engleski

Philosopher's language. A computer-assisted linguistic exploration of Renaissance Latin philosophical prose

Early modern philosophical Latin was predominantly shaped by two competing influences: classicising standard promoted by rhetorically aware humanists and technical jargon of medieval philosophical writings. Increasing availability of machine-readable texts enables us to observe large-scale linguistic patterns aligned with each of the traditions. In this paper, I present a digitally supported analysis of an extensive corpus of Latin literature from all periods and various genres, which can help us interpret some linguistic properties of Renaissance philosophical prose. The corpus comprises 811 works, totalling 35 million words. The analysis is based on comparing the distribution of the most frequent words, which, arguably, correlates with the differences between individuals, periods, and genres, although the authors exert only very limited control over it. An array of tools are used to produce visualisations of these correlations in the form of networks. Finally, on the basis of the facts we know about the genres included in the analysis, I try to make sense of the findings.

neo-Latin, stylometry, Latin linguistics, philosophy - Renaissance

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