Dante’s language is of fundamental importance for understanding today’s Italian.
It is not for nothing that we often refer to Dante as “father of the Italian language” (an expression that became established in the patriotic fervor of the Risorgimento). However, it is not always clear to everyone why our Poet is, rightly, defined as such. In fact, two correct observations could be made.
First: Dante’s language is quite different from today’s Italian; second: Dante was not
the first author of Italian literature, but there was an abundant literature in the Italian vernacular before him.
These observations would therefore lead one to think that the overused definition of “father of the
Italian language” is a rhetorical exaggeration, but it is not.
Dante is truly the father of Italian, for very concrete and objective reasons. In this article we will try to analyze the characteristics of Dante’s language, to then explain why it is correct to attribute to Dante the invention of the beautiful language that we still speak today.
The characteristics that distinguish Italian from other European languages (Romance and otherwise). First of all, if today we try to read an ancient text like the Divine Comedy, we will certainly find linguistic difficulties; however, these will not prevent us from understanding a good part of the text and from comprehending it, even in the most complex parts, with the help of a good commentary. In short, we will need at most a commentary and not a translation.
Well, this does not happen with the other main European languages: the French, the Spanish, the
Germans or the English will never be able to read their medieval classics if they are not accompanied by a real translation.
In fact, between Dante’s Italian and today’s (with the necessary differences) there is an evident continuity; while a French person will have to resort to a translation to read texts written in Old French, just as if it were a foreign language. Furthermore, another peculiarity of Italian concerns its exquisitely literary origin. That is, in Italy, unlike other countries, it was not a nation already formed that gave birth to a literature, but exactly the opposite.
Italian was practically born even before Italy itself! Originating from the Florentine vernacular,
it then asserted itself not for political reasons (as has normally happened elsewhere), but for purely
cultural and literary reasons.
Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Ariosto, Tasso, Leopardi, Manzoni wrote in Italian when Italy as a unitary state did not yet exist. Ours is therefore a Nation that even before being politically
united was united for centuries by a great literary tradition. Dante’s language was certainly the Florentine vernacular, which he himself identified as his “mother tongue” and which at the time was only one of the many vernaculars spoken in the peninsula.
The Florentine nature of the language spoken by Dante is also revealed to us by some passages of the Divine Comedy. In the Tenth volume of the Inferno, Farinata addresses him with these words: «O Tuscan who through the city of fire / live you go thus speaking honestly» (Inf., X, 22-23), and Count Ugolino also recognizes the poet by his speech: «I do not know who you are nor how / you came down here; but you truly seem Florentine when I hear you» (Inf., XXXIII, 10-12).Dante
Yet it must be emphasized that definitively establishing which language Dante’s is is not as obvious as it seems. In fact, unlike other ancient poets such as Petrarch or Boccaccio, we do not possess even one line of Dante’s handwritten work. There is no autograph of the poet, but his works have been handed down only through the copies present in the numerous manuscripts in circulation.
This is not an insignificant detail, since based on the geographical origin of the copyist, the linguistic patina of the manuscript could vary significantly. In fact, at the time, copyists did not have too many scruples in adapting (more or less voluntarily) the copied text to their own linguistic variant.
Therefore, it is clear that these circumstances have constituted a serious problem for all philologists who have attempted to reconstruct the original linguistic patina of Dante’s works. The characteristics of Dante’s language Despite the problems highlighted, the interference of copyists has not been able to hide the Florentine basis of Dante’s language, a Florentineness that is particularly evident in the phonetic and morphological structure.
There are many forms used by Dante that have in themselves unmistakably Florentine characteristics. Among the most important are the linguistic phenomenon of anaphonesis (absent in other cities of the same Tuscany such as Siena or Arezzo) for which we find words such as consiglio, gramigna, lingua instead of conseglio, gramegna, lengua. Another Florentine phenomenon is the suffix -aio of words such as portinaio, primaio, paio (the result of Latin suffix
–arium). But also a form no longer used such as the ending –aro for the third person plural of the past tense, to understand andaro, mandaro, restaro instead of androno, mandano, restarono.
Furthermore, it has been noted how Dante often in the Divine Comedy prefers to use linguistic forms that are a little more archaic than those used in his time, that is, forms more present in the Florentine of the last decades of the thirteenth century (the period of his youth) than in that of the fourteenth century. This perhaps to give the writing a more solemn tone; or because he remained tied to the language of his youth, since at the beginning of the fourteenth century he was already in exile outside the city.
Typically Florentine is also the strict observance of the so-called Tobler-Mussafia law that prohibited starting a sentence with an unstressed pronominal particle, which had to be in an enclitic position to the verb. To be clear: you could not start a sentence with “Si dice” or “Ti priego”, but it was mandatory with “Dicesi” and “Priegoti”. This rule has remained as a linguistic fossil in expressions still used today such as “dicesi” or “affittasi”. Dante’s language is profoundly Florentine even in the vocabulary used. This can be seen both by considering the many words of everyday use (verbs such as andare, dire, sentire, vedere; adjectives such as alto, basso, nuovo, bello; nouns such as occhio, casa, bocca, figlio; as well as prepositions and conjunctions such as di, da, con, per, ma, etc.), and
rarer and more expressive words. The latter naturally reach their maximum concentration in the first canticle, where they are useful for describing the horrors of hell.
There are Florentine words of pregnant concreteness such as broth, squeaking, grinding,
glutton, croaking, scratching, scratching, rump, barking, manure, stench, rotten, stump,
mold, muzzle, wound, tingling, pigsty, scabies, spitting, dung, sucking, sweat, brawl, but also
low-level words understandable only by Florentines such as biscazzare (to squander),
nicchiarsi (to moan softly), scuffare (to blow noisily), nor is there a lack of trivial terms such as puttana, puttaneggiare, merda, culo and much more.
Rosario Carbone
