2016年7月3日 · itWaC (Italian) itWaC: a 2 billion word corpus constructed from the Web limiting the crawl to the .it domain and using medium-frequency words from the Repubblica corpus and basic Italian vocabulary lists as seeds.

Italian was adopted as an everyday written language long after French and English were. In medieval central Italy, literacy meant the ability to read and write Latin (and perhaps Greek if one was really learned)—that is, until influential writers like Dante and Petrarca wrote in a somewhat artificial version of il dialetto fiorentino and made it prestigious.

French and Italian made 16 and 17 maximally different (seize vs. dix-sept). Spanish and Portuguese chose a more regular, but still distinct enough pattern (dieciseis and diecisiete). Romanian is the odd Romance language out, where Sound Change didn't put up much pressure and the old latin forms of 16 and 17 are pretty well preserved ...

2018年12月16日 · "a word can found used in opposed geographical space" Italian and Portuguese share a few words which are not found anywhere else between Italy and Portugal. The first person singular subjective personal pronoun is the same word in Portuguese and Romanian, even though Portugal and Romenia are very far apart.

Standard Italian is based on the written form of the Tuscan dialect used by Dante and Petrarch, and does not take into account the changes in the language since the establishment of the orthography. Thus, standard Italian writes “la casa” and pronounces it as /la ʹkasa/, but the people in Tuscany actually say [la ʹhasa].

2017年10月29日 · The Italian language is well known for using definite articles quite liberally, before dates, weekdays, numbers, in some cases even in front of personal names as it is the case of the Milanese dialect: “il Giorgio”, “la Maria”. So I wonder what’s the origin of this “economy of expression” reserved to a family member.

2023年10月26日 · The use of capital letters is still in flux: either all nouns (like modern German spelling); or at the beginnings of sentences, and for the 'proper' nouns to capitalise (the definition of which then has to be made - in the modern spelling, yes for names of individual people and places, but no to the days of the week, to demonyms, to language ...

2019年2月5日 · I've also heard that Italian is the Romance language closest to Latin. And I've heard the same claim made about Romansh Ladin. (I'd love to put all the linguists who made those claims together in a small room and make them come to some sort of agreement.)

2022年5月4日 · E.g. In the Ngiti language of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, four different tenses of the verb "to whistle" can be distinguished using tone alone: ma màkpěnà "I whistled" (recent past), ma mákpěná "I whistled" (intermediate past), ma makpéna "I will whistle" (near future), ma makpénà "I used to whistle" (past habitual).

2020年7月23日 · The vast, vast majority of native Italian (i.e. not imported from another language) nouns and verbs end in vowels. It's very uncommon for native Italian nouns and verbs to stop at a consonant. Yet, when we look at Latin vocabulary, huge number of words end in hard consonants, e.g. diem, emptor, nauseam, rigor, nos, id, meus, and so on and so forth.