Wiktionary talk:About Italian

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Per WT:RFV#ananasso (which will be archived to Talk:ananasso), it seems that not all users are in agreement as to whether Old Italian (roa-oit) should exist as a separate L2 language from Italian on Wiktionary, and if so, what year to use as the cutoff. It appears that GianWiki has been behind our Old Italian entries and used 1582 as the cutoff (now codified at WT:About Old Italian, but as Prosfilaes notes, that makes Dante's work Old Italian, which 1) is strange, because he has been considered the first modern Italian author and 2) is problematic, because it seems SemperBlotto has already added words from Dante and works of similar age and marked them as Italian (it). I think that moving the cutoff back to before Dante would be the best solution, but it would require reviewing the entries in Old Italian, and perhaps merger would be easier. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 21:09, 29 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

As I noted in the RFV discussion, I took the 1582 date from our dictionary definition of ], the only definition of it I could find that provided a date. It's based on the establishment of the Accademia della Crusca, the body which standardized Italian. The fact that Old Italian does not even have a Wikipedia article, whereas e.g. Old Spanish, Old Portuguese (mentioned at RFV) and Old French do, does not bode well for Old Italian being an independent language. One of the only reference works to use the string "old Italian" as a language name (rather than "old Italian or Turkish gold coin"), the 1860 New American Cyclopædia, outright says "There is no old Italian, in the sense of the old French; for the ante-Dantic only differs in form from the idiom which he created." Other uses, e.g. Rhotacism in the Old Italian Languages, and the Exceptions, are referring to the old Italic languages (Latin, etc). I would merge it back into it. - -sche (discuss) 05:26, 31 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

I think the onus is on the person (or people) wanting to split off Old Italian from Italian to prove on the balance of probability that it's correct to do so. So I say merge. Renard Migrant (talk) 15:46, 16 September 2015 (UTC)Reply

I think we shouldn't use languages not in ISO 639-3 without solid argument for up front. I certainly think we shouldn't use roa-oit; we should either get a new sublanguage tag via rfc:5646 (from ietf-languages), or a new language code via ISO 639-3 (and SIL), if we see fit to make this distinction.--Prosfilaes (talk) 20:05, 16 September 2015 (UTC)Reply

I will begin to merge Old Italian into Italian. - -sche (discuss) 10:35, 21 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

The sole reason - in my point of view - for the existence of a distinct "Old Italian" category is that it's perhaps better suited to contain terms and forms that have little to no place in Modern Standard Italian (except as archaisms or poeticisms), having either been replaced by other terms and forms, or simply fallen out of use.
That said, if such a distinction happens to be regarded as inaccurate or incorrect, merging could indeed prove a solution to the issue. -- GianWiki (talk) 23:29, 23 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

Italian is not really meant to be exclusively Modern Standard Italian; whether or not we separate out Old Italian, it's going to include archaisms and poeticisms and any word used in Italian in the last few centuries. Even, to some extent, dialects, though a lot of Italian lects have their own codes. Words that aren't Modern Standard Italian should generally have a context label.--Prosfilaes (talk) 03:58, 24 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

I understand that. I have no qualms about merging the two, either, because I can see how the distinction is much more faint than that between - say - French and Old French. Also, I can help with the merging process. -- GianWiki (talk) 17:18, 24 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

Yes, the solution is to use context labels like {{lb|it|obsolete}}, rather than a separate header — especially because the words would generally have to be present under an ==Italian== header even if we were to consider "Old Italian" a separate language and duplicate the content also under that header, because the words usually continued to be used past the proposed cutoff date. The entry which started this discussion, ananasso, is a case in point (in fact, all uses of it seem to be from after the proposed cutoff date). - -sche (discuss) 00:24, 25 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

Note that we should keep this as an etymology-only language code, given how often cited it is: Category:Terms derived from Old Italian. But the entries should be ==Italian==. - -sche (discuss) 03:32, 29 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

 Done. - -sche (discuss) 00:10, 30 June 2016 (UTC)Reply