5 - Historicizing Language, Imagining People: Aldrete and Linguistic Politics

Summary

By extrapolating the humanist tenets that recognized human value only in the classical tradition, fifteenth-century Italian grammarians such as Guarino Veronese had granted the status of language only to those tongues that had a written tradition (Hebrew, Greek and Latin), thus excluding the Romance and Germanic vernaculars. On the eve of the sixteenth century, while the first explorers ventured to a new continent, a few philologists strove to grant their vernaculars a status that only the sacred languages had enjoyed until then.

Antonio de Nebrija, the Castilian grammarian celebrated for having composed the first grammar of a vernacular language, truly belonged to that group of Latin humanists who, like Lorenzo Valla and Guarino Veronese, had devoted their lives to redeeming the Latin of their ancestors from the barbarity of the Middle Ages. The place of the vernacular in Nebrija's educational reform program has been clarified by Francisco Rico: the study of Castilian would facilitate the understanding of Latin grammar. In fact, Nebrija's Latin Introductiones, not his Gramática Castellana, was “the cornerstone, the nucleus of a new image of the whole culture.” In Nebrija's plan, Castilian was an intermediary stage towards the learning of Latin; like Valla, Nebrija saw Latin at the center of the res publica christiana – the language of a spiritual, rather than a territorial, empire.