Dethroning Dante

For 700 years, Italian language purists have held that if a word cannot be found in Dante's Divine Comedy, or did not evolve from Dante's Italian, it isn't really a word at all. This scruple and others have so seriously hobbled lexicographers that they have not been able to bring out a comprehensive Italian dictionary since 1811. Now, overriding all impediments, Italian scholars are finally compiling a modern dictionary.

Actually, Dante's Italian has seldom been spoken or written except by elite men of letters, diplomats, philosophers and scholars. The masses speak various provincial dialects, although the differences have gradually been softened by modern communications. At the same time, new complications have arisen in the borrowing of words from French and English. Thus the longtime guardian ' of Italian lexicography, the Accademia della Crusca in Florence, faces a touchy job of arbitration between pedantry and colloquialism.

What's Topless in Italian? It must decide, for example, whether to include peculiarly Italian uses of English words. Sexy is in conversational use in Italy but implies heights of nubility far beyond the English meaning. A box is a garage for such fast sports cars as spyders, which is a corruption of speeder. A pullman is a long-distance bus; water is short for water closet. Some phrases have been adopted intact, such as strip tease, baby doll, Latin lover and jet set. Topless, fortunately, brings the same vision to Italian men as to Americans.

The academy, founded in 1583 with support by the Medici family and with Galileo himself as a member, published its first dictionary in 1612, a century and a half before the learned Dr. Johnson did as much for English. Subsequent editions appeared regularly until 1811 and one—the 1623 edition—became the model for definitive dictionaries in other European countries. The academicians tackled the job again in 1842, and plugged away for 81 years in their classical Dantean style, leading one critic to call the work "a vile, barbarous collection of excommunicated language." They were all the way up to the letter O when the more modern-minded Mussolini government ordered the project abandoned.

From Pirandello & Moravia. The Italian project is part of a worldwide push toward updating languages. France, Germany, The Netherlands, Spain and Greece all have recently undertaken or completed such projects, most of them inspired by the Oxford English Dictionary, whose final volume was published in 1928. Even with the aid of IBM computers, which will record and digest words from such great Italian writers as Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Pirandello, Moravia—and Dante —the job is expected to take 50 years.

Because of the borrowing of words from other languages, the new work will add five letters—J, K, W, X and Y—that have not been part of the formal Italian alphabet. It will cost about $5,000,000, fill 20 volumes, each 1,000 pages thick. It is all a labor of love for the academy's dynamic President Giacomo Devoto, who at 67 is not likely to live much beyond the publication of Volume I, scheduled for 1975.