Birth of a language

The 10th century: early Italian

The closeness of Italian to Latin helped scholars enrich the newly-born language with many Latin terms with relative ease. Earlier, we remarked that similarities between these languages can be explained with the late emergence of the Italian language. The Placito Capuano, probably the first document extant in the Italian language bears witness to that, dating as it does to the second half of the 10th century. Similar documents had appeared in other romance languages around the 9th century.

The Placito Capuano

The Placito Capuano or Placito di Capua is the first in a number of acts, also known as Placiti Cassinesi. They were written in early Italian between 960 and 963 A.D. : court proceedings allowing the Benedectines from four abbacies to reclaim their lands from squatters that had occupied them after a Saracen attack had dispersed the local chapter.

Two such proceedings come from Teano and one from Sessa Aurunca (two small towns near Caserta), from three local chapters of the Monastery of Montecassino. They contain legal formulas similar to the Placito.

The discovery of the Placiti is relatively recent: the Carta Capuana (960 A.D.) was found by abbot Gattola in the archives of the Monastery of Montecassino in 1734. All the texts show linguistic features typical of the area of Capua, many of their traits are still in today's southern dialects:

Sao ko kelle terre, per kelle fini que ki contene,
trenta anni le possette parte sancti Benedicti.

("I know that those lands, within the borders that enclose them, were owned for thirty years by the party of St. Benedict's") (Capua, March 960 - Placito Capuano)

Sao cco kelle terre, per kelle fini que tebe monstrai,
Pergoaldi foro, que ki contene, et trenta anni le possette.

(I know that those lands, within the borders that I showed to you, were owned for thirty years by the party of Pergoaldus.) (Sessa Aurunca, March 963)

Kella terra, per kelle fini que bobe mostrai,
sancte Marie è, et trenta anni la posset parte sancte Marie.

(The land within the borders that I showed to you belong to Santa Maria, and thirty years was owned by the party of Saint Mary's) (Teano, July 963)

Sao cco kelle terre, per kelle fini que tebe mostrai, trenta anni le possette parte sancte Marie.

(I know that those lands within the borders that I showed to you, were owned for for thirty years by the party of Saint Mary's) (Teano, October 963)

These are the first phrases in our possession written in Italian, although a only few decades later the frequence of such deeds increases up to the time when the use of Italian becomes common and widespread throughout the peninsula.


Visualizzazione ingrandita della mappa

Language in the twilight zone

It was probably around the turn of the 9th century that one monk from Verona, taking a break from his copying chores, wrote a riddle on the margin of a parchment:

Se pareba boves

alba pratalia araba

albo versorio teneba

negro semen seminaba

The Indovinello dates to the late 8th- early 9th century, A.D. and is followed by a small thanksgiving prayer in Latin: gratias tibi agimus omnip(oten)s sempiterne d(eu)s.

Riddles were a popular pastime in the middle ages, but the Indovinello Veronese (lit. 'Veronese riddle') is one of a kind in that it is the first in our possession in a language that contains Italian words. But what does the riddle hint to?

We are referred to "somebody" who plows "white fields" ('alba pratalia') with a pair of cows ('boves'), holds a white plow ('albo versorio') and sows a black seed ('negro semen'). A tentative translation might be

He led two cows / plowed white fields / drew a white plow / sowed a black seed.

The person is none but the writer himself, the monk, and the story is a metaphor for the act of writing. The two cows are his fingers which draw a white pen (the white plow) across the white pages (the white fields), marking the paper with ink (negro semen) as it passes. An act which, beyond the penning of a poem, marks the transition between Latin and Italian.

These lines were written in codex LXXXIX (84) of the Biblioteca Capitolare in Verona, Italy. The parchment, a palimpsest discovered by Schiapparelli in 1924 contains a Mozarabic oration by the Spanish Christian Church (a document in a romance language developed in Spain by contact with the Moorish culture, probably from Toledo). It was then brought to Cagliari and thence to Pisa before reaching Northern Italy, where it was re-used once again by our monk. It dates between 801-3 and 845 A.D., when the Chapter of Verona was under Archdeacon Pacificus.

Similar documents emerge at about the same time abroad, but many of those outside Italy written at this time are already emancipated from Latin syntax and grammar (France's Serments de Strasburg dates to 842). The later development of Italian has been indicated as one of the causes for the linguistic immaturity of the Indovinello, which seems to stand in a gray area between Latin and Italian, although at the time of discovery, in 1924, it was hailed as the first document in the Italian language. Since then, Schiapparelli's finding has been taken much more conservatively.

It is undoubted, hiwever, that these few lines are a milestone in the history of the language since they seem to have frozen the time when vulgar Latin was turning into something entirely new and how this was coming about.

Though some words still stick to the Latin grammar ('boves' with an -es for the plural masculine, 'alba' with -a for plural neutral) most are indeed distinctly Italian, with no cases and the endings of Italian verbs: 'pareba', 'araba', 'teneba', 'seminaba' (for Lat. parebat, arabat, tenebat, seminabat and It. pareva, arava, teneva) show the falling of final -T, while 'albo versorio' and 'negro semen' (notice -o for the Italian masculine) instead of singular neuter "album versorium" and "nigrum semen".

It is remarkable that 'versorio' is still the word for "plow" in today's Veronese dialect. Cortellazzo and Paccagnella say that the pl. -es of boves might well be considered Ladino (a minority language of Veneto, Trentino, Friuli) and therefore romance rather than Latin, but the etymology is still disputed. It is not typical of eastern romance languages (as modern Italian) which favors -i/e over the -es ending for the plural.

'Albo' is already vernacular, since it. blanco > bianco is a later German import (Latin would have "album" anyway). At any rate, the -um is already gone, and the -o stands in its place.

'Pareba' and 'teneba' seem to hint to old Venetian rather than Latin (today's dialect has further sonorized the "b" in a vocalic environment, as in Italian: pareva, teneva). However, the telling signs of linguistic change are the suppression of Latin cases and endings.

This is the most visible sign of the deep mutation from a synthetic (where the role of a word, whether subject or object is marked by a suffix attached to its root) to an analytical language (where such function is given by a specific place in the sentence, or word order, as S-V-O).

Albo versorio, ending in -o as it does should be ablative, but it is accusative, negro should be accorded to the neuter "semen", but it does not, and i > e - very important, as Italian language changes short I > E. To see the full changes, however, we have to wait until the late 10th century.

Flirting with Cicero

Prolonged use of Latin, a slower unification process, the erudite and Tuscan influence account for the archaic traits of the language and its resistance to change as compared to other romance languages.

However, Italian enjoys a flexibility in word order unseen in most of its sister tongues, comparable only to a that of a flexive language. Not surprisingly, Italian grammarians strove to model Italian prose on Classical Latin. Looser word-order with frequent subject-verb inversions is even more noticeable in Southern Italian. A few examples of O-V-S order:

“Bella era quella cantante!” (lit. “beautiful was that singer!”) “Che, l’hai incontrata, tu?” (lit. “What, her meet did you?”) ”Sì, alla Scala di Milano cantava!” (lit. “Yes, at the Scala di Milano sang she”). Northern (non-standard) Italian has always S-V-O, perhaps because of its proximity to France. On the contrary, the Florentine dialect can rephrase sentences more loosely.

Italian is modeled on literary Florentine, whose poets had a long love-affair with Cicero (see right column: Trencento and Renaissance) : when we see this, flexibility in word-order will appear less capricious. Word order tend to be (O-) V-S in the south ( "questo ha fatto lui!"), where S-V-O is favored by northern speakers even in cases when emphasis requires O-V-S.

In questions as "Va via subito Marco?" the accent is certainly on Marco, but not so in "Marco va via subito?". However, the growing importance of northern media today seems to be affecting such liberty in spoken usage.

Is Latin Really Dead?

The assertion that the romance languages are just a modern version of Latin may sound exaggerated, but it is nonetheless one that is shared by most scholars today. Among them Italian comes even closer: most Latin words, even when spoken are intelligible by Italian speakers. The Florentine dialect, on which Italian is largely based, "has preserved with good accuracy the morphological and phonetic traits [and] (...) such closeness to Latin has historical roots: the fact that Tuscan emerged relatively late and the pre-humanistic environment in which it flourished" (Segre 1978).


A few facts that may account for its archaic traits:

1. most linguistic traits of Latin are also shared by the Tuscan dialect: the domination by Etrurian Kings and the political influence of their families in Rome’s earlier times. The Etrurian substratum is a feature of both Latium and Tuscany's dialects.

2. Italian scholars and writers long held the Italian language to be inferior to Latin and drew heavily on Latin sources to coin words. Only in the 13th century did middle-class Florence impose Tuscan as the language for commerce and banking. The intellectual elites, the clergy and the nobility insisted on using Latin, and the Renaissance studies largely encouraged it.

3. As a result of this attitude and a lack of political unity the Italian language developed a few centuries later than most romance languages: though the Indovinello Veronese (9th c. A.D.), a riddle found in Verona shows traces of Italian, scholars still place it in that gray area of (late) vulgar Latin.

The earliest documents in the Italian language date back to about 960 A.D. and come from a deed signed by a Capuan notary at Montecassino. The fact that a notary must use Italian to be understood by his audience is proof that the Italian language, though its standard, is widely spoken. Its development is linked closely to the history of Italy and the Renaissance - then a national standard was created - and the consciousness of Italy's national identilty set Italians on the long road to political unification.

In the following days we're going to explore the birth and development of Italian from vulgar latin to today's standard and touch a bit on Italian dialects and foreign language minorities that account for its rich cultural heritage.