Dante Turns Seven Hundred and Fifty | Hacker News Reader

Dante Turns Seven Hundred and Fifty

newyorker.com

36 pointsdnetesn7 comments

Something that isn't directly addressed in this article is the astonishing fact that, despite Dante's having written seven centuries ago, Italians can still (with some difficulty) understand what is meant when they read his writings (at least, those in vernacular). Such is the influence of Dante's literary language on the language of ordinary Italians today.

To put this into perspective, Chaucer was two generations after Dante, and his writings are _barely_ comprehensible by layreaders. Here's a bit of the prologue of The Canterbury Tales:

And specially from every shires ende/ Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,/ The hooly blisful martir for to seke/ That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

Only about 300 years before Chaucer and you get Beowulf which is as incomprehensible to the modern native English reader/listener as Danish is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGVDeafmsco

http://www.kami.demon.co.uk/gesithas/readings/bss_oe.html

And a good argument can be made that Shakespeare has a non-trivial percentage that's also not comprehensible to the modern reader/listener. And that was 16th century!

However, I agree that between Shakespear and the King James Bible's influence, that's about as far back as a Native English Speaker can go and generally understand what's going on. Much of it is attributed to the "Great Vowel Shift" in English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

It's amazing what important literature can do to "fix" language.

It seem remarkable that so much linguistic change can happen in such a relatively short time period, but my wife points out that in her home country of Korea, the original 15th century text that introduced their written language (Hangul) is not readable by modern Korean readers (slight differences in orthography from the modern Hangul notwithstanding).

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=272447

Mind that Dante invented the language that italians speak. That is, he encoded and merged vulgar latin as had evolved in contact with the laguages of the northern invading tribes that overran the Roman Empire for the previous 750 years in successive waves. And his version became the new pidgin in which peoples from all the Italic peninsula could communicate with each other, as the Pontifical States adopted the language as official that made its establishement easier[1]. Each region had its own language and that situation remained until the late XIX Century.

[1] Don't be surprised. Take for example Urdu, the language spoken in Pakistan and large parts of Kashmir. It is an entirely artificial language, based on Pashto and Farsi if I recall correctly, that was imposed some 200 years ago by the British Raj <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu#Origin> as a political decision to submit the local population.

> . Take for example Urdu, the language spoken in Pakistan and large parts of Kashmir. It is an entirely artificial language, based on Pashto and Farsi if I recall correctly, that was imposed some 200 years ago by the British Raj as a political decision to submit the local population.

To clarify: Urdu is primarily Hindi, Arabic, and some Farsi. I don't speak any of those languages, but from what I understand, those are the primary components. Pashto is a more minor one. which has had an influence on the language due to the large number of native Pashto speakers in Pakistan.

Also, most of what you said is correct, but to anyone reading this, that Wikipedia page is unfortunately rather misleading. It's not exactly wrong because Hindi itself is so heterogenous that it should honestly be considered multiple languages. But it says that Hindi and Urdu are mutually intelligible, which is misleading. Really, a more accurate statement would be that "some speakers who identify their language as Hindi are able to understand Urdu". Many Hindi speakers[0] would not be able to understand Urdu; many have difficulty even understanding other Hindi speakers.

For example, most of my family speaks fluent Hindi[1]. However, none of them can actually understand Urdu except the ones that also happen to speak Arabic (because they lived in Arabic-speaking countries for a few years). It's like how English speakers may be able to pick out some German words, but not actually understand the language when spoken, whereas learning Dutch might help them bridge the gap.

This is similar to the situation with Arabic, which we treat as a single language, but is actually a spectrum of many different languages that are partially (but not always completely) mutually intelligible. It's hard to explain this by analogy to English speakers, unfortunately, because English dialects are relatively homogeneous by comparison[2].

[0] and I'd be willing to venture most, though it depends very much on which regions and religions you survey

[1] Again, to be precise, this means that they use the name "Hindi" to refer to the language that they speak.

[2] which says more about what we classify as "English", which is a political decision rather than a linguistic one, which brings us back to the original point all over again.

Your pointing to the Papal States reminds me: another period of Italy's history also demonstrates this narrative quite well. The Fascist government was the first body to publish a large amount of literature in Italian, which lead to more Italians speaking it than ever had. And as the people used Italian as a kind of pidgin under the Papal States, so too did they use it as a pidgin when so many were displaced during and following the War and the partisan resistance.

A variation of Inferno set in Silicon Valley where the ghost of, say, Douglas Engelbart[0], leads the Young Founder through the descending layers of tech hell (all the way to Ring-0) would be amazing.

Dante's Inferno is truly scathing and quite gossipy. Such bitterness would transition well to the current ecosystem, methinks.

[0] Or any SV old time luminary, really. I pick Doug because of his visionary potential.

Relevant link: The Divine Comedy on Project Gutenberg (in English)

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8800/8800-h/8800-h.htm

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