Morini looks at Verstegan's Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in the context of Tudor-Stuart linguistics, or more precisely of Tudor-Stuart views of the English language. Throughout the sixteenth century, English scholars debated how best to extend the possibilities of and confer cultural prestige on the vernacular: some attempted a ‘purist’ defence of domestic linguistic roots, while the silent majority were in favour of a moderately ‘neologizing’ position that would allow writers and translators to add to the native stock by the insertion of foreign terms designating new cultural objects. Verstegan’s book is a very important, though rather belated, fruit of the purist tree: through an analysis of the key terms which recur in the historical and philological chapters (the English tongue and the blood of the English people must be kept ‘pure’ and ‘unmixed’) and by comparing Verstegan’s idea of ‘Teutonic English’ with analogous or contrasting positions expressed by John Cheke, Philip Sidney, and others, Morini enlists A Restitution on the losing side of that ‘struggle for a noble vernacular’ from which modern English emerged as a highly impure and compound language.
Teutonic and Unmixed: Verstegan’s English
MORINI, MASSIMILIANO
2012
Abstract
Morini looks at Verstegan's Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in the context of Tudor-Stuart linguistics, or more precisely of Tudor-Stuart views of the English language. Throughout the sixteenth century, English scholars debated how best to extend the possibilities of and confer cultural prestige on the vernacular: some attempted a ‘purist’ defence of domestic linguistic roots, while the silent majority were in favour of a moderately ‘neologizing’ position that would allow writers and translators to add to the native stock by the insertion of foreign terms designating new cultural objects. Verstegan’s book is a very important, though rather belated, fruit of the purist tree: through an analysis of the key terms which recur in the historical and philological chapters (the English tongue and the blood of the English people must be kept ‘pure’ and ‘unmixed’) and by comparing Verstegan’s idea of ‘Teutonic English’ with analogous or contrasting positions expressed by John Cheke, Philip Sidney, and others, Morini enlists A Restitution on the losing side of that ‘struggle for a noble vernacular’ from which modern English emerged as a highly impure and compound language.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
