That Renaissance humanism was a broad intellectual and cultural movement toward a new outlook on human dignity and capacity reaching over the dominating Christian values should not blind us to the fact that the Renaissance was in effect a strongly aristocratic age. While the over-riding goal of humanists was to pursue learning with a view to rediscovering the place of mankind in nature, there was no room of learning for ordinary people. The humanists took pride in their difficult achievement and were loath to open their learning to anyone who could speak only his native language. Their 'mother tongue,' as it were, was the object of contempt, what they saw as Classical Latin carrying the weight of their great authority. It takes a feat of the historical imagination to realize how much they scorned the people who were ignorant of the classical language, and how much, for that matter, they hated the people themselves. The hatred was raised almost to the state of aesthetics in their proclamation, Odi profanum Vulgus 'I hate the profane mob.' They spoke of 'vulgar Latin' and 'vernacular languages' without ever doubting whether the spoken language of Cicero differed any more from his written expressions than in our own days a dialectal form of a language does from its standardized version—without ever giving a thought to why before them Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio had chosen to write in the vernacular. From the fourteenth to well into the seventeenth century, those who wanted the glory of being read by posterity would not fail to reserve a high place for Latin over and above their own native tongue. The present paper centers around the distorted nature of the linguistic philosophy that characterized Renaissance humanism.
국제언어인문학회 [INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR HUMANISTIC STUDIES IN LANGUAGE]
설립연도
2000
분야
인문학>언어학
소개
국제언어인문학회는 '언어를 통한 인문학 연구'의 필요성에 동감하는 여러 전공분야 학자들의 뜻을 담고 있습니다. 언어에 초점을 맞추는 것은, 다양한 전공분야의 참여에서 생겨날 수 있는 '이질적 집합'의 상황을 극복하기 위한 장치입니다. 현재로서는 작은 불씨를 지핀 것에 불과합니다. 그러나 이렇게 일구어진 불꽃이 새로운 학풍의 바람결에 커다란 섬광으로 빛나게 될 날이 올 것을 우리는 확신합니다. 우리의 학회와 학술지는 인문학 불변의 가치와 시대적 사명을 인식하는 국내외의 학자들을 향해 활짝 개방되어 있습니다. 특정 전공의 범위를 넘어서서 철학, 문학, 언어학, 종교, 역사, 문화, 예술 등의 시각에서 언어의 본질을 토론할 기회가 될 것입니다.