3. Linguistics in the Renaissance period. Emergence of General rational grammar

1.1 Introduction
Mirko Tavoni
The division o f this chapter into three parts, corresponding to Western
Europe, Roman Slavdom and Orthodox Slavdom, is justified by the different
historical conditions in which linguistic thought developed, and
by the different forms it took in the three areas.
The distinction between Roman Slavdom (linked to the Roman
Church: Croats, Slovenians, Slovaks, Czechs and Poles) and Orthodox
Slavdom (belonging to the spiritual jurisdiction o f the Orthodox Church:
Bulgarians, Serbs, Ruthenians and Russians) must be made because o f
the profound differences in the cultural tradition which characterize the
two areas.1 First o f all, most o f the documents written by Slavs belonging
to the Catholic faith, at least up to and including the Renaissance,
are in Latin, while the official language o f Orthodox Slavdom until the
eighteenth century was Church Slavonic. Therefore linguistic thought
developed independently in the two Slavic areas: in Roman Slavdom it
felt the effect o f the Western tradition, while in Orthodox Slavdom it
was strongly influenced by the Byzantine grammatical tradition.
The label ‘Renaissance’ originates from and can be properly applied
to that part o f Europe which is united by the shared use o f Latin as the
language o f culture, religion and science, and this is also true as far as
the development o f linguistic thought is concerned; this means Western
Europe, filled for the most part by modem languages belonging to the
Romance and Germanic families, and the western, Roman, area o f the
Slavic dominion, which maintains a fairly close cultural solidarity with
the Latino-Germanic area. From the second half o f the fifteenth century,
the renewal in the study o f Latin brought about by Italian Humanism
spread through all this vast area o f Europe, providing a renewed basis for
its linguistic and cultural unity. In contrast to the Humanist, theoretical and pedagogic consideration o f Latin in terms o f its use (from the viewpoint
o f rhetoric rather than grammar) from about the middle o f the
sixteenth century one finds a new rationalistic and philosophical attitude
coming from France and Spain, to which Italy was to remain essentially
an outsider, marking the start o f its relegation to a marginal position.
In the sixteenth century all this part o f Europe was crossed by parallel
movements of emancipation and standardization of modem languages,
supported by powerful factors such as the consolidation o f the nation
states and their administrative machinery, the Reformation, printing.
Italy, depressed in politics but illustrious in literature, still exported
literary themes and models in support o f the vernacular, especially in
the Romance area, while German became established on religious and
national rather than literary grounds. During the same period, Eastern
Slavdom, subject to the Orthodox Church, developed a wholly separate
and different system, centred on the standardization o f Church Slavonic,
the supra-national religious language used not only in the vast context
of the Slavic-Orthodox linguistic community, but also by Lithuanians
and Romanians for long periods; here the question o f national languages
would arise two centuries later than in the rest o f Europe.
Studies on linguistics in Western Europe at the time o f the Renaissance
are particularly marked by the division into national linguistic traditions.
That is why this chapter has been organized primarily by themes
or genres, and only within these by country. This is meant to facilitate
an embryonic comparison between the different national experiences
reacting to similar stimuli, and to suggest the desirability of comparative
research, which is missing at present. The two Slavic parts, especially
the Orthodox one, to which the time period based on the category
‘Renaissance’ least applies, freely exceed the chronological limits o f
the chapter in order to outline the long transition from the Middle Ages
to the modem age.
Note
i. The introduction of the terms ‘Slavia Orthodoxa’ and ‘Slavia Romana’ is
due to Riccardo Picchio. Although in the past they have met with some
reservations among scholars, today they are widely accepted, see Picchio
(1972, 11—13). In this chapter the English designations ‘Roman Slavdom’
and ‘Orthodox Slavdom’ are used.