Codesto

Codesto is a demonstrative adjective and pronoun in Italian that designates a thing or person already mentioned or within the listener’s frame of reference, roughly equivalent to “that [one]” or “the aforementioned.” In modern standard Italian, codesto is rarely used and is generally regarded as archaic or literary. The standard demonstratives are questo (this) and quello (that); codesto survives in certain stylistic registers and in regional speech to convey an antiquarian tone or formal emphasis. The masculine form is codesto and the feminine form codesta, with plural forms codesti or codeste in contexts that preserve the base meaning.

Origin and development: Codesto dates from medieval and early modern Italian, formed by combining a base demonstrative with the suffix -esto. Its usage declined as the language standardised and replaced it with more common forms such as questo and quello. In contemporary Italian it appears mainly in historical or literary texts, religious writings, or in translations that aim to evoke older diction.

Usage and scope: When codesto occurs, it often serves to foreground a previously cited item or to create a tone of formality and distance. It may appear in fixed expressions like codesto libro or codesta pagina in older prose or in stylistic reproductions of historical language. It is occasionally encountered in regional dialects that retain older syntactic habits.

See also: Italian language, demonstratives, archaic language.