Why Italy
History of Italian language?
I find Italian language beautiful and I want informations why Italian is very different than Latin. Do common people in Rome in time of Roma Empire spoke Latin or that was kind of official language? Sorry for my English
Public Comments
- italian is actually very similar to latin- in the roman empire days latin was spoken, then around the 1300's Dante Alighireri mixed southern italian dialects with his native tuscan- both derived from latin- and formed what is now the widest dialect used in italy today
- Hi, there isn't only a latin used by everybody. There were a latin used mainly for the written language, and for the everyday life people spoke "volgaris" which is a sort of latin but developped differently in every area, like a dialect! The italian language are very different from the latin language we are studying in school, because that's the written latin form. every language is born from the dialect that is most used. the italian we know today developped from the dialect "fiorentino" used in Firenze that at the time was a sort of "vulgaris"( a latin dialect regarded as the most correct spoken one), and it started to take form with Dante which is called "the father of italian".
- well... imperial latin was probably an official language which was not spoked by common people, but it was not until the fall of the roman empire that things changed radically. then, barbarians came from the nord (especially Longobards and Norsemen, our Normans, and many other people from the wild north who thought that settling in a nicer-warmer place was a good bargain ) then our language suffered deeply from their influences and actually we may say that there are a lot of germanic words in italian ( and a little less coming from arabic and greek ) then, in the middle ages there were a lot of speeches in italy, which where so different that there was no understanding between them. remarkably, in the south the arabic influence was deeper (arabs ruled on sicily for 2 centuries) and in the north there soon came influences from frankish and germanic speeches (even in the south, when the normans fighted the out of sicily the italo-arab ruler dinasty and settled there and in Apulia and everywhere in southern Italy.) said this to remember the variety of different speeches, we have to state that italian is not a product of those. italian is something like an "artificial" language created by Dante Alighieri "in qualibet redolet civitatem nec cubat in ullam" (which more or less means: that stays in every town but doesn't stop in anyone) he took ispiration from the tuscany dialect (his speech) from Firenze, and the traditional poetry of stil novo full of words coming from provençal and from the sicilian poetry as well. in the same time, latin continued to be the official language and everybody in the high society knew it because it was used in every official document and for comunication,. it is with dante that dignity is conferred to "vulgar" speech, and the first important books start to be writed in this language (dante also wrote in latin "vita nova" "de monarchia" "de vulgari eloquentia" etc.. but his masterpiece is "la divina commedia" which is in vulgar). after dante came Petrarch (petrarca) and boccaccio with his "Decameron", and they both wrote in vulgar. so we may say that the italian language was born in the last.middle ages, but it remained a limited phenomenon just to be studied by the high classes (common people used their own dialects) since the formation of the kingdom of italy(1862) ...it was not though till the diffusion of radio and tv that it became a mass spoken language even among the rural people, and nowadays the dialects, "brothers" and not "parents" of the modern italian, are threatened by modern society, because so few people still learn them... so... I don't know if I have answered to your question or if I just talked about obscure things... remember that modern italiano descends from latin, but is son of dante alighieri's commedia and petrarch's canzoniere and boccaccio's decameron.
