The Language of Pinocchio.

The Storica blog has a post about Pinocchio that has some Hattic material:

Carlo Collodi serialised the story in Il Giornale per i bambini, the first Italian children’s magazine, beginning on July 7, 1881. The first installment was titled Storia di un burattino — Story of a Puppet. Eight episodes later, over four months, the Fox and the Cat lured Pinocchio into a forest at night, robbed him, and strung him from the branch of la Quercia grande, the Great Oak: gli legarono le mani dietro le spalle, e passatogli un nodo scorsoio intorno alla gola, lo attaccarono penzoloni al ramo di una quercia. He shut his eyes, opened his mouth, stretched his legs, gave one great convulsion, and stayed there as if frozen stiff. Fine.

Collodi was done. He had collected his fee. Italian children wrote in begging him to continue. He resumed reluctantly five months later, on February 16, 1882, with the title changed from Storia di un burattino to Le avventure di Pinocchio and a Blue Fairy — first introduced as a literal child-corpse with turquoise hair, lying in a window of a forest cottage — appearing in chapter sixteen to revive him. […]

The legacy of the book has almost nothing to do with the satire. It has to do with the language.

When Italy was politically unified in 1861, the linguist Tullio De Mauro’s classic estimate is that only about 2.5% of the population spoke standard Italian — roughly 630,000 people out of twenty-five million. The rest spoke a mosaic of regional dialects mutually unintelligible enough that a Neapolitan recruit could not understand a Piedmontese officer. The new state needed a single shared language, and fast. They chose Tuscan, the literary tongue of Dante and Petrarch — but most Italians had never heard Tuscan spoken in daily life.

What got Tuscan into ordinary Italian homes was schoolbooks. Pinocchio became one of them. Collodi wrote in clean middle-register Florentine Tuscan: short sentences, common verbs, concrete nouns — pane, naso, bugia, legno, fata, volpe (bread, nose, lie, wood, fairy, fox). The book ended up on every elementary school syllabus and stayed there. Generations of Italian children learned to read in the language Collodi had already simplified for them. By 1951, when De Mauro re-counted, the proportion of Italians who could speak standard Italian had climbed from 2.5% to roughly 87%. Television finished that job. Mass schooling, with Pinocchio in it, started it. […]

What’s strange about reading the original today — not the Disney version, not even a translation, the original — is that it doesn’t feel old. The Italian is plain enough that an early learner with a textbook behind them can finish a chapter in a sitting. The plot moves at television speed: thirty-six chapters of trouble before the redemption finally lands. The pictures are vivid, weird, and entirely Collodi’s: a piece of wood that talks back, a fox pretending to be blind, a donkey at the bottom of the sea. You do not need a literary education to follow it. He wasn’t writing for one.

Most translations soften the book. Most adaptations cut the donkey-skin drum. Most adults who think they know Pinocchio are remembering Disney. The book itself is still the book Collodi reluctantly extended past chapter fifteen because Italian children would not let it end.