Word.ws English Dictionary

Old Italian

Old Italian proper noun: the continuum of languages derived from Vulgar Latin spoken in the Italian peninsula between circa 960 and the establishment of the Accademia della Crusca in 1582.

Proper noun

Old Italian

  1. The continuum of languages derived from Vulgar Latin spoken in the Italian peninsula between circa 960 and the establishment of the Accademia della Crusca in 1582.
    • The theory that there was a spontaneous development of an obscure vowel in final position on certain occasions in Old Italian has gained general currency and has been carried on in the works of the main authorities.1938, George Melville Bolling, Bernard Bloch, Language, volume 14, Linguistic Society of America, page 224
    • [… T]his configuration, in which the infinitive clause is a prepositional complement of a noun, could not be found in the documentary evidence of (Tuscan) Old Italian. Another diverging property in this example is the preverbal subject after prepositions, no longer common in Old Italian at the end...
    • [… T]he examples show the use of nonauxiliary verbs. Though similar to Old Italian, this is another difference from contemporary Italian.2000, Guido Mensching, Infinitive Constructions with Specified Subjects: A Syntactic Analysis of the Romance Languages, pages 30 and 31 (Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax; →ISBN, 9780195133035)

Origin of Old Italian

Old + Italian, on the pattern of Old English

Questions about Old Italian

What does Old Italian mean?
Old Italian means the continuum of languages derived from Vulgar Latin spoken in the Italian peninsula between circa 960 and the establishment of the Accademia della Crusca in 1582.
What part of speech is Old Italian?
Old Italian is a proper noun.

Words near Old Italian in the dictionary

  1. Old Ingarsby
  2. Old Ionian
  3. Old Ionic
  4. Old Iranian
  5. Old Irish
  6. Old Italian
  7. Old Jamestown
  8. Old Japanese
  9. Old Javanese
  10. Old Jerusalem Island
  11. Old Junee

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Old Italian (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Old Italian.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/old_italian. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.