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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Modern Italian is closer to "volgare fiorentino" (the language in which Dante wrote the Divina Commedia) than to classic Latin. A modern Italian speaker can understand most of what is written in the Divina Commedia but he can understand very little of, for example, Cicero's works.