Did you know that many reputed Neo-Latin authors like Erasmus of Rotterdam also wrote in forms of Ancient Greek? Erasmus used this New Ancient Greek language to celebrate a royal return from Spain to ...Brussels, to honor deceded friends like Johann Froben, to pray while on a pilgrimage, and to promote a new Aristotle edition. But classical bilingualism was not the prerogative of a happy few Renaissance luminaries: less well-known humanists, too, activated their classical bilingual competence to impress patrons; nuance their ideas and feelings; manage information by encoding gossip and private matters in Greek; and adorn books and art with poems in the two languagges, and so on. As reader, you discover promising research perspectives to bridge the gap between the long-standing discipline of Neo-Latin studies and the young field of New Ancient Greek studies.
‘What is the difference between a language and a dialect?’ is one of the questions most frequently asked of linguists. A notorious and oft-repeated answer is ‘A language is a dialect with an army and ...navy’, wrongly attributed to Max Weinreich. Linguists have mostly used this witticism as a handy way to end the discussion and dismiss the distinction between language and dialect as a political question irrelevant to their discipline. This book does not attempt to answer this seemingly unsolvable puzzle either but aims to shed light on a simple fact usually overlooked by linguists and laypeople alike: the conceptual pair is not a timeless given but has a history, and a much shorter one than one might assume. It starts not in Greek antiquity, as the origin of the word dialect may suggest, but in the sixteenth century. Taking the Weinreich witticism as its starting point, this book guides the reader on the remarkable journey which the conceptual pair has made. It begins with the prehistory of the language/dialect distinction in antiquity and the Middle Ages. The core of the book surveys the emergence, establishment, and elaboration of the conceptual pair during the early modern period, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, when linguistic diversity first became an object of intense study. Finally, the much-contested and ambiguous fate of the language / dialect distinction in modern linguistics is outlined, with special reference to the persistence of earlier ideas and the rise to prominence of the political interpretation crystallized in the Weinreich quip.
Abstract
This paper focuses on how Jean Pillot, author of the most popular French grammar of the sixteenth century in terms
of editions, took efforts to contrast his native language with Greek. His
...Gallicæ linguæ institutio
(1550/1561),
although written in Latin, contains numerous passages where Pillot subtly confronted French with Greek, surveyed in
Section 2
, in order to give his audience of educated German speakers a clearer view of the
idiosyncrasies of French. In
Section 3
, I analyze why he preferred Greek to the other
languages he knew in quite a number of cases, arguing that this subtle contrastive endeavor bore an indirect pedagogical and
ideological load.
Section 4
discusses the terminological means Pillot used to confront Greek
with French, and their origins. In
Section 5
, I frame Pillot’s appropriation of Greek grammar
in the long history of contrastive language studies, with special reference to the pivotal role of sixteenth-century linguistic
analysis.
Fascinated with the heritage of ancient Greece, early modern intellectuals cultivated a deep interest in its language, the primary gateway to this long-lost culture, rehabilitated during the ...Renaissance. Inspired by the humanist battle cry “To the sources!” scholars took a detailed look at the Greek source texts in the original language and its different dialects. In so doing, they saw themselves confronted with major linguistic questions: Is there any order in this immense diversity? Can the Ancient Greek dialects be classified into larger groups? Is there a hierarchy among the dialects? Which dialect is the oldest? Where should problematic varieties such as Homeric and Biblical Greek be placed? How are the differences between the Greek dialects to be described, charted, and explained? What is the connection between the diversity of the Greek tongue and the Greek homeland? And, last but not least, are Greek dialects similar to the dialects of the vernacular tongues? Why (not)? This book discusses and analyzes the often surprising and sometimes contradictory early modern answers to these questions.
An ablative for the Greeks? Rooy, Raf Van
Historiographia linguistica,
12/2020, Letnik:
47, Številka:
2-3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Summary
In this article, I discuss a grammar dispute that took place between Philipp Nicodemus Frischlin and Martin Crusius in
Tübingen in the winter of 1585/1586. I argue that their diverging views ...on the ablative case reflect a disagreement on two levels, in
addition to their obvious personal rivalry: (1) the foundations of grammar, which Frischlin based on meaning rather than form, following
J. C. Scaliger, and (2) contrasting attitudes toward the Greek people and heritage. Additionally, I discuss Frischlin’s views on the
article and the optative mood, while also tracing a popular misquote from Scaliger’s work to Frischlin.
In the present introduction, I aim to provide some general context for the case studies in this special issue by introducing some recent developments in linguistics that inspired them (in particular ...the Haspelmath – Newmeyer debate) and by roughly sketching tendencies in the long history of linguistic description. I argue that the crosslinguistic application of linguistic categories is an old phenomenon, going back two millennia, that offers an entire array of research opportunities. This introduction also surveys the papers in the special issue, embedded in the aforementioned historical sketch, and the principal questions to which they offer some first tentative answers. I lay particular emphasis on the interplay between linguistic historiography and linguistics, advocating the view that conceptual-historical criticism should be part and parcel of the linguist’s modus operandi.
In this paper, I argue that sixteenth-century French grammarians subtly adapted the Greek concept of aorist to their native language in order to fill a gap left by past tense descriptions in Latin ...grammar. In this French aorist concept, they amalgamated features today associated with tense and aspect. I start out by recalling the origin of the aorist concept in Greek antiquity, Byzantium, and the Italian Renaissance. Then I look at French grammarians’ dealings with their past tense system, and especially how they inserted the aorist into it. I focus on the French grammatical tradition up to Henri Estienne’s well-known Traicté de la conformité du language françois auec le grec (1565). My main conclusion is that French grammarians made the best of a bad Greek concept, primarily out of a descriptive need, and only secondarily in order to give a Hellenic aura to French, even though the latter was fashionable in sixteenth-century France. As such, these grammarians developed a new language-particular concept rather than merely transposing the Greek concept to the French context.
The linguistic ideas of the 16th-century French grammarian Petrus Antesignanus have been largely neglected up till now. In the present paper, I aim to partially repair this research lacuna within the ...context of the notion of "dialect". After some short introductory notes on Antesignanus' life and works, I discuss his conception of dialect, which is expounded in his 1554 scholia on Nicolaus Clenardus' Greek grammar. This analysis occurs both on a general level and specifically with regard to the Ancient Greek situation. I include in this discussion a number of considerations that contextualize the views of Antesignanus. Henricus Stephanus' attack on Antesignanus' assertions figures as a case study in this regard.
The present paper aims at drawing renewed attention to the relevance of evidentiality for Ancient Greek by means of a number of case studies taken from two of Plato's works (namely the Apologia ...Socratis and Crito). First, I briefly identify the conceptual framework within which the main analysis of Attic evidential phenomena occurs. Then, I provide a preliminary overview of (possible) linguistic means used in marking evidentiality in Ancient Greek (formal aspect). I also explore the way in which evidential values are conveyed (semantic aspect). Certain Attic particles (e.g., ára, dḗpou), functional oppositions in complementizing patterns (e.g., hóti vs. hōs), defective verbal forms (e.g., ēmí), and "auxiliaries" (e.g., dokéō) are revealed as evidential markers or "strategies". These are able to express inferential, presumptive, reportative, quotative, visual, and participatory evidentiality. The oblique optative is suggested to have evidential overtones as well. In summary, the paper endeavors to show the importance of "evidentiality" as an integrative conceptual frame for the descriptive analysis of certain Ancient Greek phenomena.
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