Things I Never Knew About Italian

For one week now, I've been learning Italian.  Recently, I've been reading a book that shed some light on the Italian language.  It said that there were various provinces in Italy, each speaking a different dialect of Latin.  Throughout Europe, each capital city forged their own Latin dialect into the language for the rest of that nation.  But Italy was different.  A gathering of intellectuals collected the most romantic and beautiful phrases from the regions and combined these into the language now known as Italian.  To do this, they had to look back two hundred years earlier, when the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri wrote his Divine Comedy.  Dante had written this in his local Florentine language and not Latin.  When it was published in 1321 it came as a bit of a shock to the establishment, but his language is what basically became Italian.  As the author says, this is like taking Shakespeare and officially making his work the official English language.

Not only did I make this discovery, but also that the Italian states were unified in 1861.  What's so interesting about that?  Well, I already knew that the Germanic states were unified by Bismark around 1863.  It's fascinating that these two events happened within a couple of years of each other.

So to use a metaphore, I thought, now I've read about the band, I want to buy the CD.  So I did.  I bought a copy of Italian in 30 days.  At first I felt like a child learning to speak.  Then after much playing and rewinding of the CD, I can now master complicated phrases like la ragazza con la valigia (the girl with the suitcase).  Whether I will go on and learn the language, I don't know, but at least I can now have an appreciation of why this language is so beautiful and why so many people love it.

The book I refer to is called Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.  You may find it in either the Health section or the Travel section of any good bookshop.  It was recommended by Ellie on her blog.  It is a bit of a girlie book, but so what!  Sometimes it's good to see how the other half live.