

Dante Turns Seven Hundred and Fifty - dnetesn
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/dante-turns-seven-hundred-and-fifty

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lochland
Something that isn't directly addressed in this article is the astonishing
fact that, despite Dante's having written seven centuries ago, Italians can
still (with some difficulty) understand what is meant when they read his
writings (at least, those in vernacular). Such is the influence of Dante's
literary language on the language of ordinary Italians today.

To put this into perspective, Chaucer was two generations after Dante, and his
writings are _barely_ comprehensible by layreaders. Here's a bit of the
prologue of The Canterbury Tales:

And specially from every shires ende/ Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,/
The hooly blisful martir for to seke/ That hem hath holpen, whan that they
were seeke.

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vorbote
Mind that Dante _invented_ the language that italians speak. That is, he
encoded and merged vulgar latin as had evolved in contact with the laguages of
the northern invading tribes that overran the Roman Empire for the previous
750 years in successive waves. And his version became the new pidgin in which
peoples from all the Italic peninsula could communicate with each other, as
the Pontifical States adopted the language as official that made its
establishement easier[1]. Each region had its own language and that situation
remained until the late XIX Century.

[1] Don't be surprised. Take for example Urdu, the language spoken in Pakistan
and large parts of Kashmir. It is an entirely artificial language, based on
Pashto and Farsi if I recall correctly, that was imposed some 200 years ago by
the British Raj
<[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu#Origin>](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu#Origin>)
as a political decision to submit the local population.

~~~
lochland
Your pointing to the Papal States reminds me: another period of Italy's
history also demonstrates this narrative quite well. The Fascist government
was the first body to publish a large amount of literature in Italian, which
lead to more Italians speaking it than ever had. And as the people used
Italian as a kind of pidgin under the Papal States, so too did they use it as
a pidgin when so many were displaced during and following the War and the
partisan resistance.

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stephancoral
A variation of Inferno set in Silicon Valley where the ghost of, say, Douglas
Engelbart[0], leads the Young Founder through the descending layers of tech
hell (all the way to Ring-0) would be amazing.

Dante's Inferno is truly scathing and quite gossipy. Such bitterness would
transition well to the current ecosystem, methinks.

[0] Or any SV old time luminary, really. I pick Doug because of his visionary
potential.

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marquis
Relevant link: The Divine Comedy on Project Gutenberg (in English)

[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8800/8800-h/8800-h.htm](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8800/8800-h/8800-h.htm)

