Dear Otfried,
Many thanks for your very informative reply. What I would like now to
explore is how, why and by whom this title came to be used precisely at
this time in the long history of Jerome's translation.
To an Italianist, the coincidence between the dates you cite and the period
of the resolution of the Questione della Lingua is almost irresistible. As
Mario Alinei has shown ("Dialetto: un concetto rinascimentale fiorentino.
Storia e analisi", _Quaderni di semantica_, 2,1 (1981): 147-173. Also in
M. Alinei. _Lingua e dialetti: struttura, storia e geografia_. Bologna:
Il Mulino, 1984, pp.169-199), the concept and term "dialetto" is not only a
direct consequence of the Questione della Lingua but is also a creation of
that group of letterati who espoused the Bembesque solution. The
heightened awareness of what we would be tempted to call sociolinguistic
variation in the early Cinquecento gave us the terms, in Italy, "lingua"
and "dialetto" in more or less their modern meanings. I wonder - with no
evidence to back up my speculation - whether something analogous may have
happened in the Jerome's Latin. Did the Humanists' philological experience
lead them to create a new terminology to describe the historical
differentiation of Latin that they had come to understand?
Yours,
John
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Dr John J Kinder
Department of Italian
University of Western Australia
PERTH WA 6907
AUSTRALIA
Tel: (08) 9380-2192 Fax: 1182
http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/EuropeanWWW/ItalianHome.html
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