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Thursday, July 7, 2011

Tolomei, "Il Cesano"

Luigi Speranza

trato da S. Gensini


Elements of a philosophy of language in Claudio Tolomei’s Il Cesano de la lingua Toscana.

The aim is a re-consideration of Tolomei’s "Il Cesano de la lin­gua Toscana" (1525, with later revisions) from a philosophical-linguistic point of view.

The author focuses on the way Tolomei described the realm of language as conditioned by social-spatial and time coordinates.

Historical factors intertwined, in Tolomei’s mind, both in the origins and in the normal functioning of language, providing a “natural” reason for the multiplication of languages.

The myth of Babel is therefore discredited.

natural/non-natural.

The author also pays attention to Tolomei’s meta­lan­guage, where the standard nature/arbitrariness distinction was replaced by the na­ture/art distinction, indebted to the rhetorical tradition.

On the one hand, it is ar­gued, Tolomei refrained from using the term arbitrariness because it did not ac­knowl­edge the role of chance in language.

On the other hand, he employed a multi­faceted concept of nature to explain the features that rendered Tuscan a language “in its own right”.

In: Hassler, Gerda (ed.),
History of Linguistics 2008: Selected papers from the eleventh International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS XI), 28 August - 2 September 2008, Potsdam. 2011. xi, 468 pp. (pp. 129–134)

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