Mark, no, I never said such a think, and of course I could envere have
stated such a thing about "superiority" of one language over the other.
This is not what I said. You also din not previously wrote what you are
writing now about Manzoni...
First of all, I am not Florentien, I am from Napoli (a region which like
all the other Italian regions, in spite of the Unification, still keep
afresh and alive its dialect which has its own vocabulary and grammar, as
all the other italic dialects, like the SICILIAN: a phenoemnon that makes
all Italian bilingual). Naples and Sicily have had intellectuals and
writers of great stature, but beyond popular folk songs and theatre plays,
no work of Philosophy, Rethoric, Politics, Criticisms has have been written
in Neapolitan after the coming in disuse of Latinate forms. And this has
nothing to do with the Unification or the fact that educations had to rely
of a national syllabus. Century before Mazzini, Cavour and garibaldi came
to decide that enough was enough of the Borbons around in the Reign of the
Two Sicily, and went to liberate the oppressed Southern Regions, to make
one country, the neutral official language of all these regions had already
settled itself on the model of the Florentine. And this is not because
Florentien was superior, far from it...all languages are equally
noble...and potentially strilking...depends whod eals with it and what
achievements are made and what texts remain and are spread.
So, the sentence trhat follows is not to be attroibuted to me. Also, it was
not emrely fprtunate that Florentien became popular as to impose itself as
such: not merely fortunate.....(Florence had great men who had already been
as successful as late Garibaldi and his army to unify the country's
literary production under a linguistic point of view ).
>But there's something truly disturbing here. Florentine dialect in Dante's,
>or Manzoni's, or our own time was not inherently superior to all of Italy's
>other dialects, as you seem to feel, nor was it uniquely useful for
>expression, it was merely more fortunate. I can certainly understand loving
>one's own dialect. That doesn't make it better.
>
>I remember that Dante toyed with writing the Commedia in Provencal. Had he
>done so Florentine might have become the normative dialect of Italian or
>not. Some dialect or other would have, but not until the movement for
>unification required that there be one.
>
>Mark
>
>At 12:38 AM 5/24/2001 +0100, you wrote:
>>I was taught your version of the history of the language (with the
>>>difference that at the University of Toronto they told me that the
>>>acceptance of the Florentine dialect as normative for Italian was due to
>>>the influence of I Promessi Sposi), but I'm curious what evidence there
is
>>>for the stability of the pronunciation of vowels, given that we have no
>>>voice recordings from Dante's time.
>>
>>
>>
>>....Toronto is a wonderful university but literary informations and/or
>>notions sometimes travel in an odd way:
>>the authentic story is this: When Alessandro Manzoni wrote his I Promessi
>>Sposi, being "Lombardo" (from the region Lombardia where Milan is), and
>>therefore talking a language affected by Austro-Hungaric influences,
before
>>publication, he more or less stated (exactly) this: "I shall go to clean
my
>>work in the waters of the Arno river...” , a quite striking statement
that
>>became legendary because Manzoni was such an intellectual and a master of
>>style that this modest submissive attitude towards the classics has always
>>been used by teachers in school to stimulate the students to do the
same….
>>
>>Manzoni meant to say that he felt the need to refine his style on the
model
>>of the classics provided by the Florentine writers....
>>
>>Therefore, it is not I Promessi Sposi a model for Italian, but vice-versa
>>it was the Florentine and Florentine writers the model for Manzoni's I
>>Promessi Sposi.
>>
>>Now, I wonder who taught you this twisted information....
>>
>>: )
>>
>>
>> (Ah, I have such a sore-throat tonight...I went for the third time to
>>watch "Capitan Corelli's Mandolin " here in Oxford and I really fell in
>>love with Nicolas Cage, cried and wanted to heal his wounds...)
>>
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