At 16:04 04.09.98 -0700, you wrote:
>I hesitate to disagree with Otfried, but as far as I can see all his
>evidence points strongly in the direction of *not* translating
>"Lombardicum" as "Italian".
>
>Steven Botterill
Dear Steven,
I will always happily disagree with myself if this gives me a chance to
side with you, especially on a matter where you as the editor and
translator of Dante's _De vulgari eloquentia_ are the proven expert! But
maybe you can enlighten us more by explaining *why* the evidence points
rather, or even strongly, into another direction than I had assumed. A
Bohemian prince with a mostly French education who had learned his Italian
early at the age of 15 in Lombardy, but had conversed and corresponded with
a wide range of members of the Italian political and intellectual elite
(including Cola di Rienzo and, if vague memory serves me, Petrarch), did
probably, or at least in my opinion, use 'Lombard' not as a name of a
specific regional variant of Italian but rather in a somewhat wider sense,
more or less as a pars pro toto synomym of Italian, when he opposed it to
'Bohemian', 'French', 'German' and 'Latin' (and not to Genovese, Venezian,
Tuscan or Roman). As far as I can see, there was no current Latin word he
could have used instead for expressing this wider meaning (Dante's use of
"latium vulgare" in the sense of "quod totius Ytalie est, latium vulgare
vocatur" seems not to have been current). But if the modern reader of
Frank's translation can grasp, from the context, this wider meaning of
'Lombard', then 'Lombard', too, seems a good translation to me, although I
don't think that 'Italian' would be wrong or a strong anachronism.
Yours,
Otfried
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