Word-level glossary of medieval Tuscan forms in Dante, from archaic spellings to lost verb tenses.
When I first opened the Commedia, I thought my Italian was broken. Every third page threw unfamiliar verb forms at me—past tenses that didn’t match my textbook, contractions I’d never seen, conjugations that looked almost right but weren’t. I started keeping a list. Then I realized: these weren’t mistakes or dialect quirks. They were standard … Read more
When I first opened the Divine Comedy, the spelling stopped me cold. Words I recognized suddenly looked foreign. “Ogne” instead of “ogni.” “Etterno” stretched across the page. Once I learned to see these patterns, though, the text opened up. What seemed like chaos was actually consistent medieval Tuscan orthography—14th-century Florentine, to be precise. These aren’t … Read more
I learned the hard way that a modern Italian dictionary won’t help with half of Dante’s vocabulary. When I first tackled the Divine Comedy, I’d look up a word, find nothing, panic, then discover it was perfectly common in 14th-century Tuscany. That gap between medieval Italian and modern Italian is where reading Dante gets tricky—and … Read more
I didn’t realize how much drama was hidden in Dante’s pronoun choices until someone pointed it out. Now I can’t un-see it. Every time I reread the Commedia, I catch myself watching for those tiny Italian words—tu and voi—like they’re secret messages written in plain sight. And honestly? They are. In medieval Tuscan Italian, the … Read more
