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3 - Creating Networks through Languages: Italian Merchants in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

from Part II - Merchants

Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli
Affiliation:
University of Florence
Andrea Caracausi
Affiliation:
University of Padua
Christof Jeggle
Affiliation:
University of Bamberg
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Summary

Charles V famously declared that he spoke ‘Spanish with God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse’. Normally, however, a person would not be expected to be as well learned as the emperor was – or at least declared himself to be.

In the Prologue of the first of his Satires, Aulus Persius Flaccus emphasized that parrots and magpies learnt to speak because they were taught by their stomach, i.e. by hunger. In the same way travellers (merchants, pilgrims or others) were often driven to learn foreign languages solely by necessity. In most cases it was enough for them to understand or to be understood: as underlined by Braunmüller and Ferraresi, ‘Nobody would ever have expected to know other languages “perfectly” … the main point was to achieve effective communication e.g. at the workplace and not a “perfect” multilingualism in every respect’.

Introduction

Much has been written on colonies or ‘nations’ of Italian merchants abroad, on the way they settled, on their activities and on their privileges; but little space has been devoted to the problem of the knowledge of languages. A general feeling of solidarity was obviously connected with the linguistic identity; endogamy could clearly reinforce this identity and be – in turn – reinforced by it. Scholars of various disciplines have written about foreigners in terms of exclusion or inclusion/integration; cultural historians or sociologists have analysed the relation between language and identity or language and community.

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Publisher: Pickering & Chatto
First published in: 2014

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