Deeply embedded in the history of Latin Europe, the vernacular
("the language of slaves") still draws us towards urgent issues of
affiliation, identity, and cultural struggle. Vernacular politics
in medieval Latin Europe were richly complex and the structures of
thought and feeling they left behind permanently affected Western
culture. The Vulgar Tongue explores the history of European
vernacularity through more than a dozen studies of language
situations from twelfth-century England and France to
twentieth-century India and North America, and from the building of
nations, empires, or ethnic communities to the politics of gender,
class, or religion.
The essays in The Vulgar Tongue offer new vistas on the idea of
the vernacular in contexts as diverse as Ramon Llull's
thirteenth-century prefiguration of universal grammar, the
orthography of Early Middle English, the humanist struggle for
linguistic purity in Early Modern Dutch, and the construction of
standard Serbian and Romanian in the waning decades of the
Austro-Hungarian empire. Here Latin, the "common tongue" of
European intellectuals, is sometimes just another vernacular,
Sanskrit and Hindi stake their claims as the languages of
Shakespeare, African-American poetry is discovered in conversation
with Middle English, and fourteenth-century Florence becomes the
city, not of Dante and Boccaccio, but of the artisan poet Pucci.
Delicate political messages are carried by nuances of French
dialect, while the status of French and German as feminine "mother
tongues" is fiercely refuted and as fiercely embraced. Clerics
treat dialect, idiom, and gesture--not language itself--as the
hallmarks of "vulgar" preaching, or else argue the case for Bible
translation mainly in pursuit of their own academic freedom.
Endlessly fluid in meaning and reference, the term "vernacular"
emerges from this book as a builder of bridges between the myriad
phenomena it can describe, as a focus of reflection both on the
history of Western culture and on the responsibilities of those who
would analyze it.
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