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

Mirko Tavoni
1.2.1 Latin grammar
The Christian West inherits from the preceding centuries the centrality
o f Latin as the foundation o f its education system and as the language
that continues to guarantee the production and the spread o f a common
culture.1 However crucial may have been the events that in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries began to break down this cultural monolinguism,
it is difficult to overestimate the importance o f grammatica (i.e. o f both
grammar and the Latin language itself, according to the revealing identification
o f grammar and Latin which persisted from the vocabulary o f
middle Latin well into the vernacular cultures o f the Renaissance) as the
first and propaedeutic art o f the Trivium and therefore as the foundation
o f the edifice o f knowledge. The humanists attacked the traditional
methods for the teaching o f grammar, and the scholastic dialectics which
represented at the same time its organic continuation in the curriculum
and its theoretical foundation at the level o f the philosophy o f language.
By doing this they were deliberately aiming at the foundations o f a system
for which they wished to offer a new basis. The historical significance
o f their grammars, with the views o f language they imply and at
times make manifest, cannot be assessed outside the educational field
to which they clearly belong, and on the basis o f which their militant
nature can be appreciated.
There is some controversy about whether the earliest experiences of
educational and grammatical reform brought about by the Humanists
should be seen as developing or breaking from tradition. This tradition
can be identified with Donatus’ Ars minor or Alexandre de Villedieu’ s
Doctrinale (the two textbooks which seem to have been most widely
used, in lower schools and in universities respectively), and with a
more or less established corpus o f texts (such as the Auctores octo)
and grammatical works (such as Eberhard de Bethune’ s Graecismus),
which together with the Doctrinale and the major middle Latin lexicons
were to take the lead position in the ‘canon o f nefarious grammarians’ ,
which was attacked by the representatives o f mature Humanism from
Valla onwards.2 The champion o f the generation before Valla, Guarino
Veronese, certainly started an innovative teaching practice, characterized
by the drastic reduction and simplification o f the grammatical
apparatus (an obvious characteristic o f his Regulae gramaticales, written
shortly before 1418, is their brevity) and by the encouragement to
move on quickly to reading the classical texts directly. The basic idea
was that the more constantly, carefully and in depth a student read good
texts, the better he would learn Latin. Grammatical rules should not be
set up as autonomous entities: they are not the true reality o f language,
but merely observations a posteriori on the way it functions, which are
useful for taking the first steps and for allowing access to texts. This
trend, which later would be expressed as a theory in terms o f the greater
value o f usus as opposed to ratio, has a material foundation in the great
discoveries o f Latin manuscripts that characterize the first half o f the
fifteenth century:3 the number o f new texts, and o f new manuscripts for
each text, increases and improves knowledge o f ancient Latin, and creates
the need for more sophisticated working aids, both in the field of
textual philology and in the field o f grammar.
If this innovative trend is clearly present in the method and organization
o f Guarino’ s school, his grammar was described by Sabbadini
(1896, 1902 and 1903) rather in terms o f continuity with tradition,
resulting from the combination o f four components: the Italian grammatical
tradition, exemplified by the texts by the Tuscan Francesco da
Buti and by the Cremonese Folchino dei Borfoni (fourteenth century),
the Doctrinale, the Ianua (an anonymous compilation from Donatus
and Priscian on the eight parts o f speech, probably dating from the
thirteenth century) and Priscian. In addition to the difficulty in reaching
definite conclusions while no critical edition o f Guarino’ s Regulae exists,
and the widespread contamination in the medieval tradition, it should be
mentioned that these sources (especially the real presence o f the Ianua)
have been questioned in part by Percival (1972a, 1976b and 1982),4 who
points out significant changes introduced by Guarino into the syntactic
theory he inherited. The abandoning of the terms suppositum (subject)
and appositum (object); the abandoning o f ‘explanatory concepts’ designating
the kind o f influence a verb has over the noun it governs, and
justifying the case in which this governing occurs (ex natura relations
derived from Aristotelian thought); the abandoning o f terms and concepts
derived from Modist ideas (all o f them traits that did not belong to
the grammar o f late antiquity, but that became part o f the tradition during
the Middle Ages) show that a grammatical apparatus that depended
in various ways on logic was being curtailed. But other characteristics
remain: and among these the reference to a sort o f natural order o f constituent