Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  One of the principal, true, and intrinsic reasons for the real wealth and variety that are proper to the Italian language is the immense capacity to produce derivatives, which allows it to make very great use of its roots. Let us simply note the different ways in which it can form frequentative or diminutive verbs from its roots. Thus with the desinence in eggiare it can take schiaffo [slap], [1241] vezzo [caress], arma [weapon], poeta [poet] or poetare [to compose poetry], and verso [verse], and create schiaffeggiare [to slap], vezzeggiare [to caress], armeggiare [to joust], poeteggiare [to play the poet], verseggiare [to versify] (and likewise from vano or vanare, it can create vaneggiare and pargoleggiare, and spalleggiare, etc., and from favore, as also from favorare, and favorire, likewise there is favoreggiare); in icciare as from arso arsicciare; in icchiare as from canto canticchiare; in ellare as from salto saltellare; in erellare, as also from salto salterellare, and from canto canterellare; in olare, as from spruzzo spruzzolare, from vòlto voltolare, from rotare and rinfocare rotolare and rinfocolare, from giuocare, giuocolare, from muggire or mugghiare, mugolare, muggiolare, mugiolare; in igginare as from piovere piovvigginare; in uzzare as from taglio tagliuzzare; in acchiare as from foro foracchiare; in ecchiare as from morso, roso, and sonno morsecchiare, rosecchiare, sonnecchiare (and likewise punzecchiare, which may also be said using punzellare); in azzare as from scorrere scorrazzare, and from volare svolazzare; in eare as from ruota or rotare roteare (which the Crusca calls an Old Word, I don’t know why) from the Spanish rodear, blanquear, that is to say, biancheggiare and imbiancare, etc.; in ucchiare as from bacio baciucchiare; in onzare as from ballo ballonzare; and in other ways, too, because the list doesn’t end here; let alone the superfrequentatives, or supradiminutives, such as ballonzolare, sminuzzolare, etc. etc., or diminutives of frequentatives or vice versa. And the above, and other formations like them, have a certain, definite, acknowledged, agreed, and consistent meaning, so that when we see such a formation, and know the meaning of the original word, we immediately understand the modification that the reformed word serves to express as regards the idea expressed by the original word. So the mad idea (the ultimate excess in pedantry) of wanting to ban the formation of new derivatives is the same as drying up one of the main, most characteristic, and innate sources of the riches of our language. See [1242] in this regard, pp. 1116–17. I do not doubt (and the example given confirms it) that our language, in the vast range and diversity of the certain, stable, and well-defined capacity it has to produce derivatives, and the use it is able to make of them, wins out over Latin and even Greek. But it also resembles Greek a lot in its plethora of forms of derivation having the same or a similar meaning, by contrast with Latin, which is not actually impoverished, but more regulated and more precisely circumscribed in that respect, as in every other. See p. 1134, end. (29 June 1821.) These are the true reasons and the sources on account of which (provided we do not shut them off) our language will always remain richer than other modern languages, despite the specific new words, etc., which the latter keep on acquiring daily. See p. 1292, paragraph 1.

  For p. 302, beginning. As proof of what I have said [→Z 301] regarding the benefit governments derive from parties opposing them, observe the well-known fact that nowhere is the Catholic, indeed the Christian (and likewise any other) religion more slack, both externally and, in particular, internally, than in the country where it is not only dominant but unchallenged, i.e., Italy, which furthermore is its seat of power. (Spain, since it is not yet civilized, and lies outside the cultured world, does not constitute an exception.) And if, with all due proportion, we work down to those provinces of Italy itself that are closer to, or do more trade with different religions, and through the various nations, from France, etc., to Germany and England, etc., we find that where the Catholic or other Christian religions are weaker, where they are closer to and mingling with differing and opposing religions, sects, etc., that is where their observance, both external and internal, is particularly alive, solid, true, effective, and secure. (29 June 1821.)

  [1243] Let us note the powerful impact upon our sensations produced by small, even minute but real differences in men’s height. Let us also note the difference in proportions as regards women’s height, and how it is that a tall woman very often strikes us as being of greater stature than a man of middling height, and yet when we venture a comparison we find the reverse to be true, etc. Finally, let us note that the same degree of difference in other objects of no matter what kind is never able to produce effects in us which are the same as, or proportionate to, those produced by our apprehension of human height. And so we infer just how much continuous observation renders us subtle connoisseurs, and refines our sensations regarding the external forms of our fellows, and how as a consequence the idea of definite proportions is not acquired except by dint of observation and habit; and how relative it is, since the slightest real difference strikes us as very great indeed in these objects, and slight, which indeed it is, in all others. (30 June 1821.)

  Other concrete causes of the wealth and variety of the Italian language, aside from the sheer abundance of writers, are, as I have said elsewhere [→Z 343–45, 686, 766–77]:

  (1) The fact that we never renounced any of our [1244] riches, however ancient, by contrast with the French language, which would not have benefited even by having as great an abundance of writers and as many centuries of literature as we have had. Even if the French language in the last two centuries, since its regeneration, has had as many as and more writers than we had in five centuries, it would not help it to attain the variety and also the wealth that serves precisely to achieve the exact expression of things. It would not help it, I maintain, as much as our language is helped by the great number of centuries, and hence the greater variety of writers, opinions, tastes, styles, and themes handled by them. This variety may not be found to the same degree in just two centuries, even if writers were more numerous then than in the other five put together. It is a variety that serves the wealth of the language and the accuracy and precision of its expressive capacity to an infinite degree, for it has been employed to express so many different topics by so many different minds, differently disposed, and in so many different ways. The German language has not given up its ancient riches and possessions either, as may be seen in Werther, which abounds in well-judged, beautiful, and expressive archaisms.1

  [1245] (2) The great liveliness, imaginative flair, fecundity, and variety of intelligence displayed by our writers, qualities characteristic of a nation able to adapt to every kind of venture, character, enterprise, and purpose.

  (3) The amount that our written language (since we propose to speak here of its wealth and variety, and to compare it with foreign languages) has drawn from spoken, popular language. Now, how can that be, if I am saying that the principal, indeed, necessary source of the wealth and perfection of a language are writers, and men of letters in particular? Here is how.

  I have said, and it is true, that convention, the only thing that can make a word a word, that is to say, the real sign of an idea, can never be very extensive, nor uniform and regulated, nor national, save by means of literature. But a people, especially a very lively people like the Italians, and particularly the Tuscans, and a very civilized one (as the Tuscans and Italians were the first to be, among all the peoples of Europe), and one that came into close contact with other peoples (as indeed did Tuscany, because of the fame of its culture and because of its political circumstances, its liberty, and especially its trade)a [1246] naturally invents, or adopts, countless words, countless idioms, and countless kinds and forms of both. But unless they have been received from literature, which disseminates them throughout the nation, fixes their form, spells out their meaning, ensures that they endure, the use and understanding of these words and idioms do not extend very far, do not acquire very much precision, probably remain uncertain, wavering, and arbitrary, and are soon lost, being replaced by new ones. See p. 1344. Now Italian literature has done
the very thing that I have described in detail. Alone among literatures, it received with particular care, affection, and pleasure the words, idioms, and forms of the people, especially the Tuscan people, and so it came about:

  (1) That the words, expressions, etc.—which would otherwise have been characteristic of just one province, and very often of a single city, and even of something less—once they were received, cherished, and fixed in literary usage, first by the writers of that province, etc., and then by those who went there to learn the language, or for whatever purpose, and then by the totality of Italian writers, have become Italian instead of Tuscan or any other dialect. And if this has happened more with Tuscan words and expressions than others, it is because the first good Italian writers came from that part of the world, and its words, etc., were disseminated and established in Italian literature by them, [1247] and also because the Tuscan dialect was perhaps in itself more graceful and also less irregular, less ungainly and less mangled and barbarous than others, and less internally discordant, in its structures, in the forms of words and expressions, etc.

  (2) Since Tuscan and Italian writers have never abandoned the study and expert imitation of popular speech (the abuses may for now be set aside), especially Tuscan (by contrast with what has happened in all other literatures that are already formed to some degree), the consequence has been that current Italian, owing to its literature, is rich in words, expressions, etc., which came into use among one of its most lively, imaginative, and inventive peoples, from the origins of the language up until the present day. Words and expressions, etc., which would have had but a very brief duration and a very limited scope had they not been adopted and fixed by the literature, which made them both perpetual and national. And so it was that literature, and not the people, even where popular words were concerned, became the principal and authentic source of the wealth and perfection of our language.

  (3) Let the half-philosophers yell as loud as they like. The wealth that brings variety, beauty, expression, warmth, force, brio, grace, fluency, delicacy, and naturalness can never be attained, never has been, never will be, by any language that has not greatly [1248] profited from and drawn on popular language, not only at the beginning, but continually. This does not mean writing as the people speak, but leading what it takes from the people to the forms and universal laws of its literature and the national language. Philosophical precision has nothing whatever to do with any of these qualities. Philosophical and logical wealth, that is, abundance of precise, etc., words and geometric, etc., expressions, does indeed serve the philosopher; it is wealth; it is a necessity, but it does not entail any of the qualities mentioned above, rather it serves as an obstacle to them, and very often, as has happened with French, it almost completely strips the language of those that it possessed. All these qualities are in the main characteristic of popular speech, and if the written Italian language stands out from all the other modern languages with respect to these qualities, if among all modern and even ancient languages it is rich in that richness which produces and contains these qualities, it is because the written Italian language (perhaps because it was still not much used in philosophy and was generally not very modern) drew more, and more lastingly than any other, from popular language. The reasons why this language always had these qualities, and especially in so lively, sensitive, and responsive a people, more [1249] than any other language, is obvious enough. The wealth so characteristic of the Italian language, greater in Italian even than in Greek and Latin, which I have spoken about pp. 1240–42, derives solely from the discreet and judicious application of popular speech by writers to literature.

  (4) Together with these advantages, there come many abuses, and from the very same source. We roundly condemn them, and agree in this with the writers who are raising their voices against them in Italy today, though they do not agree that every kind of beauty in a language should of necessity acknowledge popular speech as its principal and crucial source. (I refer here to the beauty, etc., that is fitting in true poetry, and in literature, essentially distinct in its language from the kind that is fitting in the sciences, etc.)1 By denying it, I do not see how they can so admire, e.g., Caro, the greater part of whose wonderfully true, subtle, and delightful beauties, both in the prose works and in the verses of the Aeneid, originally stem, as anyone may see at first glance, from his extensive use and mastery of the Tuscan vernacular (and also of other vernaculars in Italy, see Monti, Proposta, vol. 1, part 1, p. xxxv) and from his very judicious application of it to the various literary genres, from the humblest to the most lofty, from private letters to Epic.2 On the other hand, Italian writers did well to draw on the Tuscan vernacular rather than the other vernaculars of Italy, [1250] for the reasons that everyone knows and which we have stated pp. 1246, end–47, beginning. But it would be silly, absurd, pedantic, and ridiculous to conclude from this that only that vernacular can therefore be drawn on, that writers can only write in the manner and to the extent that that particular people speaks, that the Italian language and Italian literature wholly depend on the common people of Tuscany (when it does not even depend on the common people at all, but simply uses them when it so chooses), that in and outside of Tuscany, an Italian writer cannot create words or phrases that the Tuscan populace does not use, that, in short, someone who is not Tuscan, indeed, who is not Florentine, or not actually from the Old Market, is not Italian. Whereas in fact, as we have seen, it is not literature that is wholly subordinated to the populace but the populace to literature, and it is the common people that serves and ministers to literature, and not literature the common people. And literature imparts a form to, and distributes the speech it takes from the populace, and not vice versa. And it adds to it whatsoever it pleases, and uses it so far as it can, and where the speech of the populace is of no use it abandons it, either in part or altogether. In short, we have praised the written Italian language because it has been able to make use of popular language, more and better perhaps [1251] than any other modern language, and because it has never dismissed it from its service, as all the others may be said to have done (even Greek after a certain time, and Italian would do, too, if we did not admonish it, indeed it would already be doing so). We have not praised it because it has submitted to the speech of the populace, much less to that of the populace of a single province or city, which Italian has neither done nor been capable of doing, nor in so doing would it have been superior to all others but inferior, nor would we have praised it but utterly condemned it. From all the above it again follows that the written Italian language can make use of any other vernacular (as did the Greek language, indeed the Attic language itself), and that for Tuscans to arrogate to themselves exclusive privilege over the common language is madness, except insofar as one is unable to find in these other vernaculars those aspects that do not belong to the common language.

  By the same token, I would add that many Tuscan and Italian writers have taken more from the Tuscan vernacular than they could feasibly take, more than was intelligible or pleasing, etc., everywhere, more than was fitting for the character and forms of regulated, written Italian, more than could be communicated [1252] to the nation, and turn from being Tuscan and provincial into national and Italian, more than proved to be noble and fit for a written language and a literature that is no longer still to be formed but is already fully formed. They were very mistaken, and though they are not to be confused with the other vernacular writers, they are certainly not to be taken for Italians but for Tuscans or Florentines and Siennese, and for writers who are not, in fact, national but provincial or even, if I may so put it, municipal.

  I argue thus regarding all similar abuses, both in writers and in the Dictionary, etc.

  —No one is less a philosopher than one who would have everyone be a philosopher, and philosophical the whole of human life, which is as much as to say, as if there were no longer any life in the world.1 And yet this is the desire, etc., of philosophizers, indeed of the majority of philosophers p
ast and present.

  Thus, our Italian half-philosophers—well aware that the people cannot be the legislator of written speech, that the vulgar tongue can never suffice for the advances of the human mind, nor for fixing, defining, distinguishing, and transmitting knowledge—therefore claim that any written language and any style must keep wholly aloof from the vernacular, and wholly exclude the vernacular from the written form. This is because they do not have enough philosophy to distinguish the beautiful from the true, and therefore literature and poetry from the sciences, and to see that the first source of the beautiful is nature, which speaks to no other kind of men in so lively a fashion, so directly [1253] and so often, as it does to the people, and by no other kind of men is it so well, and so felicitously, and so vividly expressed. Precision you can get from philosophers. Propriety, and hence energy, concision, which is quite a different thing from precision, and all the qualities that derive from propriety, may best be attained through popular speech. And Lipsius (Epistolica Institutio, ch. 2)1 recommending the study of Cicero above all others because of the elegance, sweetness, abundance, and fluency of the Latin, recommends the comic dramatists Plautus and Terence as the sole and principal means of learning about the propriety of this language. See pp. 1481–84.

  From everything we have said about the crucial difference between poetic and literary language and scientific language, it follows that French—which, in its quasi-geometric expressions borders on the quality of those words we call terms, and moreover, especially today, almost has a greater abundance of terms, or quasi-terms, than of words—is by its nature incapable of genuine poetry and of genuinely beautiful literature, for it is lacking in the language of poetry and literature that cannot help but be fundamentally segregated from that of the sciences.2 I also give the name of terms or quasi-terms to those words used in conversation and the like, with which the French language is so richly endowed, and which in any sphere express a plain, or nearly plain, spare, precise idea, precisely. (30 June 1821.)