I’ve looked and looked but can’t find anything. It seems to me that there should be something somewhere. About the closest I’ve gotten to it is the Lord’s Prayer in Sardinian,
at http://www.christusrex.com, but that’s about it. Usually also I find a lot of course syllabi and schedules, but no real information.
Other early Romance besides Italian would also be welcome. I have found one site that discusses Old French, but otherwise nothing. Come on, are the historical linguists so far behind everyone else when it comes to setting up web sites?
It depends just how Old you want your Old Italian to be. There is a wealth of resources for studying it as it was written two thousand years ago. Of course, Italian of that vintage is usually called “Latin”.
Bear in mind that, in pre-Renaissance Western Europe, the vernacular (of whatever origin) was something used by dung-footed peasants, and that persons of education and breeding wrote (and sometimes spoke) in Latin. It wasn’t until (roughly) the 14[sup]th[/sup] century that Petrarch, Chaucer, et al. made the local vernacular something more than an uncouth dialect that you swore in at your ox. For that reason, written records of what Old Whatever was are thin on the ground. Old French is better documented than most, because of the Oath of Strasbourg, the commentaries of Rashi, etc.
Basically what I’d like to do is get an idea of the language as it is theorized to have existed while these dung footed peasants were living among the crumbling ruins of the Forum.
For instance, when did noun declensions die out…500AD, 700, or 800?
I’ve seen the site, or one of the sites, that give the Oaths of Strasbourg so I know that already by that time, in the 800’s, the declension system was reduced to only two cases.