الإيطالية (عصر دانتي)

Old Italian (italiano antico) is the literary Florentine Tuscan of the "Three Crowns" of the 14th century: Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy (~1308-1320), Petrarch's Canzoniere (~1350), and Boccaccio's Decameron (~1353). Foundational to the Italian literary canon and the basis on which Pietro Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua (1525) standardized Modern Italian. Distinguishing features from Modern Italian (it): foco (vs fuoco), bevere (vs bere), core (vs cuore), mercede (vs grazie); passato remoto used as default narrative tense; archaic articles (lo, li) before consonant clusters; ellisi-rich syntax; Provençal/Sicilian poetic vocabulary borrowings. Pronunciation reflects 14c. Tuscan: closed /e o/ in many words later opened in Modern standard, intervocalic /s/ voiced /z/ throughout (preserved in Modern Tuscan accent), unraised /i u/ in checked syllables. Taught canonically in Italian schools (Liceo Classico) for reading the Divine Comedy and the Tuscan canon.