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Italian language during the Renaissance | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| komorebi Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 3781 days ago 10 posts - 12 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Latin | Message 1 of 15 17 January 2014 at 11:23am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't have any background in the Italian language nor its older and/or dialectal forms.
So I hope, someone can help me with a very specific problem ^^ How much differs the modern Italian language from the Italian during the Renaissance? To be more precise, the Italian spoken in Florence around 1500. Or a bit more hypothetical: Assuming Leonardo da Vinci met someone from our modern time, would he be able to understand him? And vice versa? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SnowManR1 Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5282 days ago 53 posts - 95 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 2 of 15 17 January 2014 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Dante Alighieri is considered "The Father" of the Italian language and lived before the Renaissance period. So to answer your question, yes, you could have a conversation in Italian with Leonardo if you reframed from using slang or colloquial expressions. Those forms of expression and idioms "should" be the only thing that would create difficulty with communicating.
I'm writing all of this on memory, but I believe Italian was a direct decendant of Latin without a language sandwiched between them. Also if you're interested you should read Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy", which consists of three parts. It's amazing! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Zetko86 Heptaglot Newbie Italy Joined 4303 days ago 18 posts - 33 votes Speaks: Slovenian, Italian*, English, Serbo-Croatian, FrenchB1, GermanB2, Russian Studies: Japanese, Hungarian | Message 3 of 15 17 January 2014 at 4:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would say that it wouldn't be harder that understanding Shakespeare for an English-speaking person. I remember I had to read some pages of the Storia d'Italia by Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540) for an exam at University and I had no problem at all understanding it, although the sentences are made in an unusual way for someone who speaks contemporary Italian. Dante on the other hand it's quite harder since he wrote his works two centuries earlier. Edited by Zetko86 on 17 January 2014 at 4:31pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4462 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 4 of 15 17 January 2014 at 4:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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I guess it would be easier for people from Tuscany since the local dialect is full of words and expressions which sound dated or even obsolete in other parts of Italy. Edited by Medulin on 17 January 2014 at 4:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4459 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 5 of 15 17 January 2014 at 5:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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Don't forget that back then Italian wasn't Italian (but more so than English wasn't
English). So if you travelled a few hundred miles in your horse and cart and pulled up in a random town you might have found the local dialect to be an almost completely different language. My mum's generation would speak dialect at home and amongst friends. I guess that 100 years before that it would have been dialect all the time except maybe for school (assuming you were lucky enough to get to go ...). So when you roll up in C14 Florence, pick someone well dressed to speak to :-) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 5855 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 6 of 15 17 January 2014 at 9:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm currently studying Italian and some of my work has been connected with the evolution of the language. When you couple this with half a dozen teachers from different regions of the country, you start to have an idea of the history / geography combo.
If someone from Italy reads this, please don't be too harsh. :) The event known to us as fall of the Roman Empire was more a progressive dissolution of structures, not a single catastrophic event. Populations all over the former Empire suffered all kinds of fates: some survived in relative isolation, while some were invaded by barbarians (foreigners). Of the latter, some resisted well, some managed to absorb the invaders, and some were completely subjugated. The people of the Italian peninsula itself were subjected to all kinds of distress (they were even raided by the Vandals, who had occupied the lands of the former Carthaginian Empire in North Africa - the irony!). In Sardinia alone, we have two major dialects, one being very close to Latin (in the North) and the other having lots of Phoenician and Punic influences (in the South). When the moment came to choose / find / elect a national language (just 150 years ago), the decision was made to opt for the variety of the Tuscan dialect spoke in the city of Florence (not at 100%, but almost). It was a political decision, based on the fact that the holy trinity of Italian classical writers (Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca) had used that same dialect to write in several centuries before. They were not current texts, but at least they wouldn't sound outright foreign. By the late Middle Ages / Early Renaissance, the dialects were arguably not all that different. I guess I may make a small contrast here: more than a century later, Camões wrote a bit in Spanish and Cervantes in Portuguese. No "biggie" there. In conclusion, Leonardo wouldn't have much trouble communicating with an Italian of today, not only because he was a somewhat smart guy (:P), but also because all of his life he would have dealt with all sorts of Italian dialects. 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Zetko86 Heptaglot Newbie Italy Joined 4303 days ago 18 posts - 33 votes Speaks: Slovenian, Italian*, English, Serbo-Croatian, FrenchB1, GermanB2, Russian Studies: Japanese, Hungarian | Message 7 of 15 20 January 2014 at 12:24pm | IP Logged | ||
In certain parts of Italy (like for instance in the town in which I live) dialects are still quite alive and I still speak in dialect to many friends of mine of my same age range (25-30 years old) though I generally speak in standard Italian to people I don't know well.
Beside that I'd like to add that some Italian dialect are quite different from standard Italian to the point of being mutually unintelligible and are generally considered different languages (for example: Friulian Sardinian Sicilian) Edited by Zetko86 on 20 January 2014 at 12:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6497 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 15 20 January 2014 at 1:07pm | IP Logged | ||
Once upon a time we had a thread here at HTLAL about the dialects of Northern Italy, and I remember that I read through a number of texts from different periods and places, mostly from Venezia, but also some from around Milano. Actually the linguists have categorized the lingo of the area around Milano back as a distinct language ("Gallo-Italian") which bridges (or maybe rather bridged) the gab between the Occitan and the Italian dialect bundles. The vernacular spoken in Venezia (Venet(i)an) also pointed in the direction of Romansh dialects or languages like Friulian, which didn't make it easier. For instance I dug up some original texts by Ruzante (ca.1496-1542), which were harder to understand than for instance Decameron by the Florentine author Boccaccio, even though these were several centuries older. However already the plays of Goldoni, which ostensibly were written in local vernacular Venetian, are much easier to read. So it isn't a general rule that dialects (or whatever we call them) in Italy were closer together in the old days before the risorgimento. Even further back (in 2006) we had a thread about the language used in Italian operas, and according to my research back then we had to go up to Puccini (or rather his librettists) to see the gap between operatic Italian and normal human Italian diminish. But even the language in Monteverdi's opera Orfeo from around 1600 was easier to understand than the Northern Italian texts I mentioned above. So how come that a man like Leonardo could move around in Italy and even to France without ever taking a language course? OK, smart guy and all that, but probably those who travelled in 1500 had to be more adept at understand different ways of speaking, and they knew that they would starve unless they really did something to learn the languages of the places they settled. Right now I'm thinking about people like Roland Lassus from Mons in modern Belgium, who emigrated to Italy and transmogriphed into Orlando di Lasso. How did he learn Italian? Well, he went there in the company of an Italian at the age of 12 - barely within the limit of what we accept as childhood. Later he settled in Munich, where he died in 1594, leaving vocal music to texts in Italian, German, French and presumably also Dutch, though none of those in Dutch have survived. So those who did travel around centuries ago somehow did manage to learn the languages they needed, but most people probably never left their home turf and certainly never watched TV, and their language skills must have been limited to those languages and dialects that were represented in their local area. But they apparently managed to communicate with itinerant salespersons and other foreigners in those languages /dialects without the help of a Berlitz guide or course, using the same methods as people in places like India or Luxemburg today. Edited by Iversen on 11 February 2014 at 12:35pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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