NOTES TO CANTO XIV.
99
Referring to Grassi’s Military Dictionary, I find bertresca with bertesca defined in a mode which will not accord with the present use of it. But though his Dictionary is a very useful work, he is not to be implicitly relied on, for he does not cite his authorities[1]; which, indeed, would not always have given much weight to his assertions; he often borrowing terms from modern authors who were the inventors of these Italian equivalents for French or German modes of expression. Thus he gives caval’armato for a heavy horse, and pernottare for to bivouac; yet he could, I believe, cite no earlier writer as the user of these words than Foscolo, in his translation of the Memoirs of Montecucoli. In point of fact,
- ↑ This, indeed, was impossible, as many of the materials were orally communicated, and the mode in which this work was in part compiled (or at least intended to be compiled) may explain the difficulties of such an undertaking, and throw some light upon those which even the provincial Italians have to encounter in learning Italian. I was living in the house of a literary man in Florence, when the Signor Grassi, a Piedmontese, arrived for the first time in that city; and he having much intercourse with mine host, I heard him develope the scheme for his dictionary. “I shall go,” he said, among other things, “into gunsmiths’ shops, and ask them the proper terms for the different parts of a musquet, beginning at the croisa,” or some such word, evidently a corruption of the French word croisée. I did not venture to tell him, that I could at least, though then new to Italy, inform him upon that point; though I might have softened the appearance of presumption by citing the example of his countryman Baretti, who learned Italian, in which he became so distinguished a writer, in London. As a proof of this, let any one compare the first edition of his grammar, filled with Gallicisms and provincialisms, with one edited after a long residence in England. The explanation of this will probably be found in Baretti’s having been conversant principally with the jargon spoken in his own province. In England he studied Italian in books and in the conversation of learned Italians, who, for common convenience, cultivated among themselves the lingua aulica of Italy, as the best universal mean of communication. This will explain the possibility of an Italian speaking his own language very detestably; and, in fact, untravelled Piedmontese or Neapolitans, &c. &c. &c. speak Italian as resident Cumberland or Cornish gentlemen spoke English some fifty years ago.
