Linguistic History and History of Writing in Early Renaissance Italy

• In Event: Writing Modern Languages in Renaissance Europe: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Abstract

Historical linguistics is normally based on the study of written records. It is rarely perceived that they also document, crucially, the culture of writing which has enabled such languages to acquire a written tradition.
Translating language into script is not a mechanical process, as every society dealt with it differently: diversifying scripts on a functional basis, using different alphabets (in Italy Latin and Greek), entrusting certain sectors of society with the task of preserving memory and eventually by electing one linguistic variety as the best suited. We have gathered a corpus of approx. 300 documents from XIVth c. — public inscriptions and signatures in manuscripts – which are being studied contextually by palaeographers and linguisticians, contrasting data relating to their matter, scripts, texts reproduced, names, dates, social status, with the languages used and their spelling, to get a closer understanding of the processes through which Italian vernaculars came to be written.

Author

• Nadia Cannata Salamone, "Sapienza," Università di Roma