Old Italian
1
9.9
- noun
:
italiano antiguo
- old Italian neighborhood
Examples
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To the great days of bel canto, When the old Italian opera companies used to come to Dublin.
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I'd fallen asleep in bed next to Jill watching a video she'd rented, some old Italian movie about a man and a woman who had their own little circus and traveled from one small town to the next, entertaining peasants.
Fiction book (2002) -
I think one of the striking things about the gentrification in Williamsburg is that the hipsters/arrivistas do not really embrace the old Italian restaurants and shops that have been there for decades.
Blog text (24) -
You essentially have two neighborhoods: the older community that still gets their coffee and pastries from Fortunato Brothers or eats in one of the old Italian restaurants, and then the new people who have imported their own scenester havens.
Blog text (24) -
They'd sat tucked in a back booth, twirling their forks in plates of linguine, and listening to a group of old Italian men playing bocce ball in the alley outside.
Fiction book (1998) -
The Old Italian language was used in artistic works prior to the 16th century.
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Scholars studies include texts written in Old Italian to understand the language's evolution.
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Many students of linguistics are fascinated by the Old Italian dialects spoken in rural regions.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'the form of Italian used up to the mid-16th century' is directly and compositionally derived from 'old' (an earlier historical/language stage) + 'Italian' (the language). This construction is cross-linguistically common (e.g. Old English, Old French) and a B1 learner who knows both constituents would readily infer it refers to an earlier stage of the Italian language.
Etymology
Old Italian names the older way people spoke and wrote Italian up to the middle of the 1500s. The word 'old' is a simple memory hook: it means these are the earlier words and grammar that came before modern Italian, so texts in Old Italian are an earlier form of the language.