engleski

Neo-Latin macaronic literature, a bizarre cousin of medieval multilingual sermons

One of the main obsessions of Renaissance humanist scholars was a linguistic reform of Latin – they considered technical Latin of the Middle Ages inappropriate for the new context and did their best to adjust their language to the usage of the classical Latin authors. On the other hand, the same period witnessed an intense advance in the use of modern languages, which began to replace Latin in an increasing range of the domains of use. This period of sociolinguistic transition gave rise to many multilingual phenomena, one of which is Neo-Latin macaronic literature. Structurally, it is characterised by an unusually large number of words consisting of a vernacular content morpheme and a Latin grammatical morpheme. It emerged in Northern Italy in the final decades of the 15th century within a literary anti-genre, parodying both classical poetic texts and current substandard varieties of Latin. It soon spread across Europe and lasted until the late 20th century. The research has shown that the activity of multilingual preachers in the high Renaissance is one of the most important among several sources of Neo-Latin macaronic literature. Therefore, in the first part of the presentation we will take a look at the origin and development of Neo-Latin macaronic literature, laying particular emphasis on its relationship to medieval ecclesiastical linguistic practices. In the second part we will see how digital technology and statistical methods can enable us to single out individual patterns in the strategies of Neo-Latin macaronic language mixing. Several examples of corpus-based analysis will show us how linguistic properties of macaronic Latin conform to the structure of the languages involved in mixing with Latin, both in the distribution of partner languages, as well as in specific morphological choices.

macaronic Latin, Latin, Neo-Latin, corpus linguistics

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