Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
General
Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
American essays; English essays
Italian body at once suggests the twofold question, why they do not
belong to it, and whether they ought not to belong to it. History
easily answers the first question; it may perhaps also answer the
second question in a way which will say Yes as regards one place and No
as regards another. Ticino must not lose her higher freedom; Trieste
must remain the needful mouth for southern Germany; Dalmatia must not
be cut off from the Slavonic mainland; Corsica would seem to have
sacrificed national feeling to personal hero-worship. But it is
certainly hard to see why Trent and Aquileia should be kept apart from
the Italian body. On the other hand, the revivified Italian kingdom
contains very little which is not Italian in speech. It is perhaps by
a somewhat elastic view of language that the dialect of Piedmont and
the dialect of Sicily are classed under one head; still, as a matter of
fact, they have a single classical standard, and they are universally
accepted as varieties of the same tongue. But it is only in a few
Alpine valleys that languages are spoken which, whether Romance or
Teutonic, are in any case not Italian. The reunion of Italy, in short,
took in all that was Italian, save when some political cause hindered
the rule of language from being followed. Of anything not Italian by
speech so little has been taken in that the non-Italian parts of Italy,
Burgundian Aosta and the Seven German Communes--if these last still
keep their Teutonic language--fall under the rule that there are some
things too small for laws to pay heed to.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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