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Why Dantes Italian Isnt Italian: Reading the Commedia in Its Original Medieval Tuscan

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Why Dantes Italian Isnt Italian: Reading the Commedia in Its Original Medieval Tuscan

I made a discovery last month that shook my confidence in my Italian reading skills. My university’s facing-page edition of the Divine Comedy had footnotes on nearly every third line. Not historical footnotes. Linguistic ones. Words I didn’t recognize. Grammar that looked wrong. Spellings that seemed like typos. My first thought: had I wasted those … Read more

Ogne, Etterno, Ne La: Spelling Differences Between Dantes Italian and Modern Italian

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Ogne, Etterno, Ne La: Spelling Differences Between Dantes Italian and Modern Italian

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