Vulgar Italian “sapere ordo”

Abstract

This paper provides a review of the evidence of the word ordo and the expression sapere ordo, attested in documentation in Vulgar Italian from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, mainly related to a delimited area between Tuscany and Umbria, and today surviving only in some dialects of the same border area, as witnessed by several dialectal vocabularies. The suggested analysis discusses their origin, their relations with other Romance languages and tries to explain some apparently more singular variants.