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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics
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The Prosthetic Tongue - Printing Technology and the Rise of the French Language (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,659
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The Prosthetic Tongue - Printing Technology and the Rise of the French Language (Hardcover)
Series: Material Texts
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Of all the cultural "revolutions" brought about by the development
of printing technology during the sixteenth century, perhaps the
most remarkable but least understood is the purported rise of
European vernacular languages. It is generally accepted that the
invention of printing constitutes an event in the history of
language that has profoundly shaped modernity, and yet the exact
nature of this transformation—the mechanics of the event—has
remained curiously unexamined. In The Prosthetic Tongue, Katie
Chenoweth explores the relationship between printing and the
vernacular as it took shape in sixteenth-century France and charts
the technological reinvention of French across a range of domains,
from typography, orthography, and grammar to politics, pedagogy,
and poetics. Under François I, the king known in his own time as
the "Father of Letters," both printing and vernacular language
emerged as major cultural and political forces. Beginning in 1529,
French underwent a remarkable transformation, as printers and
writers began to reimagine their mother tongue as mechanically
reproducible. The first accent marks appeared in French texts, the
first French grammar books and dictionaries were published,
phonetic spelling reforms were debated, modern Roman typefaces
replaced gothic scripts, and French was codified as a legal idiom.
This was, Chenoweth argues, a veritable "new media" moment, in
which the print medium served as the underlying material apparatus
and conceptual framework for a revolutionary reinvention of the
vernacular. Rather than tell the story of the origin of the modern
French language, however, she seeks to destabilize this very notion
of "origin" by situating the cultural formation of French in a
scene of media technology and reproducibility. No less than the
paper book issuing from sixteenth-century printing presses, the
modern French language is a product of the age of mechanical
reproduction.
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