The Italian Language: A Window Into Italy’s Tradition and Origins

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If you’re keen about historical past and languages, the historical past of the Italian language is among the most fascinating tales you’ll encounter. Italian has its roots in Latin and older native tongues.

Prepare for a journey into one of the crucial unique linguistic sagas, that includes historical Romans, invading barbarians, and a gaggle of poets who reworked the vernacular Florentine into essentially the most romantic language of all of them: the Italian language.

The place did the Italian language come from?

Italian is among the Romance languages, together with Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Romanian. All of them stem from the Latin spoken through the Roman Empire. So, our journey to find the origins of the Italian language should begin with the instances of historical Rome.

To start with, there was Latin

Latin was a language spoken within the fashionable Italian area of Lazio (the place Rome is), which belongs to the huge Indo-European language household, like Germanic languages, Greek, and lots of others.

It grew to become broadly spoken because of the affect of the Roman Empire, and it was by no means the static language we think about these days. From the start, the Romans absorbed the tradition and lots of phrases of the populations they conquered.

For instance, they took all Greek gods and made them their very own. For that reason, the spoken language within the Roman period had traits from the Etruscans, Siculi, historical Greeks, Gauls, and lots of extra. Remember that the Roman Empire stretched from Spain to the Center East, and from England to North Africa!

Many Latin phrases from that period survived into fashionable Italian by way of literary custom and on a regular basis utilization.

From barbarians to pizza

Within the third century, Germanic tribes from the North of Europe began migrating into Roman territory. Romans known as them barbari (barbarians) due to the damaged Latin they spoke, which the Romans thought-about babbling. After the Western Roman Empire collapsed, barbarian kingdoms grew to become the primary authorities within the Early Center Ages. 

The newcomers introduced their vocabulary into on a regular basis conversations and reshaped many native phrases with their pronunciation. Some of the well-known examples of Italian phrases inherited from this era is pizza, initially pita bread, reshaped by Lombard pronunciation, turning the “t” right into a “z.” 

The Lombards had a very vital affect on fashionable Italy. They had been a tribe from northwestern Germany, who dominated Italy from AD 568 to 774, and contributed many phrases referring to struggle and elements of the physique (yep, they clearly liked preventing!).

Have you ever seen how acquainted a few of these Italian phrases look? English is a Germanic language with many Italian cognates (phrases with the identical root and that means). This similarity comes partly from the affect of historical Germanic languages on Italian, and partly from Latin, which entered English by way of the Previous French spoken by the Normans after they conquered England in 1066.

The rise of the volgari (vernaculars)

After the autumn of the Western Roman Empire (AD 476), Italy went by way of a political rollercoaster, continuously reshaping inside borders. Barbarian invasions, impartial city-states known as comuni, maritime republics, and native lordships: This was the lengthy historic interval known as the Center Ages, which lasted till Christopher Columbus’s journey to America (1492).

Latin was nonetheless the official language of literature, philosophy, and legislation. But, in on a regular basis life, individuals began talking native variations of it, which ended up changing into the volgari medievali (medieval vernaculars). These languages had been so totally different that folks from Milan would wrestle to grasp somebody from Bologna or Naples.

Dante and the start of Italian

Vernaculars first appeared in written kind in authorized paperwork and later within the poetry of the Sicilian College, a literary motion on the court docket of Emperor Frederick II.

Nonetheless, the true basis of Italian tradition was laid in 14th-century Florence by Dante Alighieri. Dante was the primary to mirror critically on the function of vernacular languages. In his unfinished work, De Vulgari Eloquentia (On the Eloquence of the Vernacular), he even analyzed 14 Italian volgari searching for a “noble” vernacular able to dealing with elevated topics.

Between 1306 and 1321, he made one thing fully new: He wrote a 14,233-verse poem within the Florentine vernacular, with a touch of Latin, and new phrases he invented. The guide was, after all, the Divine Comedy, essentially the most well-known guide of Italian literature.

Within the poem, Dante coined many phrases which are nonetheless used in the present day, like:

• molesto (annoying)
• fertile (fertile)
• mesto (unhappy)
• contrappasso (to endure the alternative), a type of punishment from Inferno

He additionally created many Italian expressions that, by way of the centuries, grew to become Italian idioms.

• Stai fresco! (actually: keep chilly)
  • Immediately, this can be a sarcastic method to say, “That may by no means occur.” Within the Inferno, it referred to the punishment for traitors frozen in everlasting ice.
• Galeotto fu… (Galeotto was…): Nonetheless used when referring to the matchmaker or spark of a love story or vital occasion.
  • The unique line described how the guide of Lancelot and Guinevere’s romance sparked Paolo and Francesca’s forbidden love in Dante’s Inferno.
• Bel Paese (stunning nation): A typical method to consult with Italy in the present day. Dante’s verse mentioned: del bel paese là dove’ l sì suona, which suggests “the attractive nation (Italy) the place the phrase sì (“sure” within the Italian language) is spoken.
• Senza infamia e senza lode (with out infamy and with out reward/unremarkable).

After Dante: The codification of Italian

Dante opened the door, however Petrarch and Boccaccio carried the torch. Petrarch’s Canzoniere set the usual for Italian lyric poetry, whereas Boccaccio’s Decameron supplied a mannequin for prose.

In 1525, the Renaissance humanist Pietro Bembo codified their works into the inspiration of a unified literary language, establishing Florentine because the benchmark for Italian. Nonetheless, the controversy continued till the twentieth century, when linguistic homogenization lastly started. There’s even a time period for this century-long dialogue: questione della lingua (actually, the language query).

How is Italian totally different from Latin?

Italian slowly advanced from Latin, however there was by no means a clear break between the 2. For instance, phrases might finish with “-m” or “-s” in Latin, whereas Italian phrases by no means finish with a consonant. However this shift was already taking place in Roman instances, when native audio system typically “forgot” these endings in on a regular basis speech.

Italian has developed substantial variations from Latin.

1. From declensions to phrase order

One of many greatest modifications was the lack of declensions. In Latin, nouns and adjectives modified their endings relying on their grammatical function. Italian dropped this technique, so phrase order grew to become important to understanding Italian phrases.

• Latin: phrase order doesn’t matter, as a result of the suffixes “-us” and “-am” make the topic and object clear:
  • Marcus amat Claudiam. = Claudiam amat Marcus. = Claudiam Marcus amat. → Marco loves Claudia.
• Italian: phrase order modifications the that means:
  • Claudia ama Marco. = Claudia loves Marco.
  • Marco ama Claudia. = Marco loves Claudia.

2. Sound modifications

Italian pronunciation developed from Latin by way of a number of sound modifications:

• Latin has 10 vowels (ă, ā, ĕ, ē, ĭ, ī, ŏ, ō, ŭ). The Italian language simplified them into seven vowels (a, e, i, o, u, with open/closed variants for “e” and “o”).
• Grouped consonants in Latin grew to become fashionable Italian double consonants.
  • “mn” → “nn” 
  • “ct “→ “tt” 
• Some diphthongs are created and dissolved.
  • “ĕ” and “ŏ”  → “ie” and “uo”
  • “ae” and “oe” → “e”
  • “au” → “o”

3. Morphological modifications

The construction of phrases additionally shifted from Latin into Italian:

• New gender guidelines in Italian: The neuter Latin gender disappeared.
• Italian articles had been born: Particular articles come from the Latin pronoun ille, and indefinite articles come from unus (one).
  • Il bambino mangia. = The boy is consuming.
  • un bambino = a boy
• Italian verbs gained the brand-new conditional temper.

4. Modifications within the vocabulary

Many Italian phrases come from on a regular basis Latin, which was extra expressive than Classical Latin. In the meantime, Classical Latin survived in technical fields like science, legislation, or literature, not simply in Italian, however in English too!

• ēquus (horse, Classical Latin) → equino (equine), equitazione (horse driving)
• caballus (workhorse/gelding in late Latin, in all probability from Celtic or Gaulish) → cavallo (horse)

How is Italian totally different from different Romance languages?

All Romance languages descend from Latin, and this frequent origin is clear. Take a look at the sentence “The sky is blue.”

• Latin: Caelum caeruleum est.
• Italian: Il cielo è azzurro. 
• Spanish: El cielo es azul. 
• French: Le ciel est bleu. 
• Portuguese: O céu é azul.
• Romanian: Cerul este albastru.

However in Italy, issues had been a bit extra sophisticated. A number of native vernaculars developed facet by facet, all with their very own options. What we now name Italian wasn’t merely the pure evolution of Latin: It was constructed, standardized, and elevated from a type of vernaculars. Fascinating, proper?

Might one other dialect have turn into Italian as an alternative of Florentine?

Technically, sure. Venetian was additionally thought-about a powerful candidate, however Venice lacked the extraordinary literature of Florence, and Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio had been imitated by non-Florentian writers, giving Florentine writers the sting.

Nonetheless, fashionable Italian owes loads to Venetian. Some phrases you’ll be taught in your Italian language classes come straight from it:

• s’ciavo (actually: slave or servant, used as a greeting in Venice) → ciao (hello)
• Pantalone (a preferred Venetian theater character) → pantaloni (pants)

Even the phrase grazie (“thanks” in Italian) comes from Latin, however doubtless reached fashionable Italian by way of Venetian utilization.

Languages vs. dialects in fashionable Italy

Speaking about languages vs. dialects in Italy is difficult, and typically even emotional.

When Italy grew to become a unified nation in 1861, everybody spoke their native dialect. Due to this, most Italians had been labeled as illiterate in the event that they solely spoke their very own vernacular. It took over a century for normal Italian to unfold throughout the nation, thanks primarily to obligatory training and tv.

Immediately, touring round Italy, you’ll nonetheless hear individuals typically talking the trendy descendants of these outdated vernaculars. Formally, solely two of them are acknowledged as separate minority languages: Sardo (Sardinian), a Romance language spoken in Sardinia, and Friulano (Friulian), a Rhaeto-Romance language from the area Friuli Venezia Giulia. 

Right here is an instance of how totally different these two proverbs from Sardinia and Friuli are in Italian:

• Sardinian: Sa domo est pitticca, su coru est mannu.
  • In Italian: La casa è piccola, il cuore è grande. = The home is small, however the coronary heart is massive.
• Friulian: Soreli a San Martin, al dà un invièr cianìn. 
  • Se c’è il sole il giorno di San Martino, l’inverno sarà rigido. = Whether it is sunny on Saint Martin’s Day, winter can be harsh.

All the opposite vernaculars are categorized as Italian dialects, regardless that they don’t truly stem from Italian. Many have their very own grammar techniques and wealthy literary traditions (like Sicilian or Neapolitan), sound very totally different from normal Italian, and have developed their very own dialects.

Steadily requested questions concerning the Italian language and its origin

Acquired extra questions buzzing in your head? Don’t fear, we’ve received the solutions.

Many be taught Italian as a result of they love tradition and wish to journey to Italy. Classical music can also be very tied to the Italian language. Plus, Italian is among the simpler languages to be taught. With a stable methodology and the tips about find out how to communicate Italian, you could be the “plus one” of the 85 million Italian audio system who take pleasure in this stunning language day-after-day.