Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/519

 LANGUAGE.] ITALY 497 so brief a sketch as the present. We shall confine our selves to noting what has a wide territorial diffusion the reduction of c (/;) between vowels to a mere breath ing (e.g., ftioho, fuoco, but porco), or even its complete elision ; the same phenomenon occurs also between word and word (e.g., la hasa, but in casa), thus illustrating anew that syntactic class of phonetic alterations, either quali tative or quantitative, conspicuous in this region also, which has been already discussed for insular and southern Italy (B. 2 ; C. 2, 3), and could be exemplified for the Roman region as well (C. 4). As regards one or two individual phenomena, it must also be confessed that the Tuscan or literary Italian is not so well preserved as some other Neo-Latin tongues. Thus, French always keeps in the beginning of words the Latin formulae cl, pi, fl (clef, plaisir, fleur, in contrast with the Italian chiave, piacere, fiore); but the Italian makes up for this by the greater vigour with which it is wont to resolve the same formula within the words, and by the greater symmetry thus pro duced between the two series (in opposition to the Frenqh clef, clave, we have, for example, the French ceil, oclo ; whereas, in the Italian, chiave and occkio correspond to each other). The Italian as well as the Roumanian has lost the ancient sibilant at the end (-s of the plurals, of the nomina tive singular, of the 2d persons, &c.) which throughout the rest of the Romance area has been preserved more or less tenaciously ; and consequently it stands lower than old Provengal and old French, as far as true declension or, more precisely, the functional distinction between the forms of the casus rectus and the casus obliquus is concerned. But even in this respect the superiority of French and Provencal has proved merely transitory, and in their modern condition all the Xeo-Latin forms of speech are generally surpassed by Italian even as regards the pure grammatical consistency of the noun. In conjugation Tuscan has lost that tense which for the sake of brevity we shall continue to call the pluperfect indicative ; though it still survives outside of Italy and in other dialectal types of Italy itself (C. 36; cf. B. 2). It has also lost the futurum exactum, or perfect subjunctive, which is found in Spanish and Roumanian. But no one would on that account maintain that the Italian conjugation is less truly Latin than the Spanish, the Roumanian, or that of any other Neo-Latin language. It is, on the contrary, by far the most distinctively Latin as regards the tradition both of form and function, although many effects of the principle of analogy are to be observed, sometimes common to Italian with the other N&quot;eo-Latin languages, and sometimes peculiar to itself. Those who find it hard to believe in the ethnological explanation of linguistic varieties ought to be convinced by any example so clear as that which Italy presents in the difference between the Tuscan or purely Italian type on the one side and the Gallo-Italic on the other. The names in this instance correspond exactly to the facts of the case. For the Gallo-Italic on either side of the Alps is evidently nothing else than a modification varying in degree, but always very great of the vulgar Latin, due to the reaction of the language or rather the oral tendencies of the Celts who succumbed to the Roman civilization. In other words, the case is one of new ethnic individualities arising from the fusion of two national entities, one of which, numerically more or less weak, is so far victorious that its speech is adopted, while the other succeeds in adapt ing that speech to its own habits of utterance. Genuine Italian, on the other hand, is not the result of the com bination or conflict of the vulgar Latin with other tongues, but is the pure development of this alone. In other words, the case is that of an ancient national fusion in which vulgar Latin itself originated. Here that is native which in the other case was intrusive. This greater purity of constitution gives the language a persistency which approaches permanent stability. There is no Old Italian to oppose to Modern Italian in the same sense as we have an Old French to oppose to a Modern French. It is true that in the old French writers, and even in the writers who used the dialects of Upper Italy, there was a tendency to bring back the popular forms to their ancient dignity; and it is true also that the Tuscan or literary Italian has suffered from the changes of centuries; but nevertheless it remains undoubted that in the former cases we have to deal with general transformations between old and new, while in the latter it is evident that the language of Dante continues to be the Italian of modern speech and literature. This character of invariability has thus been in direct proportion to the purity of its Latin origin, while, on the contrary, where popular Latin has been adopted by peoples of foreign speech, the elaboration which it has undergone along the lines of their oral tendencies becomes always the greater the farther we get away from the point at which the Latin reached them, in proportion, that is, to the time and space through which it has been trans mitted in these foreign mouths. 1 As for the primitive seat of the literary language of Italy, not only must it be regarded as confined within the limits of that narrower Tuscany already described ; strictly speaking, it must be identified with the city of Florence alone. Leaving out of account, therefore, a small number of words borrowed from other Italian dialects, as a certain number have naturally been borrowed from foreign tongues, it may be said that all that was not Tuscan was elimin ated from the literary form of speech. If we go back to the time of Dante we find, throughout almost all the dialects of the mainland with the exception of Tuscan, the change of vowels between singular and plural seen in paese, paisi ; quello, quilli ; amore, amuri (see B. 1 ; C. 3 b) ; but the literary language knows nothing at all of such a phenomenon, because it was unknown to the Tuscan region. But in Tuscan itself there were differences between Florentine and non-Florentine; in Florentine, e.g., it was and is usual to say dipignere and pugnere, while the non- Florentine had it dipegnere and pognere (Lat pingere, pungere). Now, it is precisely the Florentine forms which alone have currency in the literary language. In the ancient compositions in the vulgar tongue, espe cially in poetry, non-Tuscan authors on the one hand accommodated their own dialect to the analogy of that which they felt to be the purest representative of the lan guage of ancient Roman culture, while the Tuscan authors in their turn did not refuse to adopt the forms which had received the rights of citizenship from the literary celebrities of other parts of Italy. It was this state of matters which gave rise, in past times, to the numerous disputes about the true fatherland and origin of the literary language of the Italians. But these have been deprived of all right to exist by the scientific investigation of the history of that language. If the older Italian poetry assumed or main tained forms alien to Tuscan speech, these forms were after, wards gradually eliminated, and the field was left to those which were purely Tuscan and indeed purely Florentine. And thus it remains absolutely true that, so far as phonetics, morphology, rudimental syntax, and in short the whole char acter and material of words and sentences are concerned, there is no literary language of Europe that is more 1 A complete analogy is afforded by the history of the Aryan or Sanskrit language in India, which in space and time shows always more and more strongly the reaction of the oral tendencies of the aboriginal races on whom it has been imposed. Thus the Pali pre sents the ancient Aryan organism in a condition analogous to that of the oldest French, and the Prakrit of the Dramas, on the other hand, in a condition like that of modern French. XIII. 63