Le carte alto-medievali come fonte di lingua

The paper relates the author's experience as a researcher in the field of pre-literary Italian, using Latin charters from the eight to twelfth centuries AD (mainly from Tuscany) as sources for information on the vernacular of the time, in the fields of phonetics, morphology and lexicography. Different approaches are taken into account and the paper proceeds to highlight three cases of possible interference between the vernacular and the Latin of the charters: a particular type of genitive occurring in nouns of the third declination; the use of apparently plural demonstrative pronouns with nouns in singular (e.g. ille terra, ipsi petio); the occurrence or not of a prosthetic vowel before initial clusters of the type sk, sp, st.