Tatiana

"Sicilian school" by Encyclopedia Britannica

This Encyclopedia article provides a different telling of the history of the importance of written Italian vernacular in the Middle Ages. Most of my sources only focus on the writings of Tuscan artists, such as Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarca, but this article looks at the writings of the Sicilian School, published even before those of the Tuscan artists.

The Sicilian School was a group of poets centered in and founded by the court of Emperor Frederick II (pictured on the right). Their work established Italian vernacular, as opposed to Provençal (spoken in Southern France) as the language of Italian love poetry. The Sicilian School is also credited with inventing the canzone and the sonnetto, two poetic forms. The members of the group were not always Sicilian; some came from Tuscany, and some from other regions of Southern Italy. Nevertheless, all of the poets produced by the Sicilian School were written in Sicilian. The group was well-known in academic circles, and Dante Alighieri mentioned the Sicilian School in his De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence), in which Alighieri examined various Italian dialects in order to determine which one could be suitable as a standard literary language. In addition, many Sicilian poetry was later transcribed into Tuscan, allowing it to be understood by a greater amount of people.

The Sicilian School's influence would be felt for many centuries after their disbandment. The canzone became a standard form in Italian poetry, and the sonnetto was the dominant form of poetry in Renaissance Italy. The sonnetto would also later be modified in the 16th century to the English sonnet, after its introduction in Elizabethan England.

https://www.britannica.com/art/Sicilian-school

"Sicilian Poetry" by Art Dieli

Dieli's website provides links to biographical information on certain Sicilian poets, along with links to poetry written by the Sicilian School.

The following is an extract of a poem by Guglielmo Beroardi, a member of the Sicilian School:

Gioia par me s'asconda,

temo non mi confonda - lo pensare,

und'a gli occhi m'abonda

le lagrime com'onda - de lo mare.

Piangendo gli occhi mei

mi bagnano lo viso,

perch'io diviso - son da l'amorosa;

lasso, tornar vorrei

ov'è il meo core assiso'

"Review: History of the Italian Language and Dialects" published by the University of Northern Iowa. Available on JSTOR

This article provides a review of "Saggi di Prose e Poesie de' più celebri Scrittori d'ogni Secolo" written by L. Nardini and S. Buonaiuti. It also goes into detail on the history of the origins Italian languages and certain regional dialects.

The author presents us with three different theories on the origins of Italian that have been developed up until that date (the article was published in 1832). The first theory is that of Leonardo Bruni, a 15th century writer. Bruni maintained that Latin and Italian vernacular originate from the same era; he believed that both languages were used at the same time in Ancient Rome. Bruni and his supporters claim that since so many Italian words are similar to Vulgar Latin (and differ from the Classical Latin used by the upper-classes), the two languages must have been the same. The author of the article quickly shoots that theory down, saying, "But if this similarity of a few words could prove the identity of two languages, then we have been speaking German all our lives, without being aware of the fact." (285) Although vulgar and classical Latin are indeed different, that does not mean that Italian and vulgar Latin are the same language.

The second theory is that of Marquis Scipio Maffei. He believed that Italian originated from the 'corruption' of classical Latin; Italian formed when adopted a 'vulgar' mode of speech and abandoned the grammatically correct forms of Latin. Maffei maintained that Italian formed without the influence of foreign intervention, and that words that supposedly entered the Italian language after invasions from the North already existed prior to these invasions. The author of this article is not entirely convinced of this theory, writing that there is little evidence to support the claim that Italian formed without foreign intervention.

The third theory is presented by philologists such as Muratori, Fontanini, and Denina. They propose that after invasions from the North into the Italian peninsula, conquerors found themselves needing to learn the language of the conquered, i.e. Latin. The invaders introduced their own pronunciations and terminology to the language, and from this language many different dialects evolved. The author believes this theory to be most credible, but admits that it is hard to determine the origins of the Italian languages.

The article presents us with the "earliest well-authenticated specimen of the Italian language" (289). It is the Canzone of Ciullo d'Alcamo, a Sicilian poet who published this particular work in 1197. Most of the other sources on this blog trace the earliest known document of Italian vernacular to the Veronese Riddle, dating back to the end of the 8th century, or the beginning of the 9th. This riddle was only discovered in the early 20th century, nearly 100 years after the publication of this article. The author continues to write about Sicilian poetry in the 1200s, but he gives no mention of the Sicilian School, or the court of Frederick II. He compares Sicilian poetry with that of Siena, going on to call Northern Italian languages more cultivated than those of the South.

The author mentions Dante Alighieri's own writings on the Italian vernacular. In his work, he named 15 dialects, and went on to say that each of these 15 are subdivided into "underdialects" (ex: Tuscan can be divided into Sienese and Aretine). In addition, multiple dialects can be found in the same city. In his Concerning Vernacular Eloquence, Dante writes that the languages spoken in Italy must amount to a thousand, if not more. The author attributes the number of Italian languages to the large number of Vulgar Latin dialects, as well as the dialects of invaders themselves, at the time of Northern invasions.

Dante admitted to a preference for his own dialect, but concluded that "the Volgare Illustre [...] of Italy is the language common to all the Italian cities, but peculiar to none" (297), meaning that the ideal Italian language is entirely subjective. During the debates of Questione della Lingua, Machiavelli, a Florentine, asserted that the language of Florence was indeed superior, and even went so far as to say that the national language should be named Florentine and not Italian. However, since all regions of Italy have contributed in some way to the language, it was given the name "Italian" rather than named after a specific city or region. The author tells us that Italian has been enriched by words and idioms originating from all parts of the Italian peninsula, but is ultimately based on the Tuscan of the 14th century.

During the 16th century, many fought against the reemergence of Italian as a standard literary language. Romolo Amaseo and his fellow supporters argued that Latin should remain the dominant language, and that Italian should be reduced to a patois. Their arguments were quickly denounced, due to the popularity of Italian.

Having finished recounting the history of the Italian language, the author continues by analyzing various Italian dialects. He divides the languages of Italy into seventeen main dialects, not counting any subdivisions of these seventeen: 1) Sicilian, 2) Calabrian, 3) Neapolitan, 4) Roman, 5) Norcian, 6) Tuscan, 7) Bolognese, 8) Venetian, 9) Friulian, 10) Paduan, 11) Lombard, 12) Milanese, 13) Bergamask, 14) Piedmontese, 15) Genoese, 16) Corsican, and 17) Sardinian.

In his look at the Roman dialect, the author notes some peculiarities of the language, including the tendency for the elision of the final syllable in the word. For example, a speaker of Romanesco might say "fà" instead of "fare", or "pensà" rather than "pensato", and "so" instead of "sono". The elision of the d sound is also noted. Example: "quanno" rather than "quando", and "annà" for "andare". The author then provides the reader with various examples of Romanesco literature. He examines the 16 other dialects in much the same way.

The article could hardly be called objective; the author's personal judgments shine through on every page. He devotes a lot of writing to belittling the works of Southern Italians, seeming to think that the more the language resembles contemporary Italian, the more cultivated it is. In his examination of medieval Italian writings, he makes little mention of the evolution of the language itself, as in, the influence of foreign languages on the vernacular, the evolution of verb endings and prepositions or articles, etc. However, this article provides an interesting look at the origins of the Italian language, dating back to the Roman Empire, and it gives further detail on some positions taken during the Questione della lingua.