21. ITALIAN LANGUAGE. I. The Lit erary The Italian literary lan guage has for a foundation the'Vlorentine dia lect, with which, more than with any other, it has in common not alone phonetics and mor phology, but also syntax and vocabulary. In regard to its phonetics, which in this matter is of the greatest importance, it will be enough to say that Siena, which has had a certain desire to dispute the first place with Florence, has, as characteristics of its dialect, the examples,— conseglio, gionto, cavallaria, etc., which resem ble the other Italian dialects and remove it from the Florentine (and literary) types:— consiglio, giionto, cavalleria.
It was proper (because of Dante, and also of Boccaccio and of Petrarch) that the Floren tine dialect should become the language of Italy; and of these three great names, Petrarch deserves a place quite by himself, because the language of his (Book of Songs') is generally much less idiomatic, and hence more largely Italian.
The literary tongue of Italy is founded, then, upon that Florentine dialect, a trifle archaic, of the 14th century, and has changed but little, partly from the respect for tradition, but more because the Florentine himself has not changed. The language of Dante is, with out any serious differences, the language of to day: there is no such thing as old-fashioned Italian and modern Italian.
Italian literature was the last to emerge among all the great Romance literatures, and its cradle was not in Tuscany. The cause for this tardiness can be found in part in the greater attachment which the Italians bad for Latin. But probably certain negative condi tions had more importance, namely, that in Italy there had not survived political and social conditions necessary for the development of the poetry of the laymen, or popular epic po etry. At all events, the language of the first school of poetry, of the time of Frederick II, which contains the southern elements and also to a certain extent the language of the later schools, of Arezzo and Bologna, left also evi dent traces in the language of the Florentine school of the dolce stil nuovo (soft new style), which quickly seized the sceptre of poetry, and these traces, although they are hardly discern ible, have never entirely disappeared from our own poetic tongue.
The first document in that dialect. which from about 1290 down predominated in Italian arts, appeared in 1211, and naturally is not at all a literary document, being of a Book of Florentine Bankers.° But after Dante. the Florentine had no serious adversaries. The linguistic unification proceeded slowly at first. so that Ariosto, not only after Boccaccio and Petrarch, but also after Poliziano and Pulci, by following in the steps of Boiardo, was able to write 'Orlando Furioso' in a hybrid tongue, which, though seeking to be purely Italian, yet preserved phonetically and morphologically a great many Emilian elements.
However, now arrived the time when it ac quired its rich vocabulary, its clarity, and so to speak, its theory, and when the language of the people (as used by Dante, by. Boccaccio and by Petrarch) should become the new lan guage of Italy, capable and worthy of a gram matical system as regular and as rigid as Latin.
These three great poets are Italian classics and are accessible to all Italians. And a kind of grammar of the popular tongue, founded upon their example, is the 'Prose' by Bembo in 1525. Ariosto, following the move ment, changed the 'Orlando' written in the dialect of Emilia in the editions of 1516 and 1521, into the 'Orlando' of 1532, which was written in the Tuscan dialect and above all tried to be grammatically correct. The period of hybridism was finished, although some traces of it, not only morphologically, but also phonet ically (fameglia, gionto per giunto, etc.), are continually found in writers who were not Florentines, and above all not Tuscans, during the whole of the 16th and also the 17th centuries.