3. Linguistics in the Renaissance period. Emergence of General rational grammar
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Tilshunoslik, 3- mavzu
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 Download 38.14 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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