Dear Otfried (and anyone else out there listening!):
I seem to have fallen victim to a malady as yet (as far as I know)
undescribed in the scientific literature: premature depression of the
"Send" key syndrome :-) Somehow I managed to send off that single
sentence before composing what I had intended to follow it! Apologies all
round.
My objection is, I think, to your "pars pro toto" idea, on the grounds that
there is, at the time of which we are speaking, simply no "totum" of which
the "pars" could be part. Charles had not learned "his 'Italian'", as you
put in in your second message, but the vernacular spoken in Lombardy -
"volgare lombardo", "lombardesco" (as in your _Poeti del '200_ quote),
whatever. I've no doubt that you're right in saying that the differences
between the vernaculars used in Italy in the C14 would have meant very
little to a Bohemian, but that they obviously meant a great deal to
inhabitants of the Italian peninsula is attested by the _De vulgari
eloquentia_ and many other texts; and I know of no evidence that any user
of any Italian vernacular in the period would have worked with a concept of
an over-arching peninsula-wide linguistic system that could be referred to
as "volgare italiano" (or "italico"), or to which the local varieties could
be seen as related in a "pars pro toto" kind of way. (After all, as I
don't need to tell you, much of _DVE_'s argument, particularly in its
prescriptive aspects, is founded precisely on the *non*-existence of a
genuinely "Italian" vernacular.) The real clincher for me is your finding
that there seems to be no pre-1375 usage of "italian-" to refer to the
language; I would suggest that that is fairly strong evidence that the
concept was not yet available. *Ergo*, I think the translation of
"Lombardicum" as "Italian" carries with it a very serious risk of being
misleading, since it surely cannot fail, for the average late
twentieth-century reader, to suggest a language used, and comprehensible,
from one end of Italy to the other, from Friuli and Valle d'Aosta to
Sicily, such as we are familiar with today; and not only can that not have
been what Charles meant by "Lombardicum", it simply did not exist at the
time in which he made his statement. I would therefore translate it
"Lombard", and perhaps append a footnote for readers whose tolerance for
the minutiae of Italian linguistic history is, perhaps understandably, low.
Best wishes,
Steven
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|