Practice question · Select all that apply
Which are consequences of Dante writing in Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin?
Hints
- Three of these follow from the choice; one is simply false.
- Consider what a vernacular choice does to both the audience and the language itself.
Show the answer
- B. The poem was accessible to readers without a clerical education
- C. His dialect became the basis of modern Italian
- D. It broke with the expectation that serious poetry meant Latin
Why
The choice reached readers without Latin, broke a strong convention about serious verse, and settled the Italian language, roughly as if a single English poem had determined standard English. Nothing about a vernacular makes a work untranslatable.
Practise Dante’s Divine Comedy: an Architecture of the Afterlife
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