About the project
Despite today’s concerns about the challenges posed by migration, history reveals how migration presented new opportunities and had a positive impact.
The migration flow from the Byzantine Greek empire during the Renaissance and particularly after the fall of Constantinople in Europe (1453) represented a major brain drain from the East to the West. Western Europeans met a new culture and a language with a rich cultural and grammatical tradition.
The project “Between migration and linguistics: Greeks in Western Europe and the emergence of contrastive grammar in the Renaissance (c.1390–1600)” has studied the impact migrants had on the transformation of grammar. From a monolingual Latinocentric specialised knowledge domain, to a multilingual discipline taking into consideration that the teaching of the Greek language stimulated a contrastive approach to language studies.
Objectives
Objective A
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When and how did contrastive Latin-vs.-Greek descriptions originate in the Renaissance?
- How did Greek migrants contribute to the transfer of grammatical knowledge from Greece to the Latin West and the concomitant transformation of grammar into a multilingual discipline?
- How did grammar constitute cultural capital for the Greek migrants?
The role of the invention of printing, which opened up new possibilities in presenting linguistic data in a contrastive way, has also been assessed.
Objective B
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To what extent was the appearance of Latin-vs.-Greek grammars a written codification of humanist teaching practice, in which Greek-to-Latin translation played a major role?
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In what setting did the teaching of Greek through Latin usually happen?
- Was this the same for educated men, the usual target audience of the Greek migrants, and the comparatively limited number of women who learned Greek, including I. Sforza (the Duke of Milan’s daughter), I. d’Este, C. Gonzaga, and Th. More’s daughter M. Roper?
- Or did teachers go about it differently when dealing with women, who were usually tutored individually rather than in groups?
Objective C
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How were grammar writing and the study of language diversity influenced by the emergence of contrastive grammar?
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What was the intellectual legacy of the Greek migrants on the level of language analysis, considering that contrastive, multilingual grammars were increasingly produced from the end of the 16th century onwards, soon including vernacular languages as well?
- To what extent did Greek migration and teaching activities enhance the comparative turn in language studies which began in the 16th century and culminated in 19th-century historical-comparative linguistics?
Events
Workshop - Migration and linguistic knowledge: Premodern perspectives
In this workshop, we explore the relation between migration and linguistic knowledge from a diachronic and interdisciplinary perspective.
Time and place: – , Georg Morgenstiernes Hus, room 452 & Zoom
About
At the crossroads of history, linguistics, and migration studies, the seminars explore an important dynamic behind the dissemination of linguistic knowledge, ranging from writing systems through grammars, primers, and dictionaries to spoken competence: the movement of people, ideas, and techniques. Questions that will be addressed include:
- How has migration contributed to the development and spread of linguistic items, ideas and techniques?
- Who are the carriers of linguistic knowledge? What is the role of people such as scholars, teachers, students, artisans, family members, and people with other societal roles? How anonymous are knowledge carriers? To what extent do gender and racial stereotypes come into play?
- Which objects carry knowledge? What is the role of material media such as papyri, manuscripts, books, and recordings?
The seminars will be presented by researchers with different backgrounds, who will address these questions from their own vantage points.
Program
14h00-14h10 - Introduction
14h10-15h00 - Antiquity
- Greek meets Egyptian: Exchanges in language and language learning in Ptolemaic Egypt - Anastasia Maravela (IFIKK, UiO)
- Latin loanwords in Oxyrhynchus: who, from where, and why - Giuliano Sidro (University of Oxford)
- respondent: Alisa van de Haar
15h00-15h45 - Middle Ages
- The spread and consequences of bilingual and biscriptal competence in medieval Scandinavia - Alessandro Palumbo (ILN, UiO)
- respondent: Raf Van Rooy
16h00-16h45 - Italian Renaissance
- The co-creation of contrastive grammar in the Renaissance: New perspectives on Greek migrant teachers and their Italian students - Raf Van Rooy (IFIKK, UiO)
- respondent: Anastasia Maravela
16h45-17h30 - Early Modern Period
- French teachers in exile: Refugees from the sixteenth-century Low Countries using language skills as starting capital - Alisa van de Haar (Leiden University)
- respondent: Alessandro Palumbo
17h30-17h50 - Concluding remarks by Aneta Pavlenko (MultiLing, UiO)
17h50-18h00 - Wrap-up, followed by drinks
Organizer
Raf Van Rooy and Alessandro Palumbo
Duration
01.04.21-31.03.23.
Financing
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement nr. 890397.