When Charles V talks about "speaking Italian to women" which language in Italy was he talking about...

You are thinking of the Divine comedy.

So it is the Florentine dialect, not the other languages in North Italy?

thats tuscan, i.e. proto-italian

No, the Divine comedy was written in archaic italian.

Italian as a language existed since Dante's time.
It was basically only used by men of letters, but it existed and was called italian.

I understand the literal meaning as "let go of my dick", sure. It doesn't fucking exist as a figure of speech tho.

Was it just a standardized register of Tuscan?

Not quite. The grammar was mostly tuscan/roman, but the vocabulary came from all over. As it was meant to have all the lyrical qualities of all regional poetry, it had a very aulic vocabulary with a very great many loans from the northern and southern languages. And that was to begin with. It did receive even more northern influence through the centuries.
Right now, italian is just barely enough to understand pure tuscan. Old fucks talk in a way that's barely intelligible, especially deep in the countryside.

that picture is nicolo machiavelli's prince though, how is dante relevant here famalam

The Prince is actually in italian.
Here in italy the Divine comedy is classified as "Archaic italian", while the Prince is classified as "Italian".

Ah ok. But machivelli was tuscan no? Bocaccio too would also be tuscan too wouldnt he? Its intelligible to italians today because their tuscan writing was literally the basis for the style for the italian elite and therefore centuries later provided the rubric for a united italian language when these elites were brought together under one flag theough risorgimento

Machiavelli and Boccaccio both wrote in italian.
Niccolò was a protonationalist, Giovanni was 'cosmopolitan' in the italian sense. His writing was very influenced by the neapolitan and sicilian schools of poetry.

>Its intelligible to italians today because their tuscan writing was literally the basis for the style for the italian elite and therefore centuries later provided the rubric for a united italian language when these elites were brought together under one flag theough risorgimento
Completely wrong. Tuscan was the grammatical base for italian, but italian was artificially made up between the 13th and 14th century by the elites that intellectually were already pretty much together if indeed they were ever apart. You can see examples of italian intellectuals like Machiavelli or Bembo pushing for a wider adoption of italian from 1300 onward. There's a shitload of italian writers from all over the peninsula active during the renaissance, perfectly intelligible today.

This quote confuses me a bit. Wasn't Venetian more popular than Italian at this time and the trade language of the Med?

>implying

Dante himself spoke about different "vulgar" languages. Italian wasn't a thing until recently, and the choice of Tuscan was made to retroactively include Dante in the new "Italian" culture.

Yes, very probably.

The trade language was a pidgin of venetian mostly but also other languages, it was called sabir.
Venetian was the language of the venetian republic, both officially and mundanely, but even venetian intellectuals when addressing their fellow italian intellectuals used italian rather than venetian. You have venetian historians and literates like Marcantonio Barbaro and Pietro Bembo writing mostly in italian while using venetian in everyday life.

>Italian wasn't a thing until recently
>first italian vocabulary dated 1612

why wasn't venetian considered a god-tier dialect desu. wasn't it pretty archaic and had cool latinisms and byzantinism in the language? sounds awesome to me

thats the thing though. the italian language was always an elite phenomenon and didn't become a mass phenomenon until the 1950s. risorgimento saw the attempt to nationalize italian but it failed until post wwii and the spread of mass radio and television.

>language of trade? you pleb
No but seriously, venetian is very cool, and so is sicilian (sicilian school of poetry is fucking top tier), but neither had a chance to be considered. It was always going to be tuscan or bolognese, because they were a happy average of the 'outlying' vulgars.
Venetian in particular had a good few issues, like being very fragmented. Whereas tuscan was basically florentine, venetian was more of a spectrum, with a big conflict between lagoon venetian and pavan venetian. Basically extreme literary shitflinging between university writers (pavan) and actual venetian (lagoon).

>italian doesn't exist
>italian isn't widespread
These are two completely different things and well you know it. Don't try to move goalposts.

> Don't try to move goalposts.
i wasn't that poster. i'm

probably tuscan... this makes me remind a song.
youtube.com/watch?v=VqVd5TPpNos