Italian language

Italianis a Romance language. By most measures, Italian, together with Sardinian, is the closest toLatinof the Romance languages. Italian is an official language inItaly,Switzerland,San Marino,Vatican Cityand western Istria (inSloveniaandCroatia).

Quote

• ThepopularityofMetastasioandPetrarchin the eighteenth century had caused many people to look upon Italian as an effeminate language—-a view which was now criticized byMacaulay,for example: 'It is a general opinion, among those who know little or nothing of the subject, that this admirable language is adapted only to the effeminate cant of sonneteers,musiciansand connoisseurs.'Leigh Hunt,in particular, strove to eradicate thisprejudice:'One of the great objects of the present writer, for many years past, has been to lure his readers into the love of other languages, particularly of this (Italian) most beautiful of them all,' and for this reason he gave the original Italian in quotations as well as histranslation.
  • C. P. Brand; Walter Brian Harland (9 June 2011).Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-Century England.Cambridge University Press. p. 43.ISBN 978-0-521-24729-0.

• Auniversityteaches. What does it teach? It must obviously teach all thelanguagesin which the greatliteratureswhich have been preserved were written —Hebrew,Arabic,Sanskrit,Greek,Latin,French,Italian,German,Scandinavian,andEnglish.
  • Charles William Eliot,as quoted byZ. Elmarsafy; A. Bernard; D. Attwell (13 June 2013).Debating Orientalism.Springer. p. 82.ISBN 978-1-137-34111-2.

• Thewritten languageat the heart ofChinesecivilization was designed for the production of aconservativeelite and the exclusion of the masses from their activities. The contrast could scarcely be greater with the competing vernaculars ofEurope– Italian,FrenchandCastilianas well asPortugueseandEnglish– usable for eliteliteraturebut readily accessible to a wider public with relatively simple and easily scalableeducation.
  • Niall Ferguson,Civilization: The West and the Rest(2011)