Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I don't speak Italian, but I do speak Latin. When I look at Dante's "Divine Comedy", it appears, to my eye, to be a lot closer to Latin than modern Italian is - I can understand much more of it than I can modern Italian.
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Italian has taken a long evolution from Latin. As a matter of fact, Dante and Lampedusa were forging the common ground of the Italian language. Italian, as a written language, is quite old (but never was talked). Only recently, with a higher level of education, the "high" Italian is been used more and more as a talking language.
This evolution of the italian language is largely the same as with German (Luther and Gutenberg) or English (Shakespeare).