Italian Abbreviations

Italian – Refers to the culture of the modern nation of Italy, or in general to the cultures that (have) existed on the boot-shaped peninsula in the Mediterranean .

Italian is one of the Romance ( or Neo-Latin) languages, spoken by about 55 million people in Italy, the canton of Ticino and part of Graubünden ( Switzerland), in Yugoslav (formerly Italian) Istria and Dalmatia; further in all continents, but especially in North, South America and Africa by about 10 million Italian emigrants. Italian developed in the course of the Middle Ages from various idioms of folk Latin (Vulgar Latin), which had already been influenced by the Anterior Roman autochthonous languages ​​of Italy and later also incorporated Germanic or (relatively few) Greek and Arabic elements. In this way dialects have arisen, which were actually all a Vulgar Latin, which was spoken in different ways. Nevertheless, these dialects maintained a certain unity, also thanks to the support they found in Church Latin and the influence of classical literature. Thus, Vulgar Latin in Italy withstood even the fiercest attacks of the Germanic invasions.

For historical and geographical reasons, Latin was able to survive most purely in Tuscany. This circumstance, and the fact that the first great and brilliant writers, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, wrote their most important works in Florentine, brought about the domination of Florentine-Tuscan over all other dialects, so that Florentine (albeit also with some admixture of other dialectal elements) has become Italian.

The other dialects, however, lived and survived and were able to develop independently because of the political divide of Italy and even had some very important poets (e.g. Belli, Trilussa and Pascarella in the dialect of Rome, Di Giacomo in Neapolitan, Porta in the Milanese, Barbarani in Veronese etc).

The Italian dialects can be divided into four groups: in the north, the Italo-Gaul dialects (Lombardian, Piedmontese and Ligurian) and, with a Celtic substratum, Emilian-Romagnol, form a group. Another group are the various Venetian dialects. The third group consists of the Middle Italian dialects (ie the various Tuscan, those of Umbria, Latium and Marche) and Corsican. Finally, the southern dialects: Neapolitan, Abruzzese, Calabro-Sicilian and Apulian. On their own are Sardinian, Franco-Provençal and Ladin (Graubünden and Friuli).

The first language documents (apart from a few words in notarial documents from the 8th and 9th centuries) date from 960—964 (Charters of Capua, etc.). It is remarkable that among the Romance languages ​​Italian has changed the least, so that today one can read and understand a text from the 12th or 13th century without too much effort. The Italians have always interfered with their language. The question of whether Italian should be a kind of general civilized language, made up of elements of the different dialects, or whether one predominant dialect (ie Florentine-Tuscan) has occupied Italians for centuries. Dante has already addressed the problem in his De vulgari eloquentia, in which he was also the first to classify the Italian dialects.

The polemic continued in the 17th-18th century (the puristi or purists, with Baretti ao) until Alessandro Manzoni (*1785, ♱1873) gave a solution to the question through his language-renewing books that still prevails today, namely that not only the literature, but also the language use of the (civilized) Florentines must be decisive for Italian. Bertoni added the language of Rome when he published with Ugolini his spelling rules and the glossary of Italian (Prontuario di pronuncia e di ortografia, 1939). [Prof. Dr. E. Peternolli] LITT. G. Bertoni, Profilo ling. d’Italia (1940); W. von Wartburg, La posizione della lingua italiana 91940); W. Meyer-Lübke, Gramm. storico-comparata d. lingua it. ed. dialetti toscani (1941); TA Ugolini, Testi antichi italiani (1942); G. Rohlfs, Hist. Grammar of it. Sprache (1949-54); c. Battisti en G.Alessio, Etymological dictionary of the language it. (1950-57); G.Devoto, History profile ling. ital. (1953); E. Monaci, Crestomazia it. of the first centuries (1955); B.Migliorini, History of the language it. (1960); M.Vitale, The question of language (1960); TT.de Mauro, History ling. of Italy reunited (193); T.de Mauro, Linguistic history of united Italy (1970); Z.Mulgačic, Introduction to the study of the Italian language (1971); G. Rohlfs, Studies and research on the language and dialects of Italy (1972).

List of Acronyms Related to Italian