NERI DORTELATA OF FLORENCE, TO THE LOVERS OF THE FLORENTINE LANGUAGE.

Having seen by experience time and time again, and understood through many reports, dearest friends, with what attention and affection you hear the Florentines speak, and how—among the other pronunciations of Tuscany—you marvelously enjoy theirs: and how much you also desire to be able, either by yourselves or with that little practice of Florentines that fortune sometimes grants you, to know and learn the Florentine pronunciation: and desiring, for my part, to satisfy both your honest desires and that debt I hold toward my own mother tongue: I have provided for both the one and the other, at the same time, as best and as easily as I have known how. For I have gathered together all those observations of our Alphabet, and of the Accents, which have seemed necessary to me for now to demonstrate and mark all the most notable sounds and spirits referring to phonetic articulations or breathings of our language: And I have put them into action in some booklets.