VENETIAN AND ITALIAN.

VENETIAN AND ITALIAN. “Venetian predates Italian by hundreds of years,” says Roderick Conway Morris in his review in the December 12, 2008 TLS of A LINGUISTIC HISTORY OF VENICE by Ronnie Ferguson. Venetian grew naturally out of late Latin in the area near Venice. Italian (or “Tuscan” as Venetians often call it) was “an artificially created language…forged by scholars and humanists of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in an attempt to found a national language….” Italian succeeded in part because it took the role that Latin had played as a written language. Venetian is still spoken by a majority of the people in Venice and the immediately surrounding area. “Ciao” is a contraction of the courteous Venetian phrase “vostro schiavo” (your humble servant).