At that point the writing closely reflected actual pronunciation, but with rapid expansion and the increasing urbanization of its speakers Old French soon underwent radical pronunciation and syntactic changes (morphing into Middle French) while the writing remained fairly static.
Old French developed a relatively fixed orthography early on. While figuring out the written form of an unfamiliar spoken French word can be difficult, the spelling is normally consistent enough (much more so than in English) to enable correct pronunciation of an unfamiliar written word.įurthermore, French and Italian are at opposite ends of the Romance Family when it comes to diachronic change or innovation. In many words it fails to note tonic stress or to disambiguate certain letters, such as: open and closed o and e, voiced and voiceless s and z (including zz), the combination gli, which normally represents a palatal lateral but in a few cases is, the digraph gn, which is usually a palatal nasal, but very occasionally is, and semi-consonantal and vocalic i and u. In fact, modern Italian spelling isn't all that "phonetic" when it comes to avoiding ambiguity.
I think there was a final orthographic reform in the early 20th century. By then the written form of the language was fairly stable. Use of this vernacular was further bolstered by the regional political influence that Tuscany enjoyed from the early Renaissance on, but it wasn't (at least not in the modern sense) a national language until 1861.
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. Italian was adopted as an everyday written language long after French and English were.
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