Blessed written errors, passion for philologists and energy for Italian

The texts are dictated, copied, handed down. Whether they are manuscripts, movable type prints or in word format, it happens to come across alterations and slips. Thanks to these oversights, scholars have isolated certain aspects of our language. “The exception makes the rule” by Matteo Motolese in the bookstore

In the second chapter of his excellent The exception is the rule. Seven stories of mistakes that tell Italian, recently in the bookshop for the types of Garzanti, Matteo Motolese recalls a founding event, which happened to him while he was preparing to prepare his degree thesis. Going to the State Archives of Florence he sets out on the trail of texts concerning the plague in the fourteenth century, the one that he framed Boccaccio’s Decameron. He comes across a series of testimonies, letters, memories of ordinary citizens. “That experience – he writes – put me in contact for the first time with something I had never seen directly. A structurally unstable, fluid language, very different from what I found in modern editions of ancient texts“. An example. He realizes that the word “June” is written in different ways: “June”, “June”, “June”. A revelation. The graphic differences also cause repercussions on the sound. Boccaccio himself then, Motolese recalls, used to write the letter “c” in different ways, sometimes transforming it into “k”. A careful consultation of the Decameron’s autograph code confirms this. And, come to think of it, don’t those “kare” or “karissime” remember the handwriting of any teenager today?