Quote:
Originally Posted by FlorenceArt
A language has to exist before you write a book in it, otherwise nobody would be able to read the book (not to mention write it).
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Before Dante there was no language called "Italian"; just lots of different regional dialects in what we now call Italy but what was, at the time, numerous independent city-states. It you spoke Venetian, for example, you would not have been able to understand very much of what someone from Naples (who spoke Neapolitan) was saying. What Dante did was to create a
written language that everyone in Italy could learn to understand and use.
I don't know anything about it, but I suspect that the Koran did something similar to this with Arabic - created a "standard" out of a mish-mash of regional dialects.