An Intentionally Beautiful Language

In last week’s blog, I talked about the origins of Spanish; today, I want to discuss the origins of modern-day Italian, because it has a really a cool history.

While Italy is like Spain—and like multiple other European countries—in that the basis of its language is essentially derived from Latin, Italian evolved in a very intentional way. Because Italy wasn’t unified until much later than the other European countries, but rather existed as separate city-states for centuries, the dialects of each region were significantly different—to the extent that inhabitants of the different city-states could barely communicate with each other. There were no overarching leaders—like Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain—to standardize the Italian language.

In the 16th century, then, a group of intellectuals in Italy decided to create one unified Italian language. But they didn’t just want to arbitrarily choose a specific dialect to impose upon the rest of the country, or choose the dialect from the most powerful or prominent region—they wanted to choose the most beautiful dialect. The language they chose was the language of Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, who had written The Divine Comedy in 1321, and was virtually the first intellectual to not write in Latin. Although Dante based his writing on the Florentine dialect he heard, the result was not purely Florentine; Dante put his own poetic abilities into the language. Elizabeth Gilbert explains that he wrote The Divine Comedy “in terza rima, triple rhyme, a chain of rhymes with each rhyme repeating three times every five lines, giving his pretty Florentine vernacular what scholars call a ‘cascading rhythm.’”

As she points out, the equivalent of this would be “if a group of Oxford dons had sat down one day in the early 19th century and decided that—from this point forward—everybody in England was going to speak pure Shakespeare. And it actually worked.“

Although—as Autumn noted in her blog—it’s difficult (and maybe impossible) to determine the “beauty” of a language since it’s such a subjective judgment, this makes me think that there can be a certain objectivity in discerning beauty; some sounds are more pleasing to us than others. Shakespeare, for example, wrote his plays in iambic pentameter, a rhythm which specifically mimics the heart beat, and so moves us more than regular prose. So I think we can—to an extent—judge the beauty of a language by its flow and rhythm, the same way some music (Beethoven, Mozart) is judged as beautiful almost universally.

Actually, researchers have found that some languages are more euphonious (definition: pleasing to the ear; pleasant-sounding, mellifluous, lyrical, soothing, harmonious) than others. Supposedly, babies turn more towards vowel sounds than towards consonant sounds; languages that incorporate the vowels more (or that have more words than end in vowels) are perceived as gentler and more pleasing. In contrast, more people find languages that are heavy on consonants and gutturals (like Hebrew) harsher and more cacophonous. Yet I am wary of suggesting that a language’s beauty has much sociological effect…The mere beauty of a language cannot inspire beautiful thoughts (and this probably has more to do with the idea of universal mentalese, which goes beyond language).

http://www.101languages.net/italian/history.html

http://books.google.com/books?id=q94FAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA241&lpg=PA241&dq=italian+language+dante&source=web&ots=coUimRa8vu&sig=DIYfHYUm1M3PQbV9ZMwxcfw9XBc

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert