Italian spelling alphabet3/3/2023 In fact, the first grammar of Italian was titled Regule lingue florentine (”Rules of the Florentine language”), which Leon Battista Alberti wrote in the fourteenth century. Such writers as Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, and Boccaccio proposed the “Tuscan of Florence,” la lingua fiorentina, as a standard literary language. However, it was during the early Middle Ages that some writers tried to unify the language by popularizing their local dialects. Over centuries, the Italian territory has seen many dialects that were influenced by the domination of each area. These dialects have changed into what is now called the New Latin or romance languages. This is the reason why the first documents that have been found are lawsuits, regulations, and poems in literary Latin: only these people used the written form of the language.īecause of the presence of many different dialects, the written language was the only form comprehensible in all of the vast Roman Empire. As we mentioned during the previous lesson, the language spoken by Romans was the vulgar Latin that differs from the literary Latin, the language of upper classes and scholars. Written Italian first appears in some documents dating back to the tenth century. For this reason, Italian differs from the Spanish and French languages in usage of the accents. These stressed vowels are always positioned at the end of the word to distinguish them from those words that don’t have any accent marks because they are automatically stressed in the penultimate syllable. On the other hand, we also use the grave accent on the -e, as in caffè (”coffee”), but even on the letters -a, -i, -o, and -u to mark the stressed vowel. We write Italian using the Latin alphabet of the Roman Empire plus some acute and grave accents, such as the acute accent upon the vowel -e: for example, -é, as it happens for the word perché (”why”).
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