troubadours.
The poets of the Sicilian court they were generally officials of the Kingdom who delighted in writing poetry, and Frederick himself left us some compositions. Despite having taken the theme of courtly love from the troubadours, the Sicilian poets innovated in various aspects: they separated the recitation of their poems from musical accompaniment, they invented the sonnet, and above all they wrote in a language that literary historians call “illustrious Sicilian”.
This term indicates a Sicilian-based novel language, therefore with 5 accented vowels, but open to external influences: beyond the inevitable Latinisms, the contribution of Provencal and French, the great cultural languages of Christian Europe of the time, should be noted, to which must be added the ability to coin terms unpublished. In short, it was not what we would consider today dialect poetry, but of the creation of a new literary language.
With this experience, too Italy thus saw the beginning of its own vernacular literature, whose arrival in Tuscany would have had important consequences.
Tuscany in the Middle Ages
In the early Middle Ages, Tuscany found itself in Lombard kingdom with capital in Pavia, therefore together with Northern Italy and politically separated from Rome and Central Italy, which had remained under the Byzantines. Within the Kingdom there was a Duchy of Tuscia with the main city Lucca, connected to Pavia by the Via Francigena (which, from Central Europe, led to Rome). And Lucca remained the main city of the region for a long time.
However, it began in the late Middle Ages the rise of Florence, which became a municipality in the XNUMXth century. The city became prosperous thanks to its craftsmanship, banks and the river port, which allowed growing trade with the rest of Europe. The countryside is subjugated, the urban surface expands and the population increases, with the formation of a rich mercantile class of bourgeois extraction whose fates are increasingly intertwined with those of the ancient aristocracy: in the XNUMXth century, the rise of Florence it became unstoppable despite the clashes between factions (the Guelphs and the Ghibellines) and the hostility of nearby cities, such as Siena and Pisa.
In short, the conditions were favorable for something to happen: as the experience of Palermo demonstrates, the arts and letters blossom where there are favorable social and economic conditions, and they certainly were in rich Florence. So, something happened.
The Dolce stil novo
La Sicilian poetry reached the rest of Italy already in the time of Frederick, and the northern and Tuscan scribes began to work so that it could circulate.
Most of the copies that have come down to us are Tuscan, and have therefore undergone adaptations of the vowel system, leading to 7 accented vowels: the Sicilian poems, in which aviri rhymed with serviri, cruci with luci and nui with him, were retranscribed distinguishing between " have” and “serve,” “cross” and “light,” “we” and “he,” which created imperfect rhymes.
The example of Sicilian poetry, albeit phonetically reworked, contributed to the birth of Dolce stil novo, first in Bologna with Guido Guinizelli (1235-1276), and then in Tuscany with Dante Alighieri (c. 1265-1321), Guido Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni and so on (do you remember “Guido, I'd like you and Lapo and I"?).
Stilnovism was characterized by a refined and courtly language and, therefore, continued the construction of a new literary language begun by the Sicilian poets. This time however, as the new style was developed mainly in Florence, the starting linguistic model was the Tuscan one.
The eloquence of the vernacular
Between 1303 and the first months of 1305, Dante wrote De vulgari eloquentia, which the cliché considers to be a text on linguistics and dialectology and is instead a treatise on medieval philosophy relating to the language to be used in an Italy which the author conceived as a country distinct from the others and which needed political guidance (as we know from subsequent De monarchia, in his conception it had to deal with imperial authority, since the papal one was better concerned only with spiritual matters).
Written in Latin because it was aimed at the scholars of his time, De vulgari begins by talking about birth of language with Adam, of its division at the time of the Tower of Babel and then further up to the languages spoken in the Europe of his time, still not all well delineated and not always equipped with a definitive name, as shown by its own terminology, with the aforementioned languages d'oc, d'oïl and yes.
The different vernaculars
Dante observes that the vernaculars, i.e. the idioms other than Latin, are different from each other not only from France to Italy, but also in Italy itself, and differentiates between the right and left part of the Apennines: “in fact the Paduans speak differently than the Pisans”. He is then surprised that people who live closer, such as Milanese and Veronese, Romans and Florentines, and even "the Bolognese of Borgo San Felice and the Bolognese of Strada Maggiore" disagree in their speech.
Beyond the classificatory oddities (right and left rather than North, Centre, South and extreme South as modern linguistics does), Dante correctly observes that the differences are due, in addition to the distance in space, also as time passes, since only "men who in terms of judgment are not far from beasts believe that the civil life of the same city has always taken place under the banner of an invariable language".
“Grammar” and the vernaculars
To overcome all these causes of lack of intercomprehensibility, states Dante, “grammar” was invented (i.e. Latin), which he therefore believed to be subsequent to the vernaculars. At that point he tells us that Italy has "at least fourteen vulgar" but that, if we also wanted to calculate the "secondary and even minor varieties, it would happen that we arrive, even in this very small corner of the world, not only at a thousand varieties, but at an even higher number".
“In so much dissonance”, the author sets out “on the trail of most dignified language in Italy, the illustrious language", and it does so by exclusion: "that of the Romans - which is not even a language but rather a squalid jargon - is the ugliest of all the Italian vernaculars", after which "the inhabitants of the Marca Anconitana are soundly rejected ” and “the Spoletini”, then “Milanese and Bergamo”, “Aquileiesi and Istriani”, the “Casentinesi”, and again the “Sardinians” who “are the only ones to be devoid of their own vernacular, instead imitating the grammar as they do monkeys with men: and in fact they say domus nova and dominus meus”.
The vindication of the illustrious vernacular
Nor should one think that his judgment was more tender with the "Toscani who, dazed by their madness, have the air of claiming within themselves the honor of the illustrious vernacular", but the Florentines, Pisans, Lucchesi, Senesi and Aretini are “stunned by their foul language”, even if “someone in our opinion has experienced the excellence of the vernacular, I mean Guido, Lapo and another, all from Florence”, to which Cino Pistoiese adds.
In short, Dante's reasoning is that few "most honored individuals" have turned their backs on their speech (including him, who can be recognized when he says "Guido, Lapo and another"), while this is cultivated by the other Tuscan authors, whose writings they are "not of curial level, but only municipal": this would precisely demonstrate the inadequacy of Tuscan to act as an illustrious language.
