Dear Otfried:
As ever your latest post is full of information and gives me furiously to
think :-) The amount of evidence piling up with the "volgare italico"
usages is starting to look impressive, and of course I would not want to
claim that "pars pro toto" is *never* an available option in this context
(indeed no sooner had I sent off my last posting than I recalled what used
to be a famous relevant example in the textbooks of my English schooldays,
namely that Lombard Street in London was so called because it was the place
of business of Italian bankers, who were, by and large, not specifically
Lombards, but other types of Italian, mainly Florentines). However, I'm
stubborn enough not to be convinced that we can uncomplicatedly render
"volgare italico" by "Italian" and be sure that what we mean by that is
what a medieval author meant by it. (And I can only plead *mea culpa* to
having done so in my _DVE_ translation - there, as often in such an
enterprise, there had to be a tradeoff between the scholarly expert's
scruples and the general reader's practical needs - rather the situation
that our original inquirer, Professor Schaer, seems to be finding himself
in!) After all, to take just one of your many fascinating instances: when
Albertano da Brescia writes "et e' a. ddire _cinos_ in lingua greca quanto
che in volgare italico e' a. ddire cane", how would he cope, conceptually,
with a vernacular used somewhere on the Italian peninsula in which the word
for "dog" was not "cane"? Would it still qualify as "volgare italico" in
any more than a geographical sense, i.e. "*a* vernacular used somewhere in
Italy" rather than "*the* Italian vernacular"? This is the kind of thing
that worries me. The usages of "volgare italico" or "loquela italica" in
contradistinction to Latin seem to me to reflect a (probably conscious)
blurring, for the purposes of a particular argument, of distinctions that
would have been recognized in practice; e.g. so that Dante can talk about
"Italian vernacular" as a shorthand for general features of vernaculars
used in Italy while being well aware that no such single peninsula-wide
variety exists in actual fact - I'd be very tempted to translate some of
those singulars ("loquela", "volgare") as plurals in English, just to get
across a point that could all too easily be missed today.
Best wishes,
Steven
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|