Just a puzzled aside on this, and Erminia is certainly the person to
explicate the matter, but I always understood that the Florentine Italian
of Dante's day was NOT pronounced identically to modern Italian. And surely,
too, although say Montale would have no difficulty in understanding Dante on
the page there are colloquialisms and extensions of vocabulary in Montale
that Dante would have difficulty understanding.
david bircumshaw
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stuart Flynn" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2001 10:32 AM
Subject: Re: Re: Re: versículos
> On Tue, 22 May 2001 22:39:23 +0100, Robin Hamilton
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> >From: <[log in to unmask]>
> >
> >> But tell me, why do you speak like Dante? Has
> >> Italian changed so little in the past 500 years?
> >
> >I think Icelandic beats even Italian here -- there hasn't (I think) been
a
> >major linguistic change since about 1000 AD
> >
> >Robin Hamilton
>
> It is true that there has not been a major change in written Icelandic for
> a thousand years, but scholars say that the spoken form has changed
> significantly due to the change in vowel length. As a result, an
Icelandic
> person from 1000 AD could read modern Icelandic quite well and vice versa
> (allowing for the obvious additions of words for modern objects that did
> not exist in 1000 AD), but they would mutually have great difficulties in
> understanding each other when speaking.
>
> There is a quite recent short story on this precise theme by an Icelandic
> author whose name escapes me (help, anyone?) in which the great writer
> Snorri Sturluson comes to modern Iceland, confident that he will be
> understood because the written form of the language has not changed. In
> fact, no-one understands him, and they all think he is drunk or mad. As
> poets, we all have that experience every day, of course, but that is
> another matter entirely.
>
> Stuart
>
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