Jolene Nolandi, age 16, of Carson City, Nev., for her question:
HOW DID THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE DEVELOP?
Italian developed as a language gradually from the vernacular Latin, or everyday speech of the people. Writers first used the vernacular to make their love poems understandable to noblewomen who did not know the classical Latin.
Italian emerged as a separate language about A.D. 1000. It consisted of several local dialects.
In the early 1200s, the Sicilian dialect of the south became the chief literary language. At this time, Sicily was the center of Italian cultural life. Sicilian writers used a Latinized variety of the Sicilian dialect.
After about 1250, cultural life centered in Tuscany. The Tuscan dialect of Florence and the surrounding region became the language of literature and everyday culture.
The Tuscan dialect forms the basis of modern Italian. It was used by such great writers as Dante Alighieri, Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio.
From the 1300s to the 1500s, Italian was widely used as the language of commerce in the eastern Mediterranean area. By the middle 1500s, Italian had almost completely replaced Latin as a written and spoken language.
Modern Italian has lost much of its Tuscan character and shows borrowings from many Italian dialects. Many influences in Italy have helped standardize Italian. They include military service, education and nationwide communication by means of newspapers, books, radio and television. '
Italian, like English, belongs to the Indo European family of languages. Like French and Spanish, it is a Romance language, one of the modern languages that developed from Latin.
Today about 60 million persons speak Italian as their native language. It is spoken in Italy, of course, and is one of the official languages of Switzerland. It is also spoken by many in areas of France and Yugoslavia that lie near Italy.
The sounds of Italian are more simply organized than the sounds of English. Italian has seven vowel sounds and 20 consonant sounds.
Italian spelling is much more consistent than English spelling, because each letter or combination of letters usually stands for only one distinct sound. As a result, a word is generally pronounced exactly the way it is spelled.
An Italian pronounces each syllable clearly and separately. He spaces the syllables evenly and his intonation extends over a wide range of pitch. This gives Italian speech a staccato or short and choppy effect. Many syllables end with a vowel.
Word order in Italian sentences is less firmly fixed than it is in English, especially in the position of the subject and verb. The emphasis in a typical Italian sentence tends to fall at the end.
Many words is other languages come from Italian. For example, English borrowed the words balcony, cantata, carnival, cash, costume, granite, laundry, malaria, opera, piano, pilot, pizza, stucco, umbrella and volcano.
Many other English words, such as bankrupt, gazette and infantry, came from French, but their roots were originally Italian.