Quote:
Originally Posted by FlorenceArt
Facilitate the emergence of a language and spread it in a wider area and population, that I can accept. It makes sense even. But this is absolutely not the same as creating a language.
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Dante actually did create the written Italian language. Prior to his time, spoken Italian (in all its various dialects) was regarded merely as a degenerate form of Latin, and all scholarly writing in Italy (as elsewhere) was in Latin. Dante was the person who took the vernacular spoken language (primarily his own Florentine dialect) and, for the first time, wrote it down.
creating a language that he called "Italian". That's why he's called "The Father of Italian". This is hard to appreciate for an English speaker because nothing comparable has ever happened to English.