La Tour de Babel, le sac de Troie et la recherche des origines des langues : philologie, histoire et illustration des langues vernaculaires en France et en Angleterre aux XVIe-XVIIe siècles
Humanists across Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focused intense scholarly attention on reconstructing the history of vernacular languages. The search for the origins of languages was of genuine philological concern, since it provided a means to reconstruct the etymology of wor...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Institut du Monde Anglophone
2005-05-01
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| Series: | Etudes Epistémè |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/episteme/2829 |
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| Summary: | Humanists across Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focused intense scholarly attention on reconstructing the history of vernacular languages. The search for the origins of languages was of genuine philological concern, since it provided a means to reconstruct the etymology of words and to better understand grammatical structures. But the flood of linguistic treatises retracing the descent of languages must also be situated within their political, cultural, confessional, and even polemical context. The search for the origins of languages was an essential component of efforts to legitimate specific vernaculars as languages of literature and learning. To establish a particular vernacular’s venerable lineage, or to trace it to one of the great tongues of Antiquity, was a means to assign it a noble pedigree and increase its prestige. For certain Protestant scholars, to disprove a vernacular’s tie with Latin served as a means to downplay the linguistic contribution of Rome, symbol of the hated Roman church. Debates over the history of language, then, touched on larger arguments concerning dynastic rivalry and Protestant-Catholic conflict. This article compares the ways in which English and French men of letters set out to construct the histories of their respective vernaculars. It demonstrates how their writings can only be understand when set against a larger context of European cultural and political competition, humanist fascination with language, and religious conflict. |
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| ISSN: | 1634-0450 |