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Italian language during the Renaissance | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4505 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 9 of 15 20 January 2014 at 1:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Iversen, what are the methods used in India and Luxembourg?
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| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4152 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 10 of 15 20 January 2014 at 9:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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What an interesting thread. Italian is fascinating!
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| 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 11 of 15 20 January 2014 at 11:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
Me! Me! Me! :P I know this was addressed to Iversen, but I think I have a good answer, at least as far as India is concerned. According to my Sanskrit teacher (an Indian in his thirties currently working on his PhD thesis in linguistics), many Indians are polyglots. In fact, if you travel a bit in India (or just go to a major city) you're bound to meet people speaking different languages. In my corner supermarket in Lisbon there were, at a certain point in time, one Pakistani who spoke Urdu, an Indian who spoke Punjabi, a Nepali who spoke - you guessed it - Nepali, and a Bangladeshi (this word actually exists) who spoke Bengali. As you may have inferred, they all managed to speak among themselves seamlessly. Sometimes, I would go in and they would be sitting looking at some Bollywood film on a laptop, regardless of their origin (I'm talking about 4 nationalities / languages and 3 religions here, folks). So, like Mr. Leonardo some 5 centuries ago, these guys also had to overcome whatever difficulties they had and work together, and that includes a smattering of languages. My teacher has also told me he thinks that, for us in Portugal, languages like Spanish, French and Italian are not really foreign. He also told me that I was his first student who had already experience in learning a foreign language (Arabic does count). I mean, for this guy, even English and German are not all that foreign to a romance language speaker! One more interesting detail: according to him, the very low prevalence of Alzheimer's disease in India is due (among others) to the fact that Indians, as polyglots, use more zones of their brain than other peoples. I don't know whether this is scientifically accurate, but he tells me that MDs are prescribing learning new languages to people over 50. Edited by Luso on 21 January 2014 at 1:47am 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Donaldshimoda Diglot Groupie Italy Joined 3884 days ago 47 posts - 72 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Russian | Message 12 of 15 23 January 2014 at 11:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think the Shakespeare comparison is reasonable...Most educated people here surely can
read some old literature, grasping at least the general meaning BUT by any means we would be able to do a 100% correct translation. Some words are there but the structure and other features really differ from the modern Italian used these days. I'm not strictly talking about medieval writers and poets (Dante, Boccaccio) or renaissance ones (Ariosto,Tasso,Macchiavelli) but even writings from late '700/800 can be quite tricky to comprehend. I'd also like to dispel myth about people from tuscany having kind of a "purer" Italian to the point their dialect would eventually let them understand old writings better. We've got many many dialects but what make you recognizable has much more to do with accent than sentence structure or other grammatical stuff. Four or five words are really all we need to understand where people come from 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 13 of 15 23 January 2014 at 11:25am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think Luso gave the same answer as I would have done, and I couldn't have formulated it better.
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| komorebi Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 3781 days ago 10 posts - 12 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Latin | Message 14 of 15 02 February 2014 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
Wow, thank you all for your information and input! It's been very helpful.
These two thoughts have been extremely helpful and quite obvious when I think about it :) Thanks for pointing them out! After all, Leonardo has lived in Florence, Milan, Rome and even France, and he travelled a lot, too. So of course, he would have been in contact with people from all sorts of places. And somehow they must have been able to talk to each other ^^ While this is by no means a guarantee that he would understand modern Italian or be understood, it makes it easier to believe that he could adapt to someone speaking a rather strange Italian (from his point of view). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| chiagnology Newbie Italy Joined 3734 days ago 11 posts - 13 votes Speaks: Italian* Studies: English, German | Message 15 of 15 11 February 2014 at 2:20am | IP Logged | |||||
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Iversen made a good point! People like Leonardo were well versed in many languages back then.
Have you read the book "The Abyss" (French: L'Oeuvre au noir/Ita: L'opera al nero) by the belgian writer Marguerite Yourcenar? Here's depicted the life of a young intellectual,Zeno, who travels across Europe during the renaissance and get acquainted with many european kings who ask him to do things no one could do. He is a fictional character but not so far removed from the real life examples. Besides being artists and scientists,they were renowed for their language skills which allowed them to be the real ambassadors in 15th-16th century. Edited by chiagnology on 11 February 2014 at 2:22am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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