PROVA

[Gerson W. Barbosa]

(10-17-2014 01:24 AM)Massimo Gnerucci Wrote:  

An M for an N, but they managed to tweak it.

But your preferred quote has some problems: third line (something is missing...) and the last couple of lines have problems with their vowels (though correct in modern italian but, then, you should have ditched the double T in eterna/eterne...)!

That M remained there for quite a while before they decided to cut its right leg off. It wouldn't hurt if they had the letter repainted though.
The Ts are indeed doubled in a bilingual edition I've checked. Occasional shifts in consonant duration appeared to have occurred even in late Latin as we can see in the Appendix Probi (#110 and #112, for instance). "Acqua", which was then marked as wrong, is now correct
The google occurences of "se non etterne, e io etterno duro" outnumber those of "se non eterne, e io eterno duro" by a factor of 50. If this is not a badly propagated mistake, then at Dante's time these words might indeed have been spelled and pronounced that way.

Cheers,

Gerson.