It was then a question of vocabulary and particularly of style, and has so continued until our time. In discussing the name to be given to the language, whether Florentine, Tuscan or Italian, etc., the earliest 16th century writers naturally did not distinguish in a particularly clear manner between phonetic hybridism and the rest ; neither the Senesi, who, against the exclusiveness of the Florentines, defended the customs of the whole of Tuscany and especially of Siena (and this continued rather late, even to the time of Girolamo Gigli, a writer of the 17th or the 18th century), nor Giorgio Trissino of Vicenza who desired to do his share in every thing Italian. In the beginning of the 19th cen tury, as a reaction against the ultra simple and colorless language of the 18th century, there arose a most strict school of the purest 14th century—a revival, which, although it was con tested by Monti and by others in the name of a greater breadth and modernity in the choice of models, yet, having some merit, it helped to strengthen the weak and artificial academic quality of Italian prose.
Alessandro Manzoni, in his 'Promessi Sposi,) first issued in 1827, succeeded partially in re storing the model set by Ariosto; but so much the more for Manzoni was it a question not of phonetics but of style, and of vocabulary so far as it is necessarily connected with style. In place of a. language which had become too lit erary, he wished to substitute a language which, like the French, should be fresh, natural, pre cise. Thus be became the most enthusiastic and convincing, and altogether the most logical and coherent of the advocates of living usage and consequently of Florentine speech. He thought that all the Italians, in order to possess a lan guage not only alive and copious but free to all and by all equally understood, no matter how delicate or slight the meaning, and in all its more specialized usage— just as the French have done — should follow the usage of culti vated persons of Florence. Thus there came, before all, a renewal of the vocabulary; but following on this were added naturally some phonetic modifications, such as the substitution of o, which to-day the Tuscans pronounce, for uo, an archaic survival from the literary lan guage. From this resulted (due to the work of the followers of Manzoni) a frenzy, so to speak, of Florentinism. But of all the noise made about it, there remains to-day only an echo in some recent books. Without any doubt, through his work and his example, even more than by his theories, Manzoni has assisted tremendously in reviving and infusing with new blood the ancient tongue, or — to speak more accurately— the ancient academic Italian prose; although it may be that their traditions have not entirely disappeared, and that the vocabulary of the members of the Florentine Academy of Letters (the Crusca) is too loyal to these tradi tions. And no one can doubt for a moment
that he who wishes to speak or write well should pass a longer or shorter period at Flor ence or at least in Tuscany, because the lan guage used in Italian conversation, being mea gre or inexact in almost all the provinces, it happens frequently that even cultured people lack the habit of thinking with energetic spon taneity in Italian, whatever may be the subject of their thought. On the contrary, it is well understood to-day that a language is not reno vated by those mnemonic exercises which were so dear to the followers of Manzoni, but only by copying and following beautiful and power ful examples. An entire nation, which lives in the present, can never entirely forget its past; and the unification of the language cannot be brought about by artificial means but only by the progressive and ever ascending blending of Italian spirit and Italian culture.
From the standpoint of philology, Italian is one of the Romance languages, which are a continuation of the Latin, of which they are, so to speak, the present phases; and, for certain qualities, for example,. the loss of the final s, it could unite itself with the Rumano-Dalmatic dialects (or the Roman language of Dalmatia that has almost entirely disappeared), forming an Eastern group to oppose the Western group, composed of Ladin, French and Spanish.
Literary Italian, which belongs to central Italy, is one of the Romance tongues which has preserved more abundantly and with fewer alterations the traits of the Latin as regards phonetics and the dictionary. One or another of the sister languages may have some partial advantage over this one; for example, the tongue of Sardinia, opposed not only to Italian but to all the dialects derived from the Roman, has preserved in its Tonic vowels a phase of Latin vocalism more archaic, we might say the phase of the time of the republic, as opposed to that of the empire; and the preservation of the final a, which set to the French and to the Provençal the fashion of preserving more at length the traces of the Latin declension. But this and other similar observations cannot change appreciably the result of judgment as a whole; it must be remembered that Italian has preserved faithfully almost all the internal consonants, so that it can present an almost unchanged series such as arnate, amotts, mutare, credo, ?itch, fedele, rips, nipote, amico, andlas opposed for instance to segare), legare. For the rest, the dropping of the final s, which un doubtedly once had a place in Latin vulgate, is not of special importance except as a part of a general phenomenon, i.e., the loss of all the final consonants; and this phenomenon, combined with the preservation of all the final vowels (to say nothing of the weak vowels in the middle of a word), has given to the Italian language its new and special character.