In 'last intervention on FIRSTonline the glottologist Daniele Vitali, who is preparing a book for goWare, revisited the “language question” describing how from Divine Comedy we have 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 and of which he discusses the dynamics between written and spoken language.
The Sicilian vernacular
The same argument that concerns Tuscan, i.e. its inadequacy to act as an illustrious language (see first part) is proposed by Dante for "the vernacular sicilian” which “absolutely does not deserve the honor of being preferred to others, because it cannot be pronounced without a certain slowness” as in “Tragemi d'este focora se t'este a bolontate”. If instead we take it "in the form in which it flows from the lips of the most illustrious Sicilians [...] it differs in nothing from the most praiseworthy vernacular".
It is clear from this presumed example of popular Sicilian (and even more so when it shows what "flows from the lips of the most illustrious Sicilians") that Dante does not cite samples of spoken language at all, but draws on sources writings to which he had had access, although his travels around Italy had also allowed him what today we would call "field findings", such as the fact that there were small differences between Bolognese villages.
In Bologna
And right up Bologna comes a surprising judgment: "the Bolognese speak the most beautiful language of all, given that they take on some elements in their vernacular from those around them", since "they take the soft and soft from the Imola people, and instead from the Ferrara and Modena people a certain harsh harshness that is typical of the Lombards".
In practice, according to the Divine Poet, the Bolognese had the advantage of being neither too feminine nor too rude; if this judgment suggests a conquest of modern dialectology, i.e. the intermediate position of Bolognese between the "Emilian" and "Romagnolian" dialects, the characterization of the former and the latter is however completely unscientific, like the judgments given previously on vernacular of the Romans or that of the Sardinians.
Despite the fact that the Bolognese is the only one spared from the harsh conditions Dante's criticisms, however, it is also declared not suitable to act as a "royal and illustrious vernacular" because, if it had been, Guido Guinizelli he would not have written “Madonna, the fine love that I bring to you”: in fact the Bolognese of the time, which Dante heard in his travels, must have already lost the final vowels and instead presented oppositions between long and short accented vowels, clear and intermediate, oral and nasal certainly absent in the poetic compositions of an author like Guinizelli, from Bologna yes, but who was inspired by Sicilian-Tuscan literary models.
The “panther” of the illustrious vernacular
In short, there is a certain confusion between written language e spoken in Dante's reasoning on dialects (as we would call them today), which however does not prevent him from writing particularly interesting things when, having eliminated all municipal vernaculars, all that remains for him to do is identify the "illustrious, cardinal, regal and curial" one in a " panther that we hunt” and “that makes its scent felt in every city, but has its home in none”.
And this vernacular is for him "that which belongs to every Italian city and does not seem to belong to any, and on the basis of which all the municipal vernaculars of Italians are measured and weighed and compared".
For Carlo Tagliavini (“The Origins of Neo-Latin Languages” 1982, p. 412), Dante “aimed at the formation of a koine Italian who took the best of what was common among all the vulgar; he dreamed of an Italian courtly language along the lines of that of the Provencals, an idiom that was not one of the 'vulgar' languages of Italy" except that, the author notes, "from theory to practice the difference is often very great and Dante, contrary in theory to the use of Tuscan, he wrote in a temperate Florentine and thus contributed more than any other Italian to making this dialect the literary language of all Italy".
A potential literary language
However, it seems to me that the Of the vulgar above all describes an evolving situation in which, on the basis of the Sicilian and Tuscan experiences, a literary language in potential, that is, a written language based on a de-provincialized version of the authors' dialect which, responding to a medieval ideal of eclecticism linguistic(Gerhard Rohlfs, “Studies and research on the language and dialects of Italy”, 1972, p. 135), was made illustrious through external contributions, Latin, Provençal, French and, especially in the Tuscan case, also from Northern Italy, with which Tuscany bordered and which had had its own literary experiences influenced by models from beyond the Alps (the "Franco-Italian" or "Franco-Venetian" literature which began in the first half of the XNUMXth century).
Writing the Divine Comedy in Florentine, in short, Dante did not simply use his own mother tongue, but linked himself to a seeds pre-existing to him, to which, as regards his Tuscan phase, he had contributed personally by participating in the Dolce stil novo.
This tradition was then consolidated by the language of Comedy, which is not in pure Florentine as we will see below, even if the mainly Florentine character of its vernacular, and the fact that Petrarca and Boccaccio also wrote poetry in this vernacular, would have made it its own fourteenth-century Florentine the written language of all of Italy (as I reported last month).
Without forgetting the aforementioned economic and political role of Florence in the Italy of the time, or the intermediate geographical position of Tuscany between North and South.
The Divine Comedy and its consequences
Dante's main work is certainly of a literary, philosophical-religious and political nature, but I think it can be said that it also reflects the author's linguistic conception.
As we know, Dante uses different registers in the three canticles: to the crude and colorful images of Hell that were so little liked by Peter Bembo (see last month's article) contrasts with the elevated and hermetic language of Paradise. Furthermore, even if his work is in Florentine, we find in it a series of non-Tuscan literary elements, such as Latinisms, Provencalisms, northernisms (see Rohlfs 1972 cit.), And also neologisms such as "indiarsi", which means "to get closer to God".
We saw last month that, precisely because of these characteristics that they disliked in Dante's work, Bembo and his followers rather indicated, as a model for the written language, the works of Francesco Petrarch e Giovanni Boccaccio, but Dante's contribution cannot be ignored, so much so that he is spoken of as the "father of the Italian language".
In fact, it was thanks to the experience of the "three Florentine crowns" that he began that "Tuscan" became the written language of reference for authors from all over Italy, starting from Emilian Ludwig Ariosto who, after having written the first versions of Orlando Furioso in a northern literary language, then published the definitive edition in 1532 in Tuscan.
We close with two observations, which arise from what has been said so far.
The “illustrious Po Valley”
I said a month ago that I find the definition of "illustrious Padano" a bit misleading with which the northern language of the first Ariosto was designated, as well as that of the work to which he referred, namely L'Inamoramento de Orlando by his predecessor and fellow countryman, the Scandianese Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441-1494).
This expression, probably coined on the example of "illustrious Sicilian" which in turn refers to Dante's "illustrious vernacular", in fact designates a rather different reality.
The "illustrious Sicilian", as we have seen, is a language obtained by taking a Sicilian-type dialect and using it for literary purposes, with the help of words borrowed from other languages that already had their own literature or by inventing, based on those same models, new words.
Please note that the starting point was a real dialect, as shown by the fact that it had an accented vocalism just 5 items against the 7 from which the evolution of most Romance languages and dialects began, including Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese.
The "illustrious Po Valley" of Boiardo and Ariosto, however, was not based on Reggio or Ferrara, nor did it look to an intermediate dialect between all those of the Po Valley: it was simply an attempt to write in a high vernacular which, however, naturally , was influenced by the literary experiences that had already been made in Northern Italy.
This is exemplified by the same title TheFalling in love de Orlando, which certainly lacks the double nn pre-accent, but there are still the final vowels which, as we have seen, must have already been missing in Emilia in Dante's time (when a de, is the Latin starting point of both the Florentine "di" and the Emilian of the time (a) d, so we can consider it either a Latinism or a Franco-Venetian influence or even a widespread element wherever in Central Italy there has not been the rise and > pre-accentuation of Florentine).
Is Florentine a dialect?
We saw above that, referring to Florentine, C. Tagliavini spoke of "dialect". This does not please some Tuscans who, due to the original Florentine origin of Italian, speak at most of Tuscan vernaculars, reinterpreting the word vernacular in the sense of "low variant of Italian".
This is questionable because, as observed a month ago, Italian has spread along the written supply chain, and not through a wildfire propagation of the Florentine on the rest of the territory (especially not the extra-Tuscan one). Thus, Italian became in a certain sense the "roof language" of the Tuscans themselves, whose "vernaculars" in the meantime continued to evolve in a way that, on a phonetic level, was not influenced excessively by the written language.
Just to give an example, Dante's Florentine should not have had the gorge, as I argued in vol. IV of Emilian dialects and Tuscan dialects. The phenomenon whereby intervocalic /k/ is pronounced as if it were one is called “gorgia”. h, both within the same word and between different words: in Florentine, and consequently in the Italian of Florence, it is therefore said in house, the dog ma the hasa, the hani, and then again amiho, formiha, uniho and so on. A similar phenomenon of phonetic reduction concerns /p, t/, therefore rapha, I understand, ditho, rotha “turnip, head, finger, wheel”.
The separation of Florentine from Italian
Well, the development of the gorge and other local characteristics in Florence when Italian was already English Language literary established shows precisely that the two languages, after the act of filiation, began to evolve altogether separately despite the fact that, due to the sociolinguistic conditions and the particular history of Tuscany, even the most pronounced Florentine remains rather similar to neutral Italian.
For these reasons, Florentine is also a legitimate object of study for the dialectology, and it is right, in the modern era and contrary to the use of past centuries, to call our common language "Italian" rather than "Tuscan". Because Tuscan understood as a dialect system, and also understood as a regional pronunciation of Italian, is ultimately the most recognizable of all.
