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Dante’s Italian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery |  | |
| bela_lugosi Hexaglot Senior Member Finland Joined 6487 days ago 272 posts - 376 votes  Speaks: English, Finnish*, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish Studies: Russian, Estonian, Sámi, Latin | Message 17 of 23 16 April 2010 at 11:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I wrote my last post on the assumption that the average language buff might not know much about ancient history and/or mythology. :) You seem to be extremely well prepared, good job indeed! Have you begun reading the Commedia in Italian?
The only real difficulty (which is not always explained in the footnotes) is probably the 14th century Italian (Florentine dialect), because if an Italian reader knows a whole lot of old-fashioned words that are similar or equal to those used by Dante 700 years ago, it doesn't mean that a foreign Italian speaker knows them, too. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| dolly Senior Member United States Joined 5823 days ago 191 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Latin | Message 18 of 23 17 April 2010 at 2:58am | IP Logged | ||
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The streaming audio at the Princeton Dante Project has "pauses" in it if you have a less than perfect internet connection. Here's a downloadable recording from the wonderful volunteers at LibriVox.
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| dmaddock1 Senior Member United States Joined 5466 days ago 174 posts - 426 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Esperanto, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 19 of 23 17 April 2010 at 3:17am | IP Logged | ||
Thanks. I'm actually more of a history buff that's only recently (re)discovered languages. I'm still a beginner in the language so I haven't started reading in Italian yet, but I do regularly look longingly at the text for motivation. :-) I am a bit worried that the typical modern Italian course will leave me unprepared in the vocabulary department. Yale's free Dante course is a great companion for first-timers. The course assumes English translation though. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Adamdm Groupie Australia Joined 5470 days ago 62 posts - 89 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Dari, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written) | Message 20 of 23 08 June 2010 at 8:01am | IP Logged | ||
Good for you! I also share similar ambitions (for various languages). It seems to me that if, in the beginning, one does not know any of the target language, then the modern and an ancient form of it are equally difficult goals. If a native Italian speaker held the ambition to read Chaucer in the original, then the anticipated degree of difficulty should be similar to that for their learning modern English - of course, with the important difference that there is a great deal more teaching material available for (popular) modern languages. I saw a lovely printed bilingual edition of the Divine Commedy in an antiquarian bookshop recently - 6 volumes - original and English for each of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Too expensive for me to justify buying it, though, especially as Italian is not currently on my list of languages to learn. If you happen to be in Sydney Australia, check out Berkelou's bookshop in Oxford Street! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Adamdm Groupie Australia Joined 5470 days ago 62 posts - 89 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Dari, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written) | Message 21 of 23 08 June 2010 at 8:06am | IP Logged | ||
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What I'd really like to be able to read of Dante's is "De vulgari eloquentia", which addresses just this subject, but Dante's viewpoint in time.
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| Jackal11 Groupie United States Joined 5695 days ago 41 posts - 45 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Latin | Message 22 of 23 09 June 2010 at 5:54am | IP Logged | ||
Dante wrote this in Latin, not Italian (ironic because, in order to get people to pay attention to his claim that Italian is superior to Latin, he had to write the work in Latin!). I think the set you saw may have been the one Singleton wrote. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Adamdm Groupie Australia Joined 5470 days ago 62 posts - 89 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Dari, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written) | Message 23 of 23 09 June 2010 at 6:35am | IP Logged | ||
Yes, but he quotes examples of contemporary "Ytalie locutio". My interest in this comes from an interest in the processes of language evolution generally, and in looking at the comparable case in the evolution of Chinese, where "Classical Chinese" had a comparable role to Latin (ie, the written language of law and literature, but people didn't actually speak it much). Anyway, here's a quote from Dan (http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/dante/vulgar.shtml) - I think I can roughly make out the meaning: "Hac forma locutionis locutus est Adam; hac forma locutionis locuti sunt omnes posteri eius usque ad edificationem turris Babel, que 'turris confusionis' interpretatur ..." 1 person has voted this message useful |
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