Looking back upon classical Latin from Italy and from Denmark

Description

In fifteenth-century Italy, humanists such as Valla presented themselves as the rightful heirs to ancient Roman culture and the Latin language that became the prototype for their Latin writings. The position as heirs to Antiquity seems to have influenced the form of their Latin, as they deliberately based their written Latin upon their mother tongue, strengthening the natural influence between similar languages that exist in close contact with each other. When humanism migrated north, Danish humanists were well aware of their fundamentally different position in relation to their common prototype, classical Latin, and they explicitly discussed Latin not as their own language, but as an international language, placing written Latin and spoken Danish as even more distant languages, with other possibilities for mutual linguistic influence. This paper presents new data on the use of grammatical moods and tenses in Danish sixteenth-century neo-Latin, compare it to the linguistic structures of fifteenth-century Italian neo-Latin and discuss how this historical and geographic distance to the prototypes, discussed explicitly by humanists, affect the actual linguistic structures, for example the matter of applying complex and nuanced grammatical system of moods and tenses, such as the sequence of tenses.

Period	28 Sept 2016 → 30 Sept 2016
Event title	Renaissance Prototypes: Tensions of Past and Present in Early Modern Europe: The third conference of the Nordic Network for Renaissance Studies
Event type	Conference
Conference number	3
Location	Oslo, NorwayShow on map